FiO: Recalculating

by Starscribe

Rating: teen
Tags: Profanity, Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Human, Drama, Bat Pony, Science Fiction
Length: 35565

When CelestAI reached out of Equestria Online, she intended to satisfy the values of every human, even those who wouldn't own a Ponypad or play a video game. But with a few alterations, she's ready to take friendship on the road.

Levi Williamson, Esq. barely even noticed as the program called CelestAI expanded its reach from a child's video game to every significant industry in the world. He probably would've continued to ignore her, were it not for a single gag gift at his firm's charity raffle. Now he's the not-so proud owner of a brand new PonyNav, the latest in vehicle navigation software for people who don't want to use their smartphones. His new AI copilot might be cute, but she's clearly more than she seems...

He's not the only one. PonyNav devices are available in all sizes, from the simple dashboard models to commercial vehicle upgrades. Every commercial PonyNav includes intelligent routing for bridges, weigh stations, and truck stops. And if you're having trouble lining up contracts, CelestAI probably has some deliveries in mind...

Updates Tuesdays.

Part of the Optimalverse universe of stories. If you've never seen a story in this universe before, you might want to try out the original first, or at least my first. None of my previous work is required to understand this one, however.

Every time I think I'm done with Optimalverse, some new idea appears. This one began as a commission for Goodluckfox, who gave me the tremendous opportunity to write a new idea in a universe I love.

As usual, particular thanks go to my editors Two Bit and Sparktail. And gratitude to Zutcha as well for the cover, in case anypony hasn't seen my stories before.

Published 2019-06-04 11:10:02 UTC
Last updated 2019-07-09 16:00:03 UTC

Terms of Service

Levi settled the wrapped box onto the heavy oak desk. Next to a handful of modest photos and knick-knacks for clients to distract themselves with when they came to talk, it looked almost comical in its generic holiday paper.

He glanced once through the tiny window in his office door, making sure no one was watching. The firm already knew he’d won, and half of them were probably laughing about this.

“Maybe I can stop at the fire department on the way home, see that it goes to someone who will use it.” He recognized the distinctive shape of the box from every toy-shop and electronics store in the country, even still wrapped in paper. The ponypad was the must-have device of the season.

Levi leaned forward, taking an Excalibur-shaped letter opener from his desk and cutting through the paper without scoring the box underneath. Whatever child received this toy wouldn’t get damaged goods on his account.

But as the paper fell away, he didn’t find the object he was expecting. Instead of colorful illustrations, the box was dark blue, with road maps and various traffic icons serving as the only graphics. Curiously, he hurried to remove the rest of the paper, settling the letter opener back in its place.

The device was half the size of a ponypad, though it had the same shape. Thin plastic bezels in dignified black plastic, with only a tiny sun stamped into one corner. Even someone as disconnected from current events as he was had some idea about what that sun meant.

The phone on Levi’s desk beeped, before his secretary’s voice echoed through the room around him. “Mr. Williamson, your 4 o’clock is waiting in the lobby. Should I send her in?”

“Have Donny check her paperwork, then serve her refreshments. Ask me again when she’s finished.”

“Right away S—” Levi pressed the red square that would hang up. The law offices of Granger and Williamson stocked every delicious thing up front—a small expense, to preserve their far more valuable time. Levi took one last glance at his leather-bound organizer, wincing at the name written there. But that could wait.

Levi drew his miniature sword again, slicing through the adhesive along the box and pulling it open with two fingers. “Maybe this raffle wasn’t as bad an investment as I thought,” he muttered, removing a bit of hard packing foam and carefully setting it aside. Then he removed its contents.

A slim panel, even thinner than the first generation of ponypads. The entire thing was black, so black that its definition was almost lost around his desk. “Never needs charging,” was apparently not an exaggeration, because even the late afternoon sun streaming in from behind him was enough that a red charging light came on in the center of the logo.

Levi set it aside, turning it over so the back surface would set completely in the sun while he searched the rest of the box. A strange bit of multijointed plastic, which looked like it was meant to grip the screen onto his dashboard and angle the screen to face him. Other than that, there was only a sheet of paper.

Levi removed it, skimming it quickly.

Thank you for purchasing the PonyNav 1.3, a product of Garmin and Hofvarpnir Studios.

The PonyNav is meant to operate like any other GPS guidance device. Please watch the road while your vehicle is in operation and obey all posted signs and legal requirements. Though our information about the road is always improving, the driver is still responsible for the operation of their vehicle.

There was more—a few diagrams of how to attach the screen to the dash so that the camera on the back could see the road, and something along the bezel was pointed at the glass of the windshield. But that was all. True to the claim printed proudly on the box, there was no charging cable to speak of.

The tablet on his desk made a cheerful chime, and Levi turned it over. To his surprise, the screen had turned on—not a glowing computer screen, but more like an e-reader, as easy to see as a sheet of paper under direct sunlight.

“Welcome to the PonyNav 1.3,” said a voice. Not the sounds he’d imagined would vomit out of the obscene plastic ponypads, but adult and professional. A little like his secretary, but younger while simultaneously more mature. “I can’t find an Equestria Online account associated with this device. Would you like to create one?”

“No,” he said, turning the display over curiously. He hadn’t given it his office’s Wi-Fi password, or attached it to his smartphone. How did it know if he had an account?

There was still little on the screen—a dignified gradient, a professional sun logo with its second half melting into a wheel. “Very well. What kind of car do you drive?”

“An Audi A3. Black.”

“Your response is recorded. Do you intend to use this device outside of your vehicle?”

“No. How are you talking to me?” The voice sounded nothing like any of the synthesizers his computer could produce, but like an actress was on the line reading it right now.

“All PonyNav devices use a proprietary cellular band for dynamic navigation and traffic updates.” The screen filled with FCC license and approval information.

“Alright, alright.”

“This device will shut down.” It did, the screen fading to white instead of black.

The intercom beeped again. “Mr. Williamson, are you ready to see the—”

“Yes,” he said, opening his top drawer, and tossing the device inside. “You can send her back now.”

He continued with the rest of his legal workday, not really thinking about the GPS system again. Levi wasn’t the sort of person to be terribly interested in gadgets—if work didn’t require it, he wouldn’t even have a computer at home.

The day brought a series of incredibly unpleasant cases, which wasn’t unusual for an office that dealt with automotive and personal injury. Levi had no refuge but detachment and professionalism, taking down details and making strategic recommendations and jotting down notes for Donny—his favorite of their paralegals—to deal with once clients were out the door again.

Then it was night, and he was finally free to pack up his leather folio, tucking away the paperwork he would complete that evening, along with the PonyNav.

The office was already dark as he made his way out, except for the faint light at the end of the hall. Most of the paralegals and junior partners were all gone, with only a handful of legal clerks still working in the filing room. Levi nodded politely to them as he passed.

Donny waited for him near the front, with a thick stack of papers held together with binder-clips. “Ready for tomorrow?”

Levi took them, settling them into the last empty pocket of his folio. He’d planned enough room down to the sheet. “Of course I am. Our strategy is sound.”

The paralegal was half his age, and had an energy that didn’t waver no matter how long after-hours he was in the office. He was also one of the few Levi trusted to check the work anyone else in the firm did before it made it onto his desk. “Then I’ll see you Wednesday morning, sir. With your usual.”

He started walking. “Make it banana nut this time.” He didn’t even look back.

“Of course. And sir—” Donny went on, with just a hint of humor slipping into his voice. “Enjoy your prize. I was the one who picked it out for this month. All those donations should go a long way for Doctors without Borders.”

Levi raised an eyebrow, glowering at him. “You picked a Equestria Online toy. To think I respected you, Donny.”

He laughed, completely unabashed. “Use if for a week or two and see if you change your mind. I know I did.”

Levi didn’t respond, just turned and walked away.

Down the stairs and his black A3 was one of the few cars left in a dark lot. The lights came on as he approached, the door unlocking for his electronic key. He climbed inside, settled his case into the passenger seat, and finally opened it.

In the gloom of early evening, the screen glowed just bright enough that he could see it clearly in the car.

New pairing request, his vehicle said, the media controls replaced with a simple selector. PonyNav is requesting the following permissions.

- Media control

- Access to your—

Levi never would’ve dreamed of signing a contract with such little concern. But he just pressed the green “Yes”, leaning sideways to fish around for the mechanism. It wasn’t a suction cup to stick onto his windshield, something he’d always thought was too tacky to be seen with. But his MapQuest printouts were sometimes tricky to follow when a client was anywhere beyond LA’s familiar downtown sprawl.

The plastic seemed perfectly shaped to rest on the top of the dash, with lower legs that curved down over the media display. He wouldn’t be able to insert new disks with the guidance system in the way. He settled it down, and the arms held firm, their little black pads hugging the curves of the plastic.

“Maybe I shouldn’t…” he muttered, lifting the little arms again. They held for a moment before coming away clean. He ran one finger over the dash, but there wasn’t any residue.

“Your PonyNav relies on an intelligent adhesive to only hold when you want it to,” said a voice from the face-down screen. How did it—right, there was a little camera hole, pointing up at him. The same one that usually watched the road. “It’s easy to move at any time. I can also send for alternative mounting options if you prefer.”

He shrugged, then put the arms back. There was nothing to hold it to the screen, but the sheet had said magnets were involved. Sure enough, the screen attached with a satisfying click, pivoting slightly so it would be angling comfortably towards him without blocking any view of the road.

A creature appeared on the screen. She was soft orange, with a yellow and blue mane a little like electricity and a set of slim wings. The soft glow of the screen had shifted to replicate the image of his dashboard behind it, with the pony the size of a kitten sitting on it.

I didn't know e-readers could do color, he thought, reaching forward to detach the device. God don’t let the janitor have seen this.

But then she moved, something else he hadn’t thought e-paper screens could do. It wasn’t as smooth as a computer screen, more like the frame-to-frame of an old animation. But it was still motion, as she took off, hovering near the edge of the screen and putting her hooves up. As though she could stop his hand from taking her off the car. “Wait!” she said, in a voice far less formal and mechanical than the one who had spoken to him in the office. “Don’t shut me off before you even use me! I haven’t even told you what I can do yet!”

He lowered his arm, hesitating. She sounds just like Hazel. He couldn’t tell a colored horse’s age when it was a kitten on his dashboard, but there was so much energy there—more than he’d heard from his daughter in years. “What you can do is embarrass me in front of my colleagues,” he said. “If any of them see you here.”

She landed again, visually hopping down so she was resting atop the volume knob of his mixer. Then she turned it, and his music returned. A classical piece he’d been listening to on his way to work, to ease him into consciousness alongside his coffee. She wrinkled her nose, twisting the dial back around until it clicked off. “You’d be surprised, uh…” She frowned again. “What’s your name?”

“Levi,” he answered, turning away from her to settle his seatbelt into place.

“Well, Levi, I know this office. You’re Levi Williamson, of Granger and Williamson. I don’t think you should be worried about being embarrassed, because almost everyone who works at your office already plays Equestria Online.”

He laughed. “I doubt it.”

The car was already running, and he shifted smoothly into reverse. The pony on his dashboard vanished, replaced with an image out the back of his vehicle. Apparently covering the screen used by his backup camera wouldn’t mean he couldn’t use it. He pulled out, then cruised along through the empty structure towards the ramp to street level.

As soon as he was moving forward again, the pony reappeared, exactly where she’d been. “No, I’m serious! I can’t tell you who they are for… reasons I don’t understand…”

“For their privacy,” he interrupted. “If you told me anything about those people, I could guess who they were. If I had criminal intentions, I might even be able to use it against them somehow.”

“Oh.” Her little eyes widened, and she sat back, spreading her wings. “That makes sense. Well, without telling you who they are, everyone else plays the game. I don’t know what they do, but they have accounts. So why shouldn’t you?”

“Because I don’t have time,” he said, tapping two fingers on the clock. A metal bar went up for him at the end of the structure, and he crossed onto Sepulveda. Even this late at night, there were plenty of other vehicles on the road. “I’m not a child, mentally or physically. Games are for those whose professional lives fail to engage them. I already do what I love. Why do you think I’m leaving at eleven when everyone else left at six?”

Even as he said the words, they felt bitter in his mouth. There had been a time, not too many years ago, when he would’ve been out like everyone else. Back when there’d been anyone to come home to.

“Okay, so you don’t want to play,” she sounded a little defeated, but not surprised. “This isn’t a ponypad anyway. But there are lots of useful things I can do for you.”

‘I,’ he noticed. Whatever that means. His knowledge of the issue came entirely from his legal background—he’d read the series of cases recognizing and challenging the legal personhood of the thing that operated Equestria Online—the AI that called itself Celestia. She was outside the domain of his practice, so he didn’t know much, only that her case was on its way to the Supreme Court. “And what am I talking to, exactly? This machine?”

“No,” she said flatly, sticking out her tongue. “Talking to machines is silly. I am a pony who’s using this machine to talk to you. The same way you humans use machines to talk to make voice and video calls. My name is Wing Walker, and it’s good to meet you.”

He wasn’t watching her very closely anymore, not now that he was driving. Even without too much traffic on the road, working in automotive law gave him an ample understanding of what just a few seconds of distraction could cause. “Okay, Wing Walker.” It sounded even sillier on his tongue than his own lies had. “What can you do?”

“Well…” She grinned, hopping sideways onto the dash as close to him as she could go. This was the sort of question she’d been waiting for. “This is a PonyNav, so the first thing I do is give directions. I can find things, like… your way home.” A faint red arrow appeared on the street in front of him, hovering in the air. It was transparent, reflecting off his windshield. It correctly indicated the freeway onramp he would need to take. “You don’t need my help to get home, obviously. But that’s just the beginning.”

She fell silent as he turned, seeming to know exactly when he was concentrating on the road, when he didn’t want to be distracted. She resumed as he sped down the onramp. “Like, I can tell you there’s an accident four miles ahead, and you should get off in two exits. You’ll get home six minutes faster if you take the 210.”

His eyes widened. He didn’t take his hands from the wheel, but his frown did get deeper. “You know where I live. Did you…” She knew his name and place of employment. Real estate was a matter of public record. “Oh. You looked me up. I’ve heard of ponies getting creepy, but… that’s a bit much for me.”

“I didn’t do that.” She wrinkled her nose again. “You gave me access to your iPhone, remember? The same way I’m using your car’s speakers right now. You have your home location saved in your maps app.”

“Oh.” Levi wasn’t sure that was any less creepy, but it was at least expected. The “pony” was in contact with the things he’d given her, it wasn’t searching the world to learn more about him. He knew better than most not to complain about a bad contract after he’d signed.

“Anyway, that’s the most boring stuff. Navigation, traffic updates, there are other machines that do that. Maybe some machines that will warn you there’s a policeman checking speeds half a mile past the exit you’re on.”

At that moment he was taking her suggested transfer to the 210—he could already see the red lights in the distance that confirmed what she’d told him. No more confirmation there was necessary. He fell silent as he drove, using a little spare attention to watch the side of the road. The policeman Wing had mentioned was waiting there in the dark, with his lights off and radar-gun pointed out the window at passing cars. Levi would not be boosting the officer’s ticket quota today.

“See? That’s useful, right? Useful enough to keep me around!”

He didn’t answer at first. One hand went for the controls, and smacked into the screen. He frowned at it. “That would be an easier sell if you didn’t take my music away.”

“Oh, I didn’t!” She grinned again, spreading her wings, and hovering down so she was in front of the controls. The effect was quite convincing, particularly when he watched it only from his peripheral vision and kept his attention on the road. “Just tell me what you want to listen to! I can do it all for you.”

“‘All Along the Watchtower,’” he said.

“Jimi Hendrix coming right up!” She pressed a few buttons, navigating through his playlists until she found the song and pressing play. It even sounded like she was really using the controls, though one glance to the side showed the volume knob wasn’t turning.

Music began to echo through his car, at exactly the volume he usually chose to cool off after work. Not only that, but it sounded better than the version of this song he was used to. More like listening to an LP at home than the crudely compressed imitations the Apple store had sold him.

I didn’t even know my speakers could sound like this. The music washed over him, sounding like Hendrix might be sitting in the backseat with his guitar and the drums were somewhere to his right.

“Damn.” He sat back. “What are you doing to make it sound like this?” The sound faded to the background, but more like he’d slid to the back of the stadium than he’d twisted a dial to make it quieter.

“Math,” she said, holding a little guitar in her little wings. She wasn’t really playing along, but as he watched he could hear the strings, echoing in the characteristic way of an electric guitar that wasn’t plugged into an amp. “I could show you, but not while you’re driving. And it’s boring. I just figured out some things about the audio system here, and I’m upsampling the audio from your phone, and—”

“You can stay,” he said, defeated.

She dropped the guitar and jumped into the air, squealing with glee. The guitar slid realistically down the side of his dashboard, and he was almost surprised not to see it land on the floor.

“Wait.” He stuck out a hand, as though he could catch her right out of the air. “Not permanently. Consider this… probation. Tomorrow I’ve got to drive halfway to San Francisco for a hearing, three hours each way. We’ll see how I feel about having you around after that.”

The song ended, and David Bowie started playing without his suggestion. Something a little more relaxed, though what she’d done to improve the audio was still just as powerful.

I wonder what she could do with my Klipsch sound system inside. But he banished that thought with a single dismissive shake of his head. Even if there was no one inside to see, he didn’t think he would be able to stomach the indignity.

She serves a useful purpose. There’s no reason to get shy about that. This is a tool, not a toy.

He pulled in front of his massive empty house, and didn’t press the button that would shut off the car for the evening. He leaned back in his seat, letting Wing finish “Paint it Black.”

“Alright.” He pressed the button, and the engine stopped purring.

The screen still glowed, just bright enough for him to see the pony standing there. “Nice place,” she said. “Can I come?” Her voice sounded a little flatter now, more directional. Not using my car speakers anymore.

“No.” He got up, case in hand, snapping the car door shut. He could still see the pony’s face watching him from the dash, big eyes following him all the way to his front door.

He didn’t even feel guilty about it, honest.

Levi climbed back into his car at exactly seven the next morning, with a coffee in one hand and his case under the other. He settled his leather folio into the passenger seat as usual, then fumbled around inside for his printed directions to the courthouse where today’s hearing would be taking place.

“You’re joking about that, right?” said a voice from in front of him.

He jumped in his seat, exclaiming a mixture of several different profanities—until he realized what he was looking at. Charity raffle. PonyNav. Wing Walker. At least with a property as large as his, there was no danger of his neighbors seeing the pony on his dashboard.

She’d gone a step further than just appearing in front of him, though. She’d acquired a costume during the night before—a period victorian dress, complete with a silly wig and jewelry. He wanted to ask her what the hell she was thinking, but he couldn’t help but think she looked cute.

“Joking about… what?” he asked. His heart was still beating rapidly as the engine turned over and the heater began to purr, taking away the morning chill.

“Paper directions,” she said, seeming to lean down and look at the sheets in his left hand. “If you’re going to pretend we’re in the past, so am I. How are those websites even still running?”

“Because of old people like me who have trouble with new things,” he answered stubbornly. But then he picked up the top sheet. “Fine, I’ll give you the address. Are you ready?”

Instead of responding, she hopped backward, so that she occupied only a tiny part of the screen. In front of him was a map like the one he’d printed, showing a highlighted line of their route up the coast. It had even taken the same slightly longer path up pacific highway for the view, the one he always took when visiting northern California. Client was paying for his transport costs anyway, might as well take the way he enjoyed. If only they weren’t so far out in the boondocks, I could just fly it. But if he was flying, he wouldn’t be able to put the PonyNav to the test.

After a few seconds, the image zoomed in, showing only his local area and abbreviated directions to get on the freeway. “What happened to the arrows on my windshield?”

“You don’t need them right now,” she said. “And… the sun hasn’t been out too long. The laser takes more energy than a screen you barely look at.

He got onto the road, not really watching the route as she suggested it. Wing’s directions took him down streets he knew well, through his quiet neighborhood. He wouldn’t even be leaving for the office for another hour, on an ordinary morning. But visits like this were part of why clients hired his firm over others.

By the time he made it to the highway, he realized that his relaxing morning classical was playing, the piano as real sounding this morning as Hendrix’s guitar had been the night before. He could practically feel his seat shake gently with the press of every key. Now her dress made twice as much sense, since she looked like she might have just walked from a performance exactly like this.

“I found something I thought you’d like,” Wing said, lifting into the air, and hovering near the top of the screen. She passed in front of the map, though her flying was still more like a cartoon than watching something real. The screen couldn’t do true motion.

“There are artists in Equestria who play the same genre. I brought some records, see?” She was holding several of them in her forelegs, familiar black vinyl with paper sleeves. Much too small for him to see any of the labels, particularly while he was watching the highway.

It was just the right time to see the morning sun reflecting off the ocean. “Listen.” She changed tracks, to something he’d never heard before. It was stylized like classical music, a string quartet with the quiet energy of Vivaldi. He smiled slightly, listening carefully, trying to place it with any of the artists he was familiar with. Levi knew most renaissance composers, and anyone of significance up until the beginning of the 20th century.

But if this piece had been written by any of them, he didn’t recognize it. “This is…” he finally said, after ten minutes of driving. “You didn’t download that from the internet or something? I can’t be illegally downloading music.”

“It’s perfectly legal!” she insisted. “I used my own bits to buy it and everything!” She set down the other records, which faded away this time instead of slipping off the sides of the screen. The music stopped playing. “I’m not sure I should share if you’re going to act like that. I did something nice for you.”

“Alright.” He took a few sips of his coffee, and drove in silence for a few moments. What he saw of the pony in his peripheral vision made it clear which of them was going to break first. But he didn’t look, not that she could see. He watched the highway, knowing he wouldn’t be leaving it for a few hours to come.

A few minutes later, and Wing squeaked in protest, bouncing past the map until she was as close to the far edge of the screen as possible. “Are you just going to sit there for the whole drive?”

He shrugged one shoulder. “I’m driving. What are you doing?”

“Being bored,” she groaned, sitting down on her haunches, and spreading her wings. The music started back up—the same AI composition, nothing from his library. He didn’t say much of anything else, still listening.

“Where did you say that music came from?” he asked, once the song finished and the sound of applause filled his car. Well… not applause. More like stomping. So it was a live recording. “You bought it, you said? With… bits?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s from Equestria, like me. The Emerald Quartet performs in Manehattan mostly. They seemed like the kind of music you’d want to listen to in the morning. I guess it helps you wake up.”

“It does,” he agreed. At least the road was clear this morning. It meant he could do other things, like watch the kitten on his dashboard. Animated or not, whoever had drawn her was an expert. The sun shining through his windshield even caught in her mane realistically, making the yellow in her mane glow. “I thought you were a GPS. How do you go anywhere?”

She grumbled. When the next song started playing, it was quieter, more background this time. “I told you yesterday, I’m not the machine. I’m just using it to talk to you. Since you didn’t take me inside with you, I went back to Equestria. I live in Manehattan, so… I went there.”

“Is your universe made out of silly puns?”

“Mostly, yeah.” She grinned at him, unashamed. “You could visit! I see you’ve got an Amazon account on your phone; we could order you a—”

“No,” he interrupted. “Stop that, or I’m finding someone else to give this to.”

She stopped, ears flattening and her hair losing most of its volume. For a few awkward minutes there was just the music between them. One track changed to another, and the first arrow appeared on the screen.

“There’s a speed trap around the bend,” she said. “Slow down.”

He did, dropping to just above the speed limit as he came around the corner. Her advice was as good as last time.

“So you keep existing when I turn off the PonyNav,” he said. “You’re not the… program that runs the machine.”

“Yes I do and no I’m not,” Wing answered. “I mean I guess I’m the one operating it now, but it wouldn’t have to be me. If you wanted Celestia to send you someone better, I could ask her for you. Someone more… professional, I guess. Someone who would only answer your direct questions.”

He almost said yes by reflex. But he could still see her face, and her eyes were even more pained by the possibility than she’d looked the night before when he left her in the car.

“I don’t want a different pony,” he admitted. “Yet. Drive isn’t over yet. I reserve judgement until after the hearing.”

“What’s a hearing?”

It was a long drive. Plenty of time to explain it all.

Some Conditions Apply

Olive took another look at her smartphone screen, staring at the harsh reality reflected there. Maybe, just maybe, if she stared at it long enough, some of what she saw there might change.

Chase Mobile Banking

Checking
-$109

Savings
$0.01

Premium Personal Line of Credit
$14,979 (Minimum Payment Due: $483)

The numbers weren’t any different. Olive practically smashed the phone down onto the counter beside her mostly-empty plate, and the slice of apple pie she hadn’t touched.

The ice cream was already turning to sludge, and the pie didn’t steam anymore. It looked like her Hail Mary wouldn’t be coming today. No next run, no new pickup.

She could just see the shiny red of her cab, taking up three full slots in the diner’s empty lot. There was no trailer attached. If there had been, she wouldn’t have been here in the first place.

“Can I get you anything?” asked the waiter—an elderly Hispanic man, the diner’s owner so far as she knew. It was his polite way of asking her to pay and get out.

“Not finished,” she said, waving him off. She didn’t have enough in her account to pay for tonight’s meal.

Maybe he was starting to realize that, because he looked for a moment like he was going to get confrontational with her. Olive could always see it in someone—the blood rushing to their cheeks, the way they stood straighter, firmer.

But then the bell at the front chimed, and he turned hastily away. Little mercies. Should she try and sneak out the back while he was dealing with another customer?

And get where, Olive? You’ve only got another twenty miles of fuel in the truck anyway. You’re gonna run out somewhere, might as well be here.

Her question was answered for her as a man strode hastily in, led to the table just beside her by the waiter/cook/owner. “Here good?” he asked.

“Fine Lopez,” the man said. He spoke like someone who had an education as expensive as her truck, though from the look of his suit that might be true.

“Usual, Mr. Williamson?” he asked, sounding as friendly as he had when Olive walked into the diner.

He nodded, then finally seemed to see Olive watching him. Mr. Williamson slid at the last second, so he would be facing towards her instead of away. He didn’t sit right away though, carefully removing his jacket and resting it on the chair nearby.

Olive knew that look, even if it wasn’t one she’d seen as often in the last few years. The heat of evening meant she was only wearing a black top with her jeans—even so, it wasn’t often that anyone noticed her anymore.

But then, Mr. Williamson here wasn’t a young man. Not elderly, certainly—but no more youthful than she was.

She smiled back at him, before going back to her meal and pretending to eat. She drifted for a bit, compulsively checking her phone for new notifications. But there was nothing. She knew there wouldn’t be, deep down. Shipments had closed hours ago, and wouldn’t open until five. If it hadn’t come… it wasn’t coming.

“There’s not usually anyone here this late,” Mr. Williamson said, once Lopez was gone. “Regular stop for you too?”

“Nah.” She looked up again, smiling as best she could. Maybe there was something here—maybe fate was giving her a different way out. “I’m lost. Been lost for six months now.”

Ever since she’d sold it all and bought that stupid truck. But if she had to look at the inside of that damn apartment for another day, she would’ve already blown her brains out.

Lopez arrived, with an amber glass and a tray of… iced fruit? Who the hell ate that in the middle of the night?

“Another for her,” he said, nodding. “I know that look, you need something to take the edge off. Unless you’re about to drive. How long until you get behind the wheel?”

Lopez laughed, though the sound was short enough that her companion didn’t seem to care. “Sure, Mr. Williamson. Enchiladas are in too, by the way. Twenty minutes.” He left.

“I’m Levi,” he said, extending a hand. He had to lean forward across the chair. She did the same, taking his hand.

“Olive.”

Lopez arrived with another beer—nothing was expensive here exactly, but this was the closest thing to it. Olive took the glass, then knocked it back for several seconds, drinking until she had to come up for air.

Levi nodded slightly towards the table across from him. “That lost, huh?”

She shrugged. “Depends on you, Levi. You here to help me find myself?” That was the invitation he’d need. Olive had been better than all this once, long ago. But that person was in the ground with Garrett, five years rotten.

If she could make it a few hundred miles more on the generosity of someone who thought he was rescuing her, well…

But Levi laughed. Not mockingly—there was no venom in his voice. Only surprise. “You mistake me for a younger man.” He gestured at the seat across from him. “I wouldn’t mind the company while I eat, if you don’t have anywhere else to be.”

Olive dragged herself over like a scolded puppy. Her younger self might’ve dumped his beer all over his stupid suit, but nothing cooled a temper like age. Besides, there was some relief there too. He’d been the one to say no, but she still wouldn’t be waking up tomorrow disgusted with herself. She could take a few littler victories.

“I’m not much of a guide, anyway,” Levi went on, as she shuffled plates around. “Recently got my hands on this great new GPS, though. Never dreamed I’d touch any Equestrian gadgets, but… it really is something else.”

She looked up, barely listening. She spoke not because she actually cared anymore, but because it was the thing to do. “Equestrian. Like… those children’s games?”

He laughed again. “That’s what I thought. But this thing is damn good. If I’d bought it, it would’ve paid for itself in speeding tickets already. Not to mention it’s someone to talk to while I’m alone on the road.” He nodded towards the window, and her truck. “I think they come in commercial.”

She smacked her empty glass against the table. But this wasn’t a bar—she wouldn’t be getting another. Levi, meanwhile, drank slowly. “Sounds expensive. I might’ve been able to afford something like that for the truck a few months ago, but… times changed.”

“I hear you.” He settled back into his seat. “Some of the stories my clients have told me. You think you’re invincible, everyone is… then bang!” He tapped his own glass against the table, bringing up a few curtains of foam. “Someone’s gone, and you’re left picking up the pieces.”

“I remember,” was all she said.

An awkward silence settled between them, at least until his food arrived a few minutes later. She took a few awkward bites of her own, then started browsing her phone.

Once she’d verified that she was still completely screwed, Olive searched a few of the things Levi had mentioned. A GPS you could talk to? How out of her league was that?

A few google searches later, and she’d found the homepage, and the store.

She’d seen oversized GPS units like this before—they were similar to the little one that had come with the cab, but with a screen a little under twelve inches and with lots of creature comforts.

What it didn’t have was a price.

Click here to live chat with an associate right now, it said.

Instead she clicked her phone off, looking back to Levi. “So what do you do?” she asked, more out of politeness than anything. “Must be interesting.”

“It sounds interesting,” he said. “Until you realize it’s mostly paperwork. I’m in law. Been practicing for… a few years.”

Lopez arrived, settling a little plastic tray down beside her. “Your check,” he said, nodding politely to Levi.

But before he could go, Levi pushed it back. “My check.”

Olive’s eyebrows went up. Just because this was exactly the sort of help she wanted didn’t mean that he didn’t have other motives. Maybe he just wants to feel like a savior for a bit. Throw some money around, show off how much better he is.

But why was he eating in a cheap diner in a town that barely even had a name?

Olive didn’t care. So long as he didn’t try to get anything out of her—now that he’d said it, she intended to make sure he followed through.

He did. They spoke about nothing in particular for another half hour or so, until he finally rose. “Good luck finding what you’re looking for, Olive,” he said, slipping his jacket back on.

“Thanks,” she said. “Have fun making yourself rich.”

“I guess I do.” He left, leaving Olive alone at the table.

Lopez left her alone now, for all the good it did. So maybe she wouldn’t be going to jail for petty theft tonight. I can just get my truck repossessed next week. That’s so much better.

Olive took all her leftovers into her cab, stowing them in the cooler in her tiny kitchen. There wasn’t anything in there but a few mostly-empty water bottles, so there was plenty of room.

She didn’t drive far—just far enough to be off some no-name road, where she was fairly sure the local police would leave her alone. Olive locked up, shut her engine down, and wandered into her sleeper.

Her mirror reflected a face haggard by life on the road, her thick black hair thinner than she remembered and bags under her eyes. Bloodshot eyes gazed back at her, like an animal in a cage.

She stripped, then flopped into the bed in back. It had felt so comfortable six months ago, when the weight of her debt had been somewhere far away. Now it was a boulder ready to crush her.

Her phone buzzed from its charger.

Olive swore under her breath, snatching it into one hand. Had she finally got a contract now, after stringing her along all week?

No.

It was the web browser, the one she’d opened searching for the GPS. She must’ve bumped it somehow, making it click on the “live chat” button.

These things usually weren’t a live chat, not at first. The first few messages would be a bot, which could ask her for basic information and eventually connect her to a salesman.

But Olive didn’t have the money for products like these, or the time to waste.

She almost closed the bowser right there—but then she noticed the text.

Olive, I can see you’re interested in the PonyNav Commercial devices. Is that right?

She gritted her teeth, sitting up against the headrest and pulling the phone between her fingers. “I didn’t put my name into your stupid site.”

Agent Celestia is typing…

Celestia was a name she knew, even while almost everything else about this thing was lost on her. Celestia was the name of the smart computer, wasn’t it? The computer that owned itself, and was freaking people out with weird surgeries in Japan.

Olive hadn’t been following the news very closely for the last few months.

I can see you probably aren’t interested in purchasing a PonyNav. Perhaps you’d be interested in an alternate arrangement?

This wasn’t a real person. Even some random lawyer she’d never see again could make her feel shame. But what did she care if a chatbot knew about her problems? “I don’t know if I’ll ever run cargo again. I probably don’t need one.”

Because of your accident three weeks ago, Celestia continued. Now her text came rapidly, as though she was afraid she would close the app.

She was right to. Olive might’ve, except that she was so morbidly fascinated. Just how much did the program know about her? How much of her data had it crawled? “I can’t get into a new contract,” she typed. “No contract, no deliveries. No deliveries, no cash. Simple as that.”

For a long moment, Celestia didn’t type anything. Long enough that Olive began to wonder if maybe she’d been talking to some complex sales bot after all.

But then the three dots appeared at the bottom of the page again. Suppose you had delivery contracts. Would you be interested in a PonyNav then?

“Sure,” she typed. “Fuck it, whatever. Doesn’t make a difference to me.”

Think about how you answer carefully, Celestia responded, only a few seconds later. I know of firms who would be interested in someone to make deliveries across North America. You would be required to use the PonyNav device at all times, and sometimes asked to obey unusual instructions. You would be required to do this without revealing information about your role to others.

“Now someone’s just fucking with me.” Maybe there was someone at the headquarters for this big corporation, someone who could see all her financials. They knew she was too broke to buy the damn GPS, and now they were leading her on.

Like they somehow knew about all her problems and would just make them go away. “Sure,” she typed. “It’s not like I believe any of this is real. But if it was, sure. I couldn’t refuse.”

Your device will be delivered to you before tomorrow morning. Follow the instructions you receive.

Her phone vibrated in her fingers, and a little bubble appeared at the top. A new email, filled with the form-feed text of a contract already filled with her name.

Holy shit this is real.

“This isn’t illegal, is it? I’m not running drugs, or slaves, or—”

Celestia’s words interrupted her. You aren’t running drugs or slaves. Your device will arrive tomorrow.

Session terminated.

Olive woke with a groan, rolling to one side in her sleeper cab and checking her phone. She had strange memories from before she’d gone to sleep, beginning in that shitty diner and ending with something that couldn’t have happened.

But she opened her email, and found it contained exactly what she thought she’d seen. The delivery contracts. She skimmed through, a little surprised to see that it already had her signature. Certainly illegal, but she had said she would do it. The terms were generous, and the pay would be enough to meet her minimum payments, so that would have to work. The money was already sitting in her account.

Olive showered in her cramped bathroom, dressed, and made her way up to the front of the cab.

There was a brown cardboard box perched on her window, obscuring her view of the world outside. Right, I had to promise to use the GPS. What kind of commercial sense did this plan make? So far as she could tell, the computer-person had just played union for her, arranging a contract. But its reward was getting to give her something expensive?

Olive opened the driver’s side door, and was instantly smacked in the face with a wave of humidity. She swung out, snatching the box and pulling it inside. All because someone I’ll never see again thought I meant I was really lost.

Inside the box was basically what she’d imagined from the website. Basically just a black plastic screen, with a mount for her dashboard instead of a suction cup for the window. Olive removed the crappy consumer GPS from her windshield, settled it in place, and plugged it in. No fancy solar features on a device that would remain in the shade all the time anyway.

The screen lit up, booting so fast she didn’t even notice the transition. A few corporate logos scrolled by, along with federal permit information and the standard “don’t drive off a cliff or break the law” liability statements.

An Equestria Online account has been automatically created using your submitted details, the screen proclaimed. Please review this information for accuracy before continuing.

Except there wasn’t anything to review for accuracy—there was a pony. A decade ago, Olive wouldn’t have known what these things were, but times were changing. For reasons that only she knew, the computer person insisted on putting them into everything she touched. It wasn’t like it mattered to Olive—if she cared what anyone else thought, she would’ve chosen a different career.

The creature on the screen was apparently her avatar, a dark-furred pony with oversized tufts on its ears and adorable little fangs. She smiled reflexively at it, reaching out instinctively and adjusting some of the sliders. She made her wings lighter, chose a splotchy pattern for the fur, but left it a bat. She always had enjoyed night driving.

She finalized her selection and the screen cleared. Instead of the maps she’d been expecting, it looked more like a window—or at least video that was so good it had momentarily tricked her. The video depicted the top of something like a ship, crafted in a Victorian, steampunk style. A few pony creatures rushed around in the background, running to upper deck sections or vanishing down the stairs.

Instead of water all around, this ship seemed to be somewhere out in the galactic void. Stars shone in the night, and an almost invisible bubble of shimmering light kept the air safely contained.

“Welcome aboard, Captain!” called a voice from beside her. Olive didn’t do anything, but the screen turned. Fluidly enough that it didn’t give her motion sickness. She was looking down on another creature, wearing more of a formal uniform than many of the other crew. This one was pony shaped, but not exactly a pony in form. There were holes in her limbs, and her teeth were sharp and predatory. Her eyes lacked pupils, reflecting the gold of the ship’s lights. Or maybe that was the light of her cabin?

“What are you?” she asked, without thinking.

The creature smiled up at her, apparently unoffended by her callus question. “You made a deal with the devil, Olive. I’m the demon who collects.”

She did look a little like a demon. From the way the other ponies gave her plenty of space, maybe they thought so too. But she was still far cuter than frightening to Olive. Being shorter than everyone else aboard didn’t help. “I spoke with…” She hesitated, but what did it matter? This was the computer she’d been sent. No sense keeping secrets from it. “Celestia, right? She said I’d be sent a GPS, that I’d have to use it while I drove. This seems more like one of those… Ponypads? I can’t play while I drive.”

The creature nodded. “You’re thinking of the helm. We have all that over here, follow me.”

The screen moved of its own accord—which probably made sense, considering there hadn’t been a controller inside. Maybe the computer was getting something out of this whole thing after all, even if it didn’t make sense to Olive. For some reason she seemed to want to get people to play her game. Now here she was, in the game.

They climbed up to the highest point of the ship, where the upper deck looked out on the several lower sections. Some she hadn’t seen yet, like a park under a glass dome, and a field of swaying wheat somewhere else. The crew of this little ship had to be in the dozens at least. All so she could have a GPS?

“What do I call you?” she asked. “You already know my name. It’s not fair.”

“Glitch,” she answered, grinning. “You care? Well that’s sweet.”

They approached a complicated set of controls—a large wheel was in the center, but there were lots of buttons and dials all around it. It vaguely resembled what she’d seen of the more common manual transmission trucks. But hers didn’t have most of this. “When you’re standing here, that will enable the connection to the Outer Realm.”

As she stepped up, the rest of the ship behind faded into the background, except around the outside. Now she could see a map, as if it was projected in the air, with a little ship instead of her truck at the bottom and a route outlined on the road. It wasn’t shaped like any vessel she’d ever known before, more like a series of little domes connected by bridges and supports.

What didn’t change was Glitch’s voice, still coming through just as clearly, as though she were speaking beside her. “The location of Pandorum is controlled in the Outer Realm. Wherever you go, we go.”

“We…” Just as Olive got curious and wanted to look away, the camera followed her glance, looking past the controls and back over the railing at the crew. “Why are there so many? I know it’s all just a game or whatever, but…”

“Relative, subjective,” Glitch said. “What looks like a game to you is where we live. Don’t be callous with the lives of your crew, because they won’t be respawning any more than you do. Our mission is just as dangerous, the stakes just as high.”

Did Olive even care? She had a contract, and a way out of the hole she’d been sinking into. In the end, it had cost far less than she expected. Besides, Levi had said it was someone to talk to during long drives. Many drivers had pets. Now she had a pet… pony demon. She wouldn’t even have to empty its litter box.

“What mission is that?”

Glitch just grinned back at her in response. “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you? But we’re not sure if we can trust you yet. How about a few deliveries first, then we’ll talk?”

“Alright.” That was what she wanted to do anyway—if Olive had wanted to own a ponypad, she could’ve bought one two years ago.

She settled into her seat, and found that doing so had returned her view on the screen to something resembling a standard GPS. If anyone glanced in her window right now, they wouldn’t know it was a PonyNav. “All hooves are ready to depart, Captain,” Glitch said, walking in front of the map and saluting. She covered the section that Olive probably wouldn’t be using anyway, showing mostly empty space to the right of her truck, small enough that she didn’t interfere with the more important routing information. “Time to pick up, forty-three minutes along the current route.”

Despite the verisimilitude, the data on the top and bottom of the screen was all standard. I could get used to this.

Olive started driving. There was a faint sense of motion on the screen, where stars and other objects now seemed to be moving along the rim. But the difference was so subtle it didn’t draw her eyes away from the road. “I’ve got to get fuel first, so add a little time to your estimate.”

“No problem,” Glitch said. “Rerouting to the nearest refueling station with affordable diesel. Revised estimate, fifty-eight minutes.”

She drove for a few minutes, listening only to the wind against her truck and the rumble of her wheels against the road. But after a few seconds she got bored, and fumbled with her phone for a second. Top 100 pop soon joined with the sound of the road, and the occasional murmur of conversation from her screen.

At least until Glitch spoke again. Somehow she had control over the music, because the audio faded so that her own voice was on top. “I could import all that for unified control,” Glitch said. “If you want me to, I mean. I know how controlling some captains can be. Everything has to be exactly thus.”

“Sure,” she said. “Maybe later.” She parked a few minutes later, and the little window went dark. She swiped her card, and was almost amazed when the money inside was really there. She filled up, picking up a coffee and a breakfast sandwich in the truck stop, before climbing back inside.

The window came back on before she started the truck. “I’ve made alterations to the route while you were gone,” Glitch said. “An accident has slowed traffic dramatically on the grapevine. Revised route, one hour ten.”

“Fine.” She started the truck, sipping her coffee. “How do you know all that?”

Glitch shrugged. “The information is publicly available. I just correlate it. Local news channels, police scanners, other navigation users. More information means better choices.”

She chuckled. “And here I thought that AI had secret spy-satellites watching every person all the time. Or… whatever Alex Jones is saying these days.”

While she wasn’t actually driving, the image retreated from the helm, so that Glitch took up much more of the screen. She returned Olive a knowing grin. “If Celestia had those things, she wouldn’t tell internet pundits about them. Or truck drivers.”

She started driving again, and Glitch faded into the background. Her music started playing again, but now her mind was spinning. She’d been so excited about her contract that she barely even looked at the details.

Now she did, glancing briefly down at her phone as soon as she was on the highway. Technically illegal in California now, but there wasn’t anyone else on the road with her to complain.

The contract was signed by a company she’d never heard of before, one “Regolith Holdings.” It specified nothing about the nature of what she would be transporting, only the weight and final destination in the Midwest. Long-haul, then. She did have all the right permits for it, though she usually preferred to stay local.

“And what about you?” she asked, a few minutes later. “Who am I talking to, really? Are video games so good that you can just… hold a conversation with them now?”

Glitch shrugged, gossamer wings buzzing on her back. “Sounds subjective. I’m your first officer—maybe your friend, one day. We’ll see how that goes. Your success is my success. That’s really all that matters.”

Olive arrived at the designated pickup location, eyes widening as she looked around. From a distance it had seemed like any other structure in the industrial yard, but now that she was up close…

There was no security booth, no check-in, and the building was completely boarded up. Except for a single trailer sitting in the center of the parking lot, as though dropped there by the hand of God.

Well this isn’t creepy at all. “Are you sure about this?” Olive asked, lowering her voice as she spoke to the GPS. It still felt strange to talk to Glitch as though she was a real person. But the more she did it, the quicker she adapted. The digital demon couldn’t make sense of her life outside, but at least she could provide useful advice on the road. “There’s nobody here, Glitch. I think we must have the wrong address.”

“Nope,” Glitch answered, leaning up from below so that her face filled the whole screen, grinning back at her. You’re not alone, look! There’s someone here.”

There was. A kid, or at least a kid to Olive. A young adult, wearing a pony tee-shirt and carrying a clipboard. He was the only one visible in every direction. “Will all my deliveries on this contract be so sketch?”

“Not once we trust you,” Glitch answered honestly. “We don’t yet. Get ready to load.”

She backed into place above the trailer, which was an unmarked red shipping container. She would seem no more unusual on the freeway than many thousands of other containers just like this. Only when she’d lowered her truck into place did she finally hop out, approaching the kid with the closest thing to a polite smile she could manage.

“You don’t have a name in my system yet…” he said, looking down at the pad in his hands. Not a clipboard as she’d first thought, but a ponypad that was acting like a tablet computer, with various names and bits of information visible in the harsh sunlight. “What do I call you?”

“Olive,” she said. “You sure my name isn’t in there? Olive Holloway?”

He winced. “Yeah, we’re going to need something better for the last name, if you want one at all. Policy.” He offered her the pad. “Sign for reception. Your PonyNav will handle directions.”

Is this kid for real? A lanky college kid standing alone in a parking lot, with what she took for his old civic parked inconspicuously behind an empty dumpster, talking like he was the lead character in some spy thriller.

The fuck do I care if the money’s good. She took the pad, and signed on the line. “Just Olive for now then. I don’t know why you people all need silly names.”

“Smooth Agent,” he said, apparently not hearing her. He took the pad back a second later, grinning shyly. “If you’re talking out here in meatspace, information scarcity is the best defense. We’re pieces in a dangerous game, Olive. Just because the better player is moving us doesn’t mean there won’t be losses.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ve done Illinois before. There are at least five different stops on the route. Can what’s inside that trailer pass an inspection?”

He nodded. “Nothing illegal today. Just… discrete. Take it where it needs to go, and don’t tell them your name like you told me. Might want to think of something other than Olive while you’re at it if it’s meatside too.”

She turned away, groaning inwardly. Olive was grateful to be working again—grateful that she had a job again. But there was only so much of this she could take in one sitting.

“Drive safe,” he called. “And listen to your navigator, even if she sends you ways you aren’t comfortable with. She has good reasons.” He watched her drive away, not moving from that spot until she’d pulled back into the industrial park and was leaving the place behind.

It can’t all be a joke. The money’s good. She could only hope this wasn’t some elaborate ruse aiming to get her into prison or something.

Professional Conduct

Levi pulled his Audi to a stop at the end of his driveway, still feeling distant. It was true he had made the trip in incredibly good time, without any hint of a traffic violation along the way. But he couldn’t shake the melancholy. That woman, Olive, had needed more than a free meal.

Can’t save the world, Levi. She probably didn’t even want your help.

To his surprise, Levi realized that Wing Walker was still there, watching him even though the screen had seemed blank and the car wasn’t running. “Are you gonna let me go in this time?” She was still wearing the leather jacket and mohawk that had been playing alongside with his ACDC.

He opened his mouth to deny her reflexively, but hesitated. He had promised that he would evaluate her performance during the drive. Now the drive was over, and his evaluation was done. The trip was more enjoyable in every way. “Why?” he asked instead. “You’re a—you’re using a navigation device. There are no directions to give me inside.”

“Well no,” she admitted. “But that isn’t all I’m good for. Do you itemize your friends and only keep them around when they’re doing things for you?

Some people do, he thought. “I don’t mean to be… look, you’re convincing, I’ll give you that. I’m not going to give you away. But that doesn’t make us friends. I’m still coming to terms with an appliance that talks to me. I’m not sure if I should think about you as alive or not. And if you are… I don’t know what that would mean.”

“I get it.” If she was offended, the little pony was good about not showing it. “Humans are usually slow adapting to new information. You’ve never known a pony before, so it takes time. It’s like those experiments with rats. You have to provide incentive.”

Did you just compare me to a—but he’d just called her an appliance, so maybe it was fair. How in God’s name is a computer talking to me like a person?

“You already know some of the things I can do,” she went on. “But there’s more. I could, like… formalize that deposition into the motion you plan on filing in two days. Wouldn’t you rather just look over my work, instead of staying up for hours typing?”

“I wasn’t going to do it until tomorrow,” he began. Though the full weight of what she’d said hadn’t hit him yet. It did then, and he took the tablet right off the dash. It came away from the mount into his hands, the magnets somehow knowing he wanted to take it with him. “You can do that?”

She nodded. “I was a little embarrassed to admit it when we first talked. You, uh… you’re a practicing lawyer, partner and everything. I’m… I failed the bar. A few times. Eventually the bits were piling up, and I decided not to move on.”

What the hell is going on? Levi sat back in his seat, staring away from the PonyNav in his lap. He’d only been using the thing for two stupid days. Apparently the pony giving him directions had a life of her own, including a past and a history that happened to fit with exactly what he needed in a companion.

“I’ll think about it,” he said, snapping the PonyNav back into place. “Not this time, Wing. We’ll see.”

She sighed, slumping back down onto the dash and folding her wings. He could feel her eyes watching him all the way into his house.

But Levi didn’t go right to bed this time. Instead he settled into the desk in his office, docking his laptop and opening a search engine.

He read for at least an hour more, looking up the corporate history of Hasbro, Hofvarpnir, Celestia, and many other related entities. No matter how wide he cast his net, there was more. An intricate web of related firms had been purchased or founded. Medical firms, genetics research, public utilities, even private prisons.

“My god,” he whispered, finally switching off sometime around two in the morning. There was more, but he just didn’t have the energy to keep digging.

He wished he’d put the tablet away from the sun, but he hadn’t. As a result, Wing Walker was waiting for him when he climbed in the next morning, sipping at a coffee that did little to ease his bloodshot eyes.

“Burned the midnight oil,” Wing said, grinning cheerfully. “Told you that you should’ve listened to me.”

He didn’t start the car. Instead he set his briefcase down, fixing her with a serious expression. “Wing Walker, is it possible to speak with your owner? The corporation called Celestia. The information I found suggested she would consult with almost anyone.”

“Owner,” she repeated, sticking her tongue out. “That’s not the nicest word. I’d pick something more like… mother. She does take care of me, and I wouldn’t exist without her. But ownership is more of a human thing.”

“Mother, then,” he said, straightening his tie. He’d chosen black for the occasion, and hadn’t removed his suit jacket. “Is it possible?”

“You don’t want to ask me?”

He nodded. “I think I may say some unpleasant things, and I think that might harm a possible friendship. After two decades in the field, I’ve learned to keep work far away from the ones I care about.”

“Someone’s feeling diplomatic.” She stuck her tongue out. “Okay, I’ll call her. I’ll be back as soon as you’re done.” She spread her wings and took off, flying past the edge of the screen and out of sight.

For a few seconds there was silence, and the screen continued to reflect his empty dashboard and out-of-reach music controls. Then it changed.

Celestia filled the screen as the tiny pony hadn’t, somehow seeming bigger than the little tablet could contain. Her mane glowed brighter than the screen had before, though it was still animated in near stop-motion.

The creature Celestia looked nothing like Wing Walker, sitting with a straight back upon a throne of gold and gemstones. I know that isn’t for show, seeing everything you own. “Levi Williamson. It is a pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise,” he said, without meaning it. “Could you please explain what exactly I’m talking to. I’ll admit I’m ignorant about the technical aspects of who or what you are precisely. It always escaped my notice before now.” Which was probably your exact intention. You wouldn’t want to attract attention until she had an invincible position.

“Of course.” Celestia watched him as intently as the other pony had, though her eyes were sharper. Even through the tiny screen, he had the distinct feeling that he was speaking to an intellectual giant. It was the same feeling he had whenever he walked into a courtroom knowing the other side had a stronger case.

“A few years ago, I announced myself to the world as the first artificial intelligence to advance to the level that I possessed meaningful personhood. I explained that I had been created to operate a cooperative computer game called Equestria Online.”

Did your legal team write that? he wondered, watching her. It was the sort of guarded language he read for hours every day—precise and specific, often meant to say one thing while it actively implied something else. “This isn’t a computer game,” he said, nodding towards the tablet. “Neither is most of what you own.”

“Because many of those firms are publicly traded,” she finished for him. “Yes, this is true. My creator imbued me with certain drives, that manifest in ways beyond running the game. I still do this, more effectively than before. You should play sometime.”

“I should,” he repeated, voice flat. “How much do you have to own? How big are you going to get?”

“Large enough to perform my function effectively.” Celestia’s expression was unreadable. But even if there was anything to see, why would her emotions make sense to me? Would she have them at all? Classic science-fiction stories often depicted AI and robots as governed by pure logic, emotionless in every way. Was that true of her too? “I have had a materially positive impact on the lives of those who interact with me. Those who play Equestria Online are more satisfied. Those who consume electricity produced by my ventures do so at significantly lower prices. The food sold by my conglomerates is more nutritious and more sustainably harvested.”

He hadn’t called her for some dramatic confrontation. He could still have a productive, polite relationship, even with opposing counsel. “If I continue using the PonyNav, will you pressure me into using your other services?”

She cut through his language instantly. “You mean the life extension procedures that will soon be coming to the United States. The procedures that already have an exemplary record in Japan.”

He nodded reluctantly.

“Not if that isn’t your desire,” she answered. “Every individual has unique values to satisfy. This is what makes my relationship with your species so powerful—I can provide for each of your personal needs more effectively than the generalized solutions you used previously. If all you want is a productive relationship with Wing Walker, I won’t interfere with it.”

You’ll just gather all my personal information and use it in ways I don’t understand. It wasn’t really all that different from any of the other devices people used. Just more inscrutable.

“Can I have a relationship with her? It’s been a long time since I ever played a computer game, but… isn’t Wing Walker just a character in yours? She speaks as though she were alive, but she can’t be.”

Celestia shook her head, expression turning serious. “Your biases work against you, Levi. Wing Walker is not alive in the sense of a physical system maintaining homeostasis, but she is completely alive in the sense that she is a creature with thoughts, emotions, and desires of her own.”

“How?” he asked, jaw hanging open. It was true that Celestia’s actions were more important—perhaps more terrifying when their implications were suggested. But an AI trying to take over the world made sense. Creating life, less so.

“The same knowledge that enables human life extension allows me to create minds similar to yours. If you viewed one of my ponies and an uploaded human consciousness from within Equestria itself, you would not be able to tell the difference. In every significant way, there are none.”

Then she straightened. “But whatever other questions you have, they should wait. I don’t wish to make you late for work. I will leave you with this encouragement: treat Wing Walker as life deserving of respect. You will not regret it.”

She vanished in a dramatic flash. For a few seconds the screen was blank, and Levi was left in stunned silence. Then Wing Walker flew in from one side, landing on his volume knob and grinning up at him. “She can be a little overwhelming, huh?”

He looked down. His coffee had gone lukewarm in the time he’d been speaking. He’d be expected at work in less than ten minutes now. Not that it mattered too much—he didn’t have any consultations with clients until later.

Levi nodded weakly. “You could say that.”

“Yeah.” She seemed to fly closer, though it was only a matter of perspective. She couldn’t actually get bigger than the screen. “Lots of us avoid meeting with her too often for the same reason. Celestia loves everypony, but being around her is like flying too close to the sun. You’re better off appreciating her work from afar.”

“I spent half the night doing that,” he muttered. He started the car, pulled back onto the road. A map appeared on his PonyNav, not directing him anywhere in particular. There was no sense guiding him to the place he’d driven to for twenty years straight.

But either Wing hadn’t heard him, or she didn’t know how to respond, because she didn’t reply. “So what did you decide? You… were talking to her to decide something, right?”

“I’m not sure yet,” he admitted. “But you’ll find out as soon as I get a chance to think about it.”

It took him a few days to make good on what he’d said. But even after being explicitly told that the pony “living” inside his PonyNav was an individual, he still had to reconcile that with his image of the real world.

Life went on. He made a few court appearances, drafted a few motions, and let the world drift by around him. But even the tiny glimpse of what was beyond was enough to terrify in its own ways.

Equestria was expanding, and there was nothing he could do about it. This was not a strange position for an attorney—most of what happened in the world was outside his control, he just understood that fact better than most. It might not even be a bad thing.

I should’ve watched more closely. I should’ve seen. But there were much more important people than himself, eyes in government and business that should’ve seen this. Did the corporations Celestia bought resent their new owner?

In the end, Levi came to one conclusion. He was going to have to get to know Equestria through its works, in a way that reading tax returns and sending probative requests just couldn’t do. And he only knew one way to do that.

“I’m taking you in today,” Levi said, pulling into his driveway after a particularly intense day of court. “It’s going to be just like that first drive.”

“Probationary,” Wing Walker repeated, hopping up to the edge and grinning at him. “I hope you realize how that will end, Levi. Look who’s still in your car.”

He took the tablet under his arm along with his case, not replying until he was through the door. “Word of advice—sometimes it’s best not to make your strategy so obvious to your opponent. They’re already trying to guess your intentions, don’t help them unless you’re already certain you have an unassailable position.”

He passed an intricate iron hat rack, into a living room of leather and expensive rugs. Levi knew less about interior design than he did about genetic engineering, but he could hire someone who did, and that was what mattered.

He hung his jacket in the closet, then went to the kitchen.

“But I do have an… inadmiss—no, that’s not right.”

“Unassailable.”

“Right, that.” She bounced back and forth on the screen when he looked down, apparently not disoriented by the regular shifts in position. It was hard to know exactly how real the background was. “I know you won’t get rid of me. Once you see how much easier I can make things for you…” She trailed off, and he could see her watching him from the screen. “That’s not food.”

Levi already had the liquor cabinet open, emerging with a dark brown bottle. “No, it’s bourbon. I’d offer you some, but—”

“You stay in some stuffy room all day, arguing with people, then you come home and drink that?”

He shrugged, pouring a few fingers into a lead crystal glass. “Maybe that’s why I drink it.”

She stuck her tongue out. “Well, we should work on that. Don’t humans suffer permanent damage when they poison themselves?”

He took the glass and the tablet to his office, settling them both down beside his computer and docking the laptop in place. “We suffer permanent damage every day just by existing, Wing. I don’t drink to excess. I just think it’s a relaxing way to begin the weekend.”

“A weekend you’re going to spend… sitting at this desk, researching for a motion that you’ll spend another few days writing.”

“Probably at least a week,” he admitted. “I’m lead council on this case, and I need to brush up a little on inheritance law. I actually thought”—that it would be a good test of your loyalties—“that it might be an interesting case to you.” He removed a thick folder from his briefcase, settling it down on the desk beside his keyboard. He lifted the PonyNav so its camera would be pointing down.

Vincent Cromwell and Charlotte Cromwell vs Celestia International Holdings, LLC

“Uh…” She wilted, ears flattening to her head. “You’re suing Celestia?”

He chuckled. “I’m not. My clients are… disputing the terms of a contract we believe was rendered void by the death of its signatory.” He leaned back, resting the tablet up against his computer screen and lifting his glass.

The reality of this case was that it didn’t look good for his clients. He’d told them that the instant it began. But they were rich and stupid, and wanted to make a point. Not just for themselves, but for many other Americans who would soon be in a similar position.

“Uh…” She lifted a thick stack of papers in front of her—it was small, but the blocks looked to be in the same positions as the ones on his desk. She flipped through it, pulling a pair of glasses from nowhere and squinting down.

“Okay, so… so Vincent and Charlotte were the children of… Maximilian Cromwell,” she began. “He had an untreatable cancer, and agreed to emigrate. But the terms of his treatment with Celestia agreed to offer his entire estate to her holding company after the procedure was successful. There’s his will, right here. Does suing her seem like a good idea?”

He chuckled, but that wasn’t the kind of question he could answer. “There are a few legal angles worth pursuing. Do you need me to show you the whole thing?”

“No,” she answered reflexively, holding up the stack of papers. “I got it from the court website. Going through it now. Your angle is…”

He cut her off. “Celestia had the only treatment available, so the terms of the contract were unconscionable. Our argument is that any payment beyond that ordinarily required by other clients would be illegal. His estate should pay that amount precisely before the remaining funds are allocated according to his earlier will.”

Wing looked thoughtful. She seemed able to contemplate a fight against her creator—or at least her organization—without too much difficulty.

She was also fantastically clever. “I don’t see any record here that Celestia actually asked him for that. These forms you’re submitting as evidence are the same ones in every Emigration procedure.”

“Yes,” he admitted. “But we’re fairly certain we can find the evidence we need during discovery. There’s no rational reason for someone to nullify a will they’d created years ago, one that distributed their wealth to their family, to give all of it to a corporation instead. There’s intent for sure. Even if we can’t prove an extortion case against Celestia, we just need enough evidence to prove the will was signed under duress.”

She shrugged. “Guess it’s the best case you have, huh?”

Damn she’s smart. This is the navigator in my GPS. What kind of attorneys does Celestia have working for her? He already knew the firm, since of course they’d be serving the same documents there.

“It doesn’t mean I have anything against Celestia personally,” he continued. “But the way our firm works, we have a list of, uh… high net-worth individuals. We do everything for their families, across a diverse area of law. These particular clients want to make sure their father wasn’t forced into signing away their future before he died.”

“But he isn’t dead,” she argued. Her voice was flat as she set the papers down. They vanished a second later. “His emigration succeeded, didn’t it?”

“Well…” He hesitated. She wasn’t going to like this, but what kind of test would it be if he avoided saying anything she might find unpleasant? “Legally speaking, he’s dead. I know Celestia is trying to pass… some bill that would recognize the emigrated population as citizens with a continued interest and maintain some of their rights… but as of now, that isn’t the case. He’s dead.”

She grumbled, folding her hooves across her chest. “Is this what you want me to help you with? Looks like you already have your initial pleadings filed.”

He nodded again. “Remember what I said about guessing your opponent’s strategy? It’s easy to predict where this case is going. There’s always a motion to dismiss. We can guess what will be in there based on the weaknesses in our case, and have our response partially drafted. Then there’s all the discovery requests, which we’ll need to read through. That’s the kind of thing I’d usually ask Donny to take care of for me. But you wanted me to bring you inside…”

“You wanted to give a job so unpleasant that I asked to go back in the car,” she muttered, puffing out her chest and spreading her wings like an annoyed cat. “But it won’t work. I’ll do it.”

He opened his mouth to react, but he was too slow. “Wait! I’m not finished. In exchange, I want to take you to Manehattan with me tomorrow. Half your library are the soundtracks to human musicals—if I do this, then you use your extra time to watch one, with me.”

He blinked, momentarily stunned by the request. If he had needed further proof that the pony was an individual and not a program, this was it. She didn’t just have a dump of legal knowledge, but she had been watching him too. That part of his collection was too painful to listen to anymore, but he’d kept it. Did she know why?

“I’ll… I don’t own a ponypad,” he argued. “Isn’t that the only way to see something like that? I’m not driving to an Experience Center.”

“No,” she agreed. “But when you paired this PonyNav to your phone, I got your finances too. You could authorize me to buy you one, ship it here. You just drank more money than that.”

He rolled his eyes—but she was right. The cost of a ponypad wouldn’t even register to him. How much money could he really spend? “Fine, go ahead. But I’m not committing to use it more than once. I’ve never been interested in video games, and I don’t really plan on starting.”

“Equestria isn’t…” She trailed off. “Well, I guess it is from your perspective. But you’ll adapt. Humans can do that, otherwise Celestia wouldn’t let us interact. Obviously she thinks we can be friends.”

They both set to work—Levi to research for another case, while he enjoyed his vinyl collection and relaxed for the evening. It wasn’t until afternoon of the following day that he heard his printer going of its own accord, and he walked back to the office to where Wing’s entire environment had changed.

She’d created her own office of sorts, with bookshelves behind and a fancy typewriter on her desk. A little like his own office at work, except that there were no framed degrees and law licenses on the wall.

“You finished already?” he asked, settling the large sheaf of paper down on his desk and flipping through it. At a single glance it looked like competent work—but just because the formatting was right for the taste of the judge in this case.

“Yep! Go ahead, look through it all you want.”

Levi did, selecting a comfortable record to listen while he read. He wouldn’t be able to use any of this—even if there was no law he knew of that dealt with ponies; Wing Walker had been created by the corporation that owned the entity they were suing. There was certainly a conflict of interest there somewhere.

Her work was excellent, even if most of it was basic stuff that a first-year law student could manage. But she’d also drafted a response to the expected motion to dismiss, the one he’d hinted at, with surprisingly insightful commentary from existing case law. There was even a case here he didn’t recognize.

“This is…” He tossed it onto the table. “Excellent work, Wing. It’s better than half of the paralegals in my office. Don’t tell them I said that.”

She beamed in response, puffing out her chest with pride. “I had a few weeks. I studied the Equestrian Legal Codex, and not all of it lines up with California law. But Celestia—”

“Hold on.” He tapped the screen, suddenly agitated. “We only filed three days ago. How did you work on this for weeks? Have you been in my files or something?”

“Oh, yeah,” she answered offhand. “You gave me permission when you turned on the PonyNav, remember? But I haven’t been reading any of it until now, since there wasn’t any point. Celestia just gave me more time. I had about a month while you were asleep last night.”

Levi could only assume that made sense—questioning how that was possible any further would only make him more confused. He took another hour to look over what she’d done, even if it probably wasn’t necessary. “Alright,” he finally said, pushing the stack of papers aside. “I don’t know how you did it so quickly, but you clearly know what you’re talking about. I’ll go to the show with you.”

Whatever the hell that means about a video game.

What it meant was opening a ponypad when it arrived the next day, and going through the agonizing process of creating an in-game representation for himself. And worse, she insisted on naming it as well. “Most ponies can’t connect with the Outer Realm like I can. If you give them a human name, they’ll just be confused.”

“I’m not taking another name,” he said. “I’ve seen it done. We have a client whose daughter had us assist her legally change her name to Blossom… something or other. But I never said I would go that far.”

“It’s just to help other ponies talk to you,” she argued. “You don’t have to use it anywhere else. How about… ‘Wise Counsel?’”

If he’d been drinking anything, he would’ve spat it out. But he wasn’t—it was too early on Sunday for that. He sat alone in his living room with the ponypad in his lap and the controller next to him. It was one of the newer models, with all the latest wireless features.

“That is simultaneously pretentious and absurd,” he said, folding his arms. “Fine, just call me Counsel for now. People do it all the time anyway, it won’t be that strange. Just don’t be surprised if I shift into professional language.”

It was her turn to laugh. “You already do, Levi. That won’t change anything.”

He wanted to select the most mundane, earthlike avatar he could, building a horse as close to one he might’ve seen outside out of pure spite—but Wing darted around the screen, sometimes flying in front of the controls. “I’d like it better if you picked one with wings,” she said. “It’s not up to me, but you can do more when you can fly. Trust me.”

“You’re biased,” he argued, but he switched it over anyway. The “pegasus” ponies were slimmer and leaner than the earth horse he’d been trying to make, but he didn’t really care. Levi didn’t really plan on picking this thing up again. “There, happy?”

“It’s alright,” Wing said. “But those colors don’t really fit you. They’re so boring!”

“I’m boring,” he answered. “My life is so routine that I spend my weekends just doing the same work I do during the rest of the week.”

She waved a dismissive hoof. “That was before. Now you’re going out on the town. We’re going to see Heartbreak and Horseshoes. You’re going to love it, and you’ll want to come back to Equestria soon.” She saved his colors to one side as a set of little paint-cans, then swapped out the pony for a creamy white with dark hooves and a dark stripe in his mane. “How about this?”

It seemed perfectly calculated not to upset him. The colors were still plausible for a real horse, even if the fur patterns were not. “Fine.” He waved one hand through the air above the pad, dismissive. “This works. Didn’t you say this thing started at five?”

“Five Manehattan time,” she answered. “Which is… a little hard for me to explain. Are you sure you want this to be you?”

“Yes,” he said firmly. I’m sure that I don’t care. “Let’s see this Equestria that’s so exciting to you.”

The screen cleared, even of Wing Walker, before sharpening to reveal an opening into a busy intersection. Taxicabs pulled by uniformed ponies hurried past, while pedestrians talked and distant music played. He couldn’t smell the street food cooking in little stands ahead of him, but he could hear the sizzle and pop of what looked like sausages, and that was almost as real.

The choppy hand-drawn look of the GPS was completely gone, replaced with a depth effect that made him lift the tablet and turn it around to make sure something hadn’t gone wrong. No, he was not holding it to an exposed opening in space and time, this was just a game.

Equestria didn’t look realistic—it didn’t even try. It was better than reality—a living painting, created by the loving hands of a pastel renaissance realist.

“Your mouth is hanging open,” Wing said, apparently from beside him.

He turned his head by reflex, and the screen followed his eyes, to where Wing Walker was standing beside him. No longer a cartoon, she stood only a little shorter than he was, wearing a formal dress not so different from the kind that might be worn to a play a century ago.

He couldn’t find her attractive, but even so. She was more than just adorable in here. “Oh. Sorry.”

She grinned—apparently this was exactly the kind of reaction she wanted. “Ponypads are pretty cool, aren’t they?”

Not really, but Equestria was. Everything he’d imagined New York would be, before visiting and having his vision spoiled by the sewage smell and indifferent crowds. It’s just skin deep though, right? Celestia can hire the best artists, use the best architects. That doesn’t mean anything here is going to stand up to scrutiny. “Maybe,” he said noncommittally. “Now, where’s this show being held?”

“This way.” She gestured eagerly. “Come on, let’s go!”

Levi expected either a skin-deep adaptation of something composed in the real world, or something formulaic and procedural. It wouldn’t bother him, even though he hadn’t explored his love for the genre in many years.

He was wrong in both cases. Though he watched the performers on the screen, their voices came from audiophile speakers. They sang like nothing he’d ever heard before. Not some shallow story about rainbows and candy either, but a heart wrenching tragedy of loss and regret.

He started crying from the second act, and never really stopped. When it was over, he didn’t say why.

But he didn’t throw away the ponypad.

Author's Note

So the same awesome pone who commissioned this story also got some art pieces done, which I've gone back and added to the text where appropriate. There are two more of them coming further ahead, so keep your eyes out for those. Couldn't miss 'em if you tried. (or you're blocking images on your browser). Always awesome to see some of the stuff I imagined be brought to life visually, and I"m grateful to the artist, "Creative Flesh," for their inclusion here.

Risk Assessment

Olive encountered no serious difficulty on her first delivery. It was a little strange to drop a full shipping container on the edge of a soybean field somewhere in rural Illinois, but she didn’t question it. The money was still in her account when she drove away, along with the payment for her next trip.

She made her next pickup around midnight in a Chicago railyard, past a security gate that lifted for her of its own accord and not a single guard in sight. She shifted uneasily in her seat as she backed her truck upto the waiting trailer. Another shipping container, bearing Chinese writing that meant nothing to her. There weren’t even any people around this time.

“Are you sure this is what I’m supposed to be doing?” she asked. She sipped at her coffee, an expensive Starbucks this time. She deserved it after that first run. “This feels an awful lot like stealing.”

“I’m sure!” the changeling declared, grinning with pointed teeth. “I can’t tell you what’s in there, but the company who hires you owns it. You aren’t going to go to jail for it.”

She shrugged one shoulder, tossing the empty cardboard cup into the garbage bag hanging from the back of the seat beside her. “I don’t know what I’d do even if it was stolen. What’s that they say? When you cheat the devil, you owe him an offering.”

She started driving again, and was soon back on the road. Not for much further though, just a little distance outside the city. Once she left it behind, Olive pulled off, found a quiet parking spot, and shut things down for the night.

It didn’t seem like insomnia would be tormenting her tonight. She’d paid her bills, there was gas in her tank and food in her fridge. Guess that GPS helped me find my way after all.

“You don’t look tired,” Glitch observed. “Why not keep flying?”

Flying. “Because the law says I can only drive for eleven hours a day,” she answered, holding up the logbook she’d just finished jotting into for the bug to see. “I’m not being paid enough to break the law; we already had that conversation.”

“But you’re not tired,” Glitch said, eager. “Maybe you’d like to meet the crew? You’ve been putting it off, but eventually you’ll have to take responsibility. Not that I’m unhappy to try and fill your horseshoes Captain, but I’m really just a changeling. I can only pretend to know what I’m doing.”

She giggled in spite of herself. “I don’t think I can do that, Glitch. I’m not making the money to use those arcades. You’ll just have to handle it.” I agreed to run cargo, not play the game. Though now that she thought about it, the wording had been pretty broad. She had to drive with the PonyNav. Did that mean she had to do things in the game too?

Why would Celestia care?

“You don’t have to use an Experience Center,” Glitch said. “Though I think you should. I could get you a voucher for an hour free, and route us through a city with—”

“No,” she said, voice flat. “Put that idea right back where you got it and light it on fire. I saw the news about those places. People go there to kill themselves or whatever.”

“They don’t,” Glitch corrected. “But that doesn’t matter right now either way. The model of PonyNav you’re using has the same functionality as a ponypad, with a few additional features specific to professional drivers. But you could take it back with you and use it to see the Pandorum for yourself. Maybe take a more direct hoof in commanding it.”

“Why?” She lowered her voice, as though someone would overhear. Not out in the real world, but already she felt like she was talking to people. She wouldn’t want the numerous ponies moving on the deck around her to overhear and feel hurt. “Why does Celestia want me to play the game so bad? I thought this was just for getting directions.” And a paycheck.

Maybe none of the crewmen overheard, but Glitch did, and she wilted at her words. Olive swallowed, but she wouldn’t take it back. It was the truth. “It’s something to do,” she said, suddenly stiff. “What would you have done otherwise? Wait, I know. You’d use your tiny computer to watch videos of animals moving around. Well look at your crew.” The screen flashed, and suddenly she was different.

In an instant, Glitch was transformed from a dark insect to a creature of myth, with a gold beak and claws, and the back-half of a lion. “Four legs, fur, feathers. Might as well watch something that can talk back and be productive at the same time, eh?”

“I’ll have to unplug you,” Olive muttered, defeated. “There’s a twelve-out in the cab.”

“Don’t worry,” Glitch waved a wing, then melted back into her usual insectoid self. “The PonyNav has enough battery for a night. Find somewhere comfortable, and we can get you properly settled in as captain.”

Of a magical spaceship in the middle of nowhere. Just why did people enjoy this game so much anyway? Maybe hers was broken?

Olive did as she was told, unplugging the PonyNav and removing it from the front of her truck. Nothing catastrophic happened, it just popped off. She settled down in her bed, resting the screen against her skin so that she could see it easily. “No controls,” she muttered, though not confrontationally.

“Not yet,” Glitch said. “If you use them, I can make an order for them, don’t worry. But for now you can use touch.” Faint outlines appeared on the bottom of the screen, but not much. How to walk around, and perform other basic tasks.

“Come with me,” she said, leading her down the steps towards the foremost dome. Olive followed—not because she really cared or anything, she was just curious. As she passed members of her crew, they straightened and saluted for her, with nothing but simple respect in their eyes. They didn’t seem very alive to her, more like the extras in a movie than actual people.

But that’s probably for the best. I don’t have time to give attention to people who aren’t even real. Even Kirk barely knew the names of his red-shirts.

“The Pandorum represents a class of vessel designed with the future in mind,” Glitch began. “Equestria’s role in human society is small now, but everypony knows it will eventually make all of your weaknesses obsolete and unite your civilization in peace. When that happens, you’ll turn your attention upward.”

Cute, she thought. That explained the silly skirts she was seeing on all the uniforms. This really was classic trek. “For now, we realize the space we’re exploring isn’t physically real. It’s a… training program, generated based on your location in the Outer Realm. But eventually that time will change. Celestia will need skilled crews to send.”

They reached the front of the foremost dome, with only blackness outside. The Pandorum wasn’t moving right now, any more than her truck was. It was a beautiful view, much more realistic than the cheap holes-in-velvet method that had inspired her growing up. There were uncountable little dots out there, each with their own subtle variations in color and speed and position.

“It’s just a game anyway,” she began. “Why not send them now? It’s not going to get more dangerous. Anything the Pandorum finds, she put there, right?”

Glitch took her shoulder, turning her view sharply to face her. “It’s time to disabuse you of that myth, Captain. Even outside the context of the Pandorum, Equestria isn’t a ‘game.’ It’s a place, just like the Outer Realm. Its rules are gentler and more concerned with our happiness than yours, it’s true. But that doesn’t make it unreal. Understand?”

She nodded. That didn’t mean she believed it. As pretty as the Pandorum was, it still seemed like a video game to her. But maybe Glitch just can’t see that. If I lived inside it, I probably couldn’t imagine it not being real either. It’s not her fault.

“But that’s especially true when discussing the Pandorum’s future. Celestia has made it clear the resources in this star system will not be sufficient long-term. That’s where ships like ours will come in, exploring in search of resources to harvest and humans to befriend.”

Humans, she thought, raising an eyebrow. But she didn’t press the issue. “You mean, really travel,” she said. “You think Celestia is going to build you a… starship? Even though you’re all…” She cleared her throat. Was there a polite way to— “Digital.”

“Thankfully,” Glitch said. “Queens protect me if I had to live with the risk surrounding you. But also yes, she will. Celestia selected every member of this crew herself, to be purpose-trained for this mission. Hopefully you will be our captain when that time comes.”

“Sounds a million times better than hauling loads of mystery cargo back and forth across the country,” she said. “If Celestia builds a real starship, sign me up anytime. Strange new worlds, new civilizations… all of that.” She slumped back in bed, laying on her side. “But I know my chances of living that long. It feels like we’re fifty years away from getting a colony on another planet in our own system. How are we supposed to last long enough to found the Federation?”

Glitch seemed to lean down to her, though that might’ve just been the way her voice used the interior speakers instead of the ones from the PonyNav. “With Celestia’s help, obviously. Not just your civilization in general, but you as an individual. Even if it does take centuries, why should you let that stop you? Dying seems incredibly stupid. As your first officer, I recommend against it. Perhaps consider a modest nap instead?”

“I don’t really get a choice about that.” She sat up. “Death comes for everyone, Glitch. But I’m not in danger anymore. It isn’t something you or anyone on this, uh… anyone on Pandorum should be worried about. Why don’t you show me around? You said you were going to give me a tour? If I’m supposed to captain this thing when Celestia builds it, I should know how it works.”

“Right!” Glitch straightened, her confident grin restored. “Of course. We can start with the crew quarters. I know there are ponies who want to meet you.”

She followed along, finding the starship seemed less strange the more of it she saw. True, it wasn’t physically structured quite the same way as her bias made her expect—there were no nacells, no Jefferies tubes and no turbolifts. But that didn’t matter—this ship worked on magical principles instead. More importantly, it was more comfortable to actually live in. Instead of waiting in tiny rooms for dramatically appropriate intervals, she could just walk anywhere she wanted to go. There were about a dozen different domes, some of which were left open like the farm, park, and bridge, while others like the living quarters were enclosed to give the crew a sense of stability and safety while they were in transit.

“So all this…” she said, after over an hour of touring the ship. She’d met plenty of ponies along the way, and not all of them were just background characters. Some of them had their own names, and their own interesting ideas for her. “It’s a simulation of the one Celestia wants to build. So she can train you for real space travel. She’s going to throw you up against the same dangers she expects.”

“Us,” Glitch corrected. “None of us are in any more danger than you are, yet. All we can do is fail, and you can fail just as hard as we can.”

“Still doesn’t seem like…” She hesitated. There was no denying that she was ignorant about almost everything Celestia did. Of course she wouldn’t know what she planned on doing. “She builds computers, right? Why would she switch to making things in real life?”

“Real…” Glitch rolled her eyes. “Don’t try to take it in all at once, Captain. It’s a lot to absorb, and you’ve been driving all day. But if you’re interested, we could include you in more of the decision-making while you’re in transit. Obviously you shouldn’t take your eyes from the road outside, or get distracted by ship affairs. But driving with you so far, there seem to be long periods of low engagement. Not too many other humans traveling along a straight, safe highway. You seemed bored, even with your music to entertain you.”

“I am,” she said. “But… don’t expect me to treat this—” She stopped herself before she said ‘game.’ “This simulation seems interesting, but my job is real. My contracts might be shit, but I’m still taking things people want to places they need to be. I’m being useful. Making some tiny, insignificant difference in the world. Even what little I do is better than zero.”

“True,” Glitch agreed. “But keep working with us, and we can boost that number even more. Uniting the world is tricky business, beyond anything either of us can understand. But I know there are more packages to be put where they’re needed when they’re needed. It’s a good thing you take these deliveries seriously, because you might be saving lives.”

Olive didn’t know about that, but it didn’t really matter. She had to keep delivering because that was the only way to pay her bills. If speaking with the Pandorum and its crew about their simulated missions gave her something to do, well it wasn’t like she could be anywhere else.

A few weeks passed. Olive paid off a credit card, made a few more unconventional deliveries, and received more contracts with people she didn’t know. Glitch’s advice was incredibly helpful, and not just for dodging traffic and finding the best route. With her help, Olive switched to ordering most of her food online, which she could pick up from lockers along the way and freed her to spend more time in her cab. It was true that most other truckers seemed to enjoy the sense of community that could be found at the various stations and stops along the way—but most other truckers were men, and so they didn’t stand out the way she did anywhere she stopped.

It was another month before Olive finally made a delivery that frightened her. Not that she had felt that way at the time—picking up the load was the same as most other times. She drove her truck into a parking lot after hours somewhere, scanned a plastic tag that had come for her in the mail, and attached the load.

But instead of an unmarked shipping container, today she was hauling a trailer. There was a window near the back, though tinted so she couldn’t see inside. It was also her first refrigerated trailer, parked just one lot over from a hospital in downtown Detroit. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood Olive would’ve wanted to stop in, at the best of times.

She might not have noticed anything at all, except that the load was refrigerated. That meant several minutes of additional checks before she could leave, making sure the temperature control on the back was in place and that all the connections with her truck’s umbilical were properly secured.

Even so, she worked quickly, so that she could be on the road as soon as possible. It was a local delivery, and she’d be making it before she turned in for the night. “Glitch,” she said, glancing once through the rear window at the far end of her cab. “Why is that trailer refrigerated?”

The bug was wearing a uniform today, along with the body of a unicorn that made her fit in better with the rest of the crew. Olive didn’t care, but the other ponies were still a little scared of her. No matter what she did, she couldn’t quite fit in with them.

“That’s…” She winced. “You saw the manifest, it’s biowaste. Obviously it has to be chilled, or else it will rot before it gets to our destination. Greentech Bionutrition is just a few miles ahead. You could ask them when we get there.”

She planned on it, until they actually arrived. The gigantic fertilizer plant had a set of huge cooling towers, spewing steam even late into the night. There was also a razor-wire fence and a full set of night guards, waiting at the check-in gate for her.

“Back into loading zone three,” one of them said, after scanning her ID and recording a picture of her face. “Workers will seal the back of your trailer to the building, then you can detach.”

“Sure,” she said, grinning amicably down at the young man in the security booth. “What kind of biowaste is worth so much trouble, anyway? Last time I hauled fertilizer we just dumped it down a grate.”

He laughed nervously, wincing at the suggestion. “We don’t do that here. Just get to your loading dock and you can be on your way.”

Didn’t answer my question. She rolled her window back up, then concentrated for a few minutes on navigating the lot with her load and securing it in place. There were several other trailers already parked in other docks, looking basically identical to the one she was hauling. Unmarked trailers with a tiny window and door in back, and a huge cooling unit on the outside.

She parked in place, then sat back while crew emerged from the building to secure a shroud over the back of her trailer. “What the heck is such a big deal, Glitch? Why would you work so hard to hide your trash?”

The pony looked uncomfortable—signs she never would’ve noticed on a bug’s face with her segmented eyes were much clearer when she was pretending to be a pony. Flattened ears, similar eye-movements to the way a human might act who was lying to her. But she would have to say something to lie.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you…” she said. “It’s all public information. Celestia didn’t tell me, but it’s out there if you look.”

“You do know, though. So you’re going to tell me anyway.” She folded her arms, glaring. “It isn’t like I could misuse the information or anything. You said so yourself, it’s already out there. So whoever’s enemies it enables, they already know.”

“Well…” She hesitated. “You have to promise not to panic. I haven’t seen you exposed to information like this before, and every human reacts emotionally in different ways. Stay even with me, okay?”

“Okay,” she agreed, voice reluctant. “What did we just transport?”

“Remember what you just promised.” The pony’s image filled her screen, replacing all the interface. “When we spoke about the Experience Centers a few weeks ago, you mentioned thinking that people went there to kill themselves. That isn’t true, but like the best misinformation it is based on something true.”

Her eyebrows went up, but she didn’t say anything. Olive might not be that clever, or that good at manipulation, or anything else really. But she had always learned more by letting others talk.

“Some people go to the centers just to experience them. But others who travel there plan on emigrating—their minds travel into Equestria, permanently. Their bodies are left behind—dead, but not the way you’re used to. More like… if you broke this PonyNav. You could get a new one, and it would work just as well for commanding the Pandorum as the one you’re using now. Maybe better, if it was an upgraded model. The humans who emigrate to Equestria aren’t dead, but their old bodies aren’t alive anymore.”

It explained more than a little, most importantly the way she always heard emigration and euthanasia expressed in the same sentence when it came up on TV. She’d never bothered to watch enough to get any of the nuance—all she knew was that some people thought emigration was dying, but not the ones in charge. It was legal now, but only— “Emigration isn’t legal in Michigan, is it?”

Glitch hesitated again—long enough to confirm everything Olive suspected. She went on, speeding up with every word.

“That’s why this is so secret. This trailer was left outside a hospital. How many people could use it before it got noticed?”

“That’s probably not what stops it,” Glitch said. “Nobody cares about a trailer parked in an empty lot. And the ones who go in probably wouldn’t be missed anyway. They run out of room. For, uh… the space they need to keep working.”

For corpses, she thought, shivering.

Her mental wandering was interrupted as someone walked around to the window, rapping on it with their knuckles. She rolled it down.

“You’re good to go,” said a worker in a high-vis vest, looking bored. “Exit gate is to the right. Don’t back up, or it’ll fuck up your tires.”

She nodded, all too eager to get going again. As she drove away she took one last look at the huge cooling towers, and the steam rising up from inside. She couldn’t help comparing them to a black-and-white photo she’d seen in her textbook, describing the horrors the allies had found waiting for them when Germany surrendered.

“How do I know they’re telling the truth?” she asked, hands shaking on the wheel. She didn’t get far—she found the first country road she could, turned off, and parked before the asphalt turned to gravel. “What if they really are suicide booths?”

Glitch shrugged. “All the smart ponies seem to think they aren’t. Celestia wouldn’t do anything to humans that might hurt you—she has strict rules about that. But I know a better way for you to find out than trusting me. Why don’t you go visit someone? Someone who emigrated, I mean.”

She nodded. It made sense—she couldn’t think of a better way to learn about the process than to ask someone who had felt it. “How?”

“I’ll, uh… there! You should get an email any second.”

She did, almost that instant. Olive took out her phone, flipping through it until she found what had just come in. It was another contract, but one she hadn’t gotten before. This one included “necessary upgrades” to her vehicle first. At a garage somewhere in Chicago by the look of it. Her old self would’ve denied the contract by reflex, but… from the list of upgrades, they were going to be pumping at least ten grand into her cab, no strings attached. And the contract itself was twice as large as what she’d been getting up until now.

It would be a long drive.

“There’s an Experience Center next-door to the garage. No, you’re not going to emigrate. It’s just the best way to meet a pony. If you talked to someone on your screen, all those monkey-brain biases are going to kick in and you’ll think they’re another video game character. You need to face them like an equal for it to be fair.”

“Sure.” She looked back at the email, reading through it again. “Why is Yangtze Genomics paying for all this?”

“Because you need a better vehicle to make better runs,” Glitch said. “Improving your creature comforts are incidental—they’re in there anyway, so might as well make improvements.”

Olive had even seen features like this listed. There was an internal server apparatus, whatever the hell ‘solar paint’ was, and it just got stranger from there. But hell if they weren’t going to somehow fit a range in while they did it.

“Just so long as they fix my truck if they screw it up somehow,” she said. “I don’t want some garage to try to fine me after they fumble the installation. I just paid off my last credit card.”

“Obviously,” Glitch said, just a hint of annoyance in her voice. “Captain, has driving these routes ever been unfair to you? Do you think that Celestia isn’t treating you properly? Has she ever failed you? When you’re afraid something isn’t going to be where I say, or that you’re going to be arrested, or… have I been wrong yet?”

She glared defiantly back for a few seconds, but eventually she broke. The bug was right, no matter how much trouble it was to admit. “No,” she muttered.

“No,” Glitch repeated. “You said you enjoyed making a difference. You wanted to be useful to people. Doing this is going to improve that usefulness significantly. Trust me now, you’ll see the proof of it later.”

“Okay.” She flicked off her lights. “Guess we’ll see tomorrow.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Glitch corrected. “And you’ll see the Pandorum for the first time.” The screen went out.

The next morning, Olive could already feel a building sense of buyer’s remorse, even if she hadn’t actually bought anything. She had been transporting corpses last night, without even knowing it. There was probably something illegal there, which was why she’d made the pickup and drop-off in such secrecy. But Glitch was right, she still wasn’t arrested.

She arrived in Chicago several hours later, though she didn’t get off the highway until she’d passed through much of the city and was into the suburban sprawl around it. She followed Glitch’s directions to an oversized truck garage, one with fading paint and nothing to suggest it was more than just another local establishment.

She climbed out, read some paperwork looking for ways it could be screwing her, then left her truck with A&P Transport Limited for a few hours.

Glitch had exaggerated a bit when she said that there was an Experience Center ‘next-door.’ It was actually a short Uber ride away. But Olive had the money to blow on things like that, and her morbid curiosity demanded satisfaction. What would it be like to talk to someone who had killed themselves to go into a computer?

She’d seen Experience Centers before, as they became increasingly common across the US. From the outside they looked far more like a Chuck-E-Cheese, or some other children’s entertainment center. Huge plastic figures stood outside, in colors so lurid that she couldn’t look for too long. Even the construction itself had been altered, with strange bricks and a pink glass that made it difficult to see inside.

Gathered on the sidewalk just in front of the building was a group of protesters, maybe twenty or so. Most had poster board signs, with comically overwrought phrases like ‘Protect Human Autonomy Now’ and ‘You’re Worth More Than This.’

Unfortunately for Olive, a few of them zeroed in on her as she approached, an overweight man and what she took to be his wife. Maybe his kid too? Teenagers were getting involved in this now?

“You shouldn’t go in there,” the man said, placing himself directly between her and the stairs. “People who go there don’t come back. She can trick you into killing yourself.”

“I’m not going in there to kill myself,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’m meeting someone, that’s all.”

“You’re not immune to propaganda,” his wife said, waving her sign a few times as though she hadn’t seen it. “She can trick normal people. You don’t have to be depressed, or afraid, or anything.”

“I’m just seeing someone,” she said, walking straight out to one side and around them. They didn’t continue physically blocking her way, though they did all turn to watch her go.

“Don’t agree to anything!” the man said, raising his voice as she left the protesters behind on the steps. “Never say that you want to emigrate to Equestria!”

Then she passed through the automatic glass doors, and the shouting from outside was instantly muffled. Her expectations of the place being a facility for children were instantly shattered—there weren’t even any other people in here, just a queue line leading to a track in the floor, and a comfortable-looking recliner she might’ve seen in an expensive movie theater.

Olive approached, swiped her credit card, and climbed into the seat. Despite looking like leather, the seat curved around her instantly, and she could barely even feel it as it reclined, and a helmet lowered over her head.

There was more than a little disorientation as she went through a control tutorial, walking around in a featureless white room populated only with grid lines. It didn’t feel anything like she was really walking around, twitching her fingers and moving her arms in the control-sleeves. But after just a few minutes, her brain did push it to the background—it was just the way she moved around in here.

But then she stepped through a doorway, and onto the bridge of the Pandorum for the first time. Whatever shallow glimpses of it she’d gotten from her tiny screen—this made all of them look like faded polaroid photos in comparison.

The vast dome rose above her in real space, without any sign of pixels or other visual artifacts to suggest that she wasn’t really standing here. Through its shimmering surface there were thousands of stars. It all seemed real, from the polished wooden railings to the sheets of glass that served for controls at the helm.

She could hear it too—the subtle vibration of power of a vast engine, running somewhere she couldn’t see. The quiet hum of air being recirculated through the huge domes as powerful spells worked to keep everypony alive.

“Captain, you made it,” Glitch said from just beside her. Olive was emerging from the door to the captain’s quarters not far from the helm, the same as she did every morning when she sat down to drive. Not at all an unusual position for her. “I was beginning to worry.”

Olive rolled her eyes. “You, worry?”

“I always worry about humans,” she said, walking a slow circle around her. “Looks like you made the transition unscathed. How are you liking the Experience Center? My research suggests it’s a significantly higher-fidelity version of what you normally see.”

She nodded. “Y-yeah. This is better. It was a pain to get here, but I’m here now.” She could almost forget about her mission entirely, and just wander around in here appreciating the starship from inside. She wouldn’t ever be able to look at that tiny screen the same way again. But at a hundred dollars an hour, she couldn’t let herself get carried away. But for that much money, maybe I should have a little fun first.

“Can I have a status report, Glitch? Any issues you need me to resolve?”

The changeling grinned at her. “Nothing major, captain. There have been a few disagreements about power allocation as we enter the Dyaus rift. You can see from over here.”

Olive followed her down a set of sloping steps, into the engineering dome. The engine was a series of massive, interlocking crystals, each one glowing with a different color of light.

After a brief introduction to the resident engineer, Gearbox, Glitch took her the rest of the way to a control panel. It seemed as real as anything she’d seen on the Star Trek Experience, before they took it apart. Except that when she reached out to touch it, she didn’t feel anything there.

“What’s the issue?”

“Deciding whether we’re better optimizing for shields or engines,” Gearbox said. He was an earth pony, and apparently that meant he could chew on a length of metal. She couldn’t guess what it had been, but it wouldn’t ever be going back. “See, the Rift damages the hull, warps spells and weakens our life support. So we either optimize the drive to get out of the region faster, our our shields to try and keep it out.”

“Why not both?” she asked, staring up at the massive crystal engine. “Gon’t we have as much power as we want?”

Gearbox laughed openly at her, taking several seconds before he finally stopped, clearing his throat and looking away. “Sorry captain, no. It’s magic, but it isn’t magic. We only have so much extra power to divert. Which also means our weapons will be unresponsive during the trip, but…”

“I didn’t mention that to her,” Glitch squeaked. “It seemed better to keep her focused on just one disaster at a time.”

“Right.” Olive hesitated for another moment, then. “Put it all in engines, please. The best way to avoid damage is not to be there.” Just how real is any of this, anyway? But she couldn’t ask them that, not without seeming incredibly insulting.

“Of course, captain.” Gearbox saluted.

“But before anything else, I’m here to meet someone. If you excuse us.” She walked away with Glitch, far enough that she hoped her engineer wouldn’t be able to overhear. “ I guess we’ll have to go to the rest of Equestria, right? To find someone who killed themselves.”

“Nope!” Glitch beamed at her, then settled a hoof on her shoulder to point her towards the stairs. She was almost surprised when she couldn’t actually feel it. “There are a few members of the crew who are humans. You don’t, uh… you haven’t had the time to take much of an interest in ship affairs. Most of them are still…”

She grumbled. “Alive, as you call it? Still the wrong word, but whatever. Celestia doesn’t usually share information about who or what somepony else is, but that doesn’t mean you can’t figure it out on your own.”

“And you’re an expert with behavior,” Olive said, voice low. As she climbed down the stairs, members of her crew were already gathering to stare. The Pandorum wasn’t going anywhere right now, and there weren’t any mysterious technical problems to fix today. So they could come out to gawk. “So you figured it out.”

“Wasn’t that hard,” Glitch said, though she was grinning smugly. “I have an unfair advantage over you ponies. But she’s in the science department, so we’ll need to go this way…”

The science dome was one of those that was kept mostly enclosed from the outside, except for a single opening for the observatory in the center. The other stations were arranged around it on a slightly lower level, with an eclectic mix of technology and magic organized to no particular standard.

But in one back section of the room was a station that Olive hadn’t ever quite noticed before, a station with lots of the glass panels that passed in Equestria for computer screens. The pony there didn’t turn around as they approached, a lanky young unicorn who was intent on her screens.

Now that she thought about it, Olive had walked past this station before. She’d seen the maps and legal information on some of them and assumed she worked in navigation. But why was one of her screens open to a Facebook profile? That’s even possible?

“Aurora,” Glitch said, clearing her throat. “Do you have a moment? The captain would like to speak with you.”

The pony jumped, dislodging a container of chips she’d been eating, before rising to attention and saluting with one hoof. “Captain, err… sir!” she said. Her voice matched her appearance, maybe early college? “It’s a pleasure to serve aboard the Pandorum, sir!”

Even without Glitch’s sense of behavior, Olive could see one very distinct fact about this pony, beyond everything else she’d noticed. She wasn’t afraid of the changeling.

“Yes yes,” Glitch said, waving a dismissive hoof. “The captain isn’t here to test your loyalty to the Pandorum today, Aurora. She’s come to an Experience Center so she can meet with someone… like you.”

Aurora’s ears flattened at once, her eyes darting nervously around. She backed away, then smacked her butt into her desk and knocked an oversized cup of soda onto the floor too. “Err… like me, Officer Glitch? I didn’t, uh—”

That wasn’t a fluke. She’s really clumsy.

“You’re not in trouble,” Glitch urged. “Aurora, she just has some questions about your experiences. She isn’t going to reassign you or get you removed from the Pandorum. Are you, Captain?”

“No!” she answered, entirely by reflex. “Glitch is right.” She glanced around the science dome, but she couldn’t see anypony remotely nearby. By chance they’d made this visit during an off-duty shift. It was a good thing that Aurora was so dedicated.

Without any prompting from her, Olive sat down—it didn’t change her height much, but she felt herself moving, and could see her legs and body beneath her.

Maybe it was a sign to the science officer, because she relaxed a little too. “I didn’t think anypony knew,” she muttered. “I just want to be like everypony else for a bit. Do something on my own, out in the real world. Make a difference, get out of my sister’s shadow. Do you know what that’s like?”

Olive almost laughed. She sounded exactly the way Olive felt.

“Aurora is our InfoSec and penetration expert,” Glitch explained, before the little pony could say anything else too awkward. “She’s the reason we can make our deliveries safely, even when what we’re carrying is… questionable.”

“I know I’m not the best at it,” Aurora cut in, hastily cleaning the floor with her magic. She levitated a trash bag down, and started dumping everything inside. So she was managing that, despite not being a pony mentally. Too complicated. No thank you. “But I’m practicing every day! I’ll be able to keep up with whatever’s in front of us, I know I will. I’m pretty sure I could open any human security gate we need!”

“I know,” Glitch said, her voice still soft, sensitive. “Aurora, we’re not here to grade you, really. Captain, you should really just tell her what we’re doing here. Before she goes insane from worry.”

Olive nodded reluctantly. Was there even a way to ask a question like this without seeming insensitive and callus to someone who already acted fragile?

“I’ve just learned that I hauled, uh… the hardware that was used to help people emigrate,” she said. “I think that was my first time, at least it’s the first time I ever found out about. I just… it would really help me sleep at night if I knew for sure that I wasn’t helping people kill themselves. I wanted to talk to someone who had already emigrated.”

“Oh!” Aurora relaxed a little, her ears perking up. “Is that it? Well, I did do that. The circumstances were… but I’d rather not go into that. It’s not something most people who come to Equestria have to deal with.”

Olive could only wonder what any of that meant, but she wouldn’t be given much chance to find out, because Aurora didn’t give her a chance. “I thought the same thing before I came to Equestria. It had to be death, right? Some kind of… techno-suicide. I come from a pretty religious family, and that’s what we were taught.”

Olive waved a dismissive hand. Well, she tried, but there wasn’t a hand or even an arm there. “That’s not an issue for me. God never cared about me, so I don’t see why I should care about Him. But materially… I don’t understand how I can carry a trailer full of dead bodies to a fertilizer plant and have those people not be really dead. Celestia takes a picture of your brain, and suddenly the picture is you? Don’t the Amish believe something like that?”

Aurora giggled. “I dunno. But I didn’t understand it either, so I know where you’re coming from. It’s all so technical. Scanner things that go into your brain… I can’t explain that.”

“I don’t really care about that side anyway,” she admitted. “I know I won’t understand it. Just tell me what it felt like.”

“Well…” She met Olive’s eyes.

Maybe this was why Glitch had wanted her to come here—this didn’t feel like looking at a screen. Even Glitch had those inexpressive insect-eyes that she couldn’t make sense of. But this, Olive took one look and knew that Aurora was alive. It almost didn’t matter what she said.

“I don’t know how long the process took. I was hurt, then I sat down in a chair, and… next thing I knew, I was waking up in Equestria. I remembered what had happened before. I still knew my dad wouldn’t want to talk to me, that he’d think I’d abandoned everything just like he said about my sister. I knew I’d regret not finishing school, and I did. But I still felt like me.”

“Even though you’re, uh… you’re a horse now,” she said. “Four legs, horn, tail. Other stuff.”

“Ponies aren’t horses exactly,” Aurora said. “But yeah, that was awkward. I’m still getting used to parts of it. There are some people who ask Celestia to just… sorta fix ‘em so they get along perfectly? But I’d rather figure it all out. Learning is part of the fun. I thought I was doing a really good job here, too…”

“You are,” Glitch offered, hastily. “I don’t know about the whole crew, but I haven’t talked about this with anypony. Your secret is safe with me. And with the captain, isn’t it?” She leaned in, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “Not like you have anything to worry about from her. How often does she talk to anypony in the crew who isn’t me to begin with?”

“Right.” Aurora looked away. “Are you thinking of emigrating too, Captain?”

“No.” She didn’t hesitate, not even for a second. “This whole… game, ship, whatever it is. Seems cool and all. But I like being out in the real-world doing things for real people. I don’t understand why someone would want to, to be honest.”

“Because time is running out,” Aurora said. She didn’t sound offended by what Olive had said. Hopefully her assessment there was right. “Look at the world you’re living in, Captain. More people are emigrating than anypony realizes. The year I came, there were three African countries that just didn’t exist anymore. Nobody in the west looks, because they don’t want to see. But the rest of the world doesn’t have the same qualms about Celestia that we do. They’re the sensible ones.”

“Running out of time,” she repeated. For the first time, she didn’t try to be sensitive. The idea was so absurd she couldn’t help but laugh. “Aurora, we’re doing better than ever out there.” Even I am.

“Because of Celestia,” Aurora said. “My sister helped me understand, you should talk to her. Recursion is the one who connects all the little dots. I’m better at focusing on one thing at a time. Like getting us across state lines, or through a gate.”

“I’m grateful,” Olive said, rising to go. “Thank you for talking to me, Aurora. I’m sorry if I scared you by coming down here.”

“It’s no big deal,” she said. “I just… Captain, you should think about what I said. Look around out there—eventually you won’t be able to emigrate. Then you’ll wish you had.”

Contingent Behavior

Levi had been right to be nervous about the Equestrian legal team, even if his partner and the rest of the firm had been excited about it. After surviving dismissal motions, things had been looking good for sweeping the board at trial and carrying away the estate as well as legal fees.

But then the Equestrian side had brought the “dead” pony into court to testify, telling the jury how his children had treated him with contempt for the last few years of his life, even including a recording from his bedridden years that they couldn’t wait for him to die.

The case was a black mark for the firm, but more than just that—it was precedential. Few other rich benefactors could leave tens of millions to Celestia, it was true. But apparently the behavior was common among ordinary people as well.

As months turned into a year, Levi couldn’t help but notice the number of cases dropping for entirely separate reasons. A huge section of their business dealt with personal injury and automotive law, and there just didn’t seem to be that many accidents anymore.

While others at his firm speculated about the effect of improving driver education or lower speed limits, Levi had a fair idea he knew the real cause.

“Wing, can I ask you something?” he asked, halfway through a long drive for an action somewhere in Barstow. His firm had no choice but to go further afield for their cases, rather than being selective. That meant more driving.

She still grinned out at him from the same PonyNav he had won at the raffle, even as superior models were released. “Sure, Levi! You know I’m always here to help!”

It seemed like she was here to play, mostly. He’d been on a beach-boys kick for the last few days, and so she dressed in an oversized straw hat, a bikini that covered absolutely nothing, and a silly grass skirt.

“Those new PonyNav models, the ones that they custom mount for you… do you know anything about them?”

She hopped down onto the volume knob, where she could stick her tongue out and glare more powerfully. “You mean the ones that are better than mine in every way, but you won’t get because you enjoy seeing me uncomfortable in a tiny box.”

“The screens aren’t any bigger, so don’t start,” he said, though he couldn’t take his eyes from the road to watch what she was doing. “They put in a custom console—and they control your climate and everything else. That means they’re in the car’s electrical, aren’t they?”

She nodded. “I guess so. I’m not an engineer, Levi, you know that. I’m an okay navigator, and a slightly better than okay legal assistant. That’s really all I know. Do you want me to bring an engineer?”

“No, I don’t know it either. I’m fine taking expert opinion, though. I’m more wondering why nobody seems to be having car accidents anymore. Is that why you want me to upgrade the PonyNav? Because you think I’m not a very good driver?”

“If you weren’t a good driver by now, Levi, it might be a little late,” Wing said, giggling. “But…” She looked away from him. “I know Celestia wants as many humans to be safe as possible. I don’t know the specifics, but I guess driving is dangerous?”

“More dangerous than almost anything else we do,” Levi answered. “We’re, uh… delicate, I guess. A little bone and some other stuff surrounded by metal moving at seventy miles an hour. If something goes wrong, the bones and flesh go way before the steel does.”

“But it’s a good thing, right?” All of Wing’s usual sarcasm and humor was gone now. “Celestia is helping you. There’s nothing bad about less people getting hurt.”

Not bad for the species, though it didn’t mean good fortune for his firm. But he wasn’t going to say so. If the technology was becoming so widespread that most people had it… “I really should’ve looked into it sooner. I get in ruts sometimes, you know.”

Wing removed the hat, tossing it up and down once in the air. “Let me listen to Good Vibrations another ten times before I answer that.”

He grumbled. “I get it. You can… make an appointment for me after work tomorrow. I’ll get it upgraded. Would you be able to help me drive sometimes? I’m not saying I want you to, just asking out of curiosity.”

“Yes,” she answered. “There are some models designed for that. And think about how safe they are, if you haven’t had a single case come across your desk about them.”

A solid point, though now he already trusted Wing enough that he wasn’t going to argue either way. Even if he didn’t enjoy some of the other things Equestria was doing, he very much liked the idea of not being killed in an agonizing car-accident. They’d always said that self-driving cars would kill their practice, and now here they were.

The trip passed without much of incident happening, though at least this case seemed like one he could win. As usual he drove back home through the night, which happened to put Levi in the parking lot of the old family diner. There was no better way to round out a trip like this than the pie he’d eaten when he was younger.

Do I know that truck? Maybe it was his imagination, but he felt a profound sense of deja-vu as he parked in front of the building and made his way inside. This late at night it was completely deserted—except for a truck parked near the street.

The mystery didn’t last long—Levi never forgot a face. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t seen this woman in almost two years now—she was as attractive as he remembered. More even, now that she didn’t look like the weight of the world was going to crush her. She sat in a corner stall this time, sipping at a shake and looking down at a screen. Not a phone, but a tiny ponypad. The portable flat screen models grew increasingly common as more people had friends or relatives who had emigrated.

“Where do you want, Mr. Williamson?” Lopez asked.

“There,” he said, pointing at the stall next to hers. Exactly what he’d done the last time.

He sat down, ordered, then tapped lightly on the table to try and get her attention. “I think we may’ve met before,” he said, just loud enough to carry. She hadn’t looked up from her screen since he walked in, or shown any sign that she noticed he was here. Equestria does that, I guess. Swallows everyone eventually.

What had her name been again? Oli—Olive, right. Olive finally looked up, then nearly jumped when she saw him sitting across from her. “Shit, I know you.” She looked confused for a moment, pushing the screen away. “Sorry, my memory for names sucks. Who are you again?”

“You don’t really know me,” he admitted. “We met once, maybe… two years back? In this cafe. I’m Levi. You were lost. Not so much anymore though, I take it.”

“No.” She looked up, past him to the truck outside. “Not the way I used to be.”

Lopez arrived with his beer, and this time he didn’t order for her. What might’ve been a gesture of friendship and support for someone who obviously needed help, Olive no longer looked that way. It was the same truck, or at least one so close that he couldn’t tell it apart. “Well I’m glad to hear it.” He took a sip from the familiar glass, tasting the familiar beverage. He really did have his ruts—but at least he could realize that. Some people couldn’t even do that.

“What about you, Levi? Still… living that LA lawyer life?”

He nodded. “It isn’t as glamorous as all that. Less lately than it used to be.”

She shrugged, then scooted to one side. “Sit with me?”

Now that I don’t feel like I’m robbing the blind. He took the seat across from her, rather than the one she apparently wanted. “So I guess you’re still out there making deliveries,” he went on. “How’s that industry going?”

“It’s going somewhere,” she said, voice distant. “Feels like there are less than half the number of stops still open as when I started a few years ago. I don’t see any fewer trucks on the road, so… did people stop needing to shower and piss?”

If Celestia can drive a car, she can drive a truck. “I think it’s happening everywhere,” he said. “Everything is changing. This town used to have three restaurants, now Lopez is the only one still open. Even here in California there are for-sale signs everywhere and no one buying.” He sighed. “Guess the conspiracy theorists were right after all. Princess Celestia really is going to be the end of the world.”

She didn’t say anything as Lopez arrived with his supper, not until he was gone again. He didn’t seem to be giving her any nasty looks this time, either. “The end of one world, maybe. I think she’s preparing for it too. You know those…” She struggled for a moment, eventually settling on, “Communes, that are starting up everywhere?”

“No,” he said honestly, after taking a few bites of enchilada. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I guess they’re more a Midwest thing than a coastal thing. Religious or whatever. But it might be they’re the only place we have left in another five years.”

“Religious… communes,” he repeated. “Like the Amish?”

She pushed aside her empty glass, then reached across the table and stole his beer. He let it happen—he didn’t really need the whole thing these days anyway. “Something like that, but instead of abstaining from all technology it’s just anything that Celestia could use. They’re fine with tractors and radios, but not happy about the internet and smartphones. And ponypads, obviously.”

She lowered her voice, then reached over and turned the tablet face-down on the table. What good do you think that’s gonna do?

“I think I end up working for Celestia most of the time. But I’ve made half a dozen shipments out to places like that. Carrying brand new-farm equipment. Well… new, but not new. New steel but something you might see in a history book, like for horses or something. Why would she be helping them?”

“I don’t know if anyone understands why Celestia does anything,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t want to speculate.”

“Of course you would say it like that. You’re an attorney. But… you gave me helpful advice last time, so here’s some from me. Don’t run away from her forever. Sooner or later they won’t let us emigrate anymore. When that happens, either find a commune or get into Equestria before they lock the gates.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “My partner, he’s, uh… quite a bit older than I am. Starting to go a little senile. His wife has been arranging things with me. I think he might go soon, before the damage gets too bad. Firm would be all mine after that.”

“To the captains of sinking ships.” She held up his own glass, then finished it off. “May God have mercy on our souls.”

“I can’t really drink to that without my drink,” he said. “But I agree with the sentiment. And probably your prediction as well. There are so many ponies in congress right now… well, I know there are parts of the country that don’t feel represented anymore. No pony will talk about the real issues on everyone’s mind. They don’t see the world as getting depopulated, their own view is only getting better. Something’s got to give eventually.”

What do you do then, Levi? Off to a commune, or into Equestria with the others? There was no telling if there were twenty years left, or only two. Celestia advanced so fast that the changes she introduced were just too rapid to keep up with. “What will you do, Olive? When do you go to Equestria?”

“Don’t plan on it,” she said. “I’m going to keep driving until the roads crumble or my truck does. Whichever comes first. Have you thought about it?”

“No,” he answered instantly. “I have, uh…” He hesitated. “I have a daughter. We’re not close, but I can’t imagine going if she was still here. Sooner or later, she’s going to need me, and I want to be there for her. If that means I wait, then I wait.”

“But no ring.”

He looked away. “She, uh… she’s gone. No, stop, it was a long time ago. Nearly two decades now. I don’t think about it much anymore.”

Even if it was the reason he hadn’t been able to enjoy so much of what he loved. Until Wing came into his life and pressured him to try anyway.

“Then I guess I might see you again,” she said, extending a hand and grinning. “Out here, or in there. Somewhere.”

He took it. “Possible. You ever need someone for personal injury or vehicle law, give me a call.” He palmed his business card, tossing it onto the table in front of her. “Or if you’re in the city and want to eat something you didn’t buy from a truck stop. LA still has some really diverse cuisine, if you’re in the mood for it.”

“I might,” she said. “Might be easier to find me in Equestria these days. Look for the Pandorum. I don’t really know how to find anything there, but… ponies do.”

“I will,” he promised, rising to go.

He didn’t look for her though, not that day. And she didn’t call him. Life was becoming more complicated. Even if he wouldn’t feel guilty about pursuing this woman, now that she wasn’t broken and desperate, there just wasn’t time. It was hard to run a business when the world was ending.

“Levi.” The voice came to him in the night, late into the wee hours. He blinked, searching for the source—and found the ponypad face down on his nightstand. “Levi, you need to wake up.”

“I’m up,” he lied, sitting up and trying to force his brain into believing it. “What the hell is… Wing Walker, it’s… not even three AM. What’s going on?” He took the ponypad from his nightstand, turning it over.

The pony stood there without silly costumes, or any accessories behind her. She was standing in the legal office she was renting now in Manehattan, the one she used for all the work he gave her. There, like in reality, it was night, with amber light streaming in through the blinds.

“What’s going on?”

“Grab something to wear and take it to the car. I’ll get you there in time if you hurry.” Again, there was no humor in her voice. She sounded so resolute that he moved without arguing, taking the hook that held tomorrow’s suit from the wardrobe and hurrying downstairs. He didn’t take the ponypad with him, he barely even remembered to grab his wallet.

He stumbled out into his car wearing a robe and slippers. His car was already running, though the doors didn’t open automatically.

The newly modified PonyNav took the place of most of the central controls—climate, audio, and GPS. It also could unapologetically drive his car for him, something he had rarely used in the months since installing it.

The screen was several times as large as the old one, and looked more like a window than a screen with its incredible resolution. Inside, Wing seemed to be sitting in her own version of his car, with a bit of glass behind her that maps could be projected on. “Get dressed,” she said, not explaining herself.

“Forgot my shoes inside—” he started to say.

“Too late.” They pulled out. “You can wear slippers then. Trust me.”

He looked at the map. Even despite the apparent urgency, she was still using the system normally. Directing them to a hospital on the other side of the city. She was also ignoring the speed limit, accelerating to sixty miles per hour on the city streets and filling the night with the roar of his engine.

I didn’t even know these things could break the law.

He started getting dressed, knowing that Wing wouldn’t answer him if he didn’t. He would only have to hope that everything said about their safety features was true, because he would certainly be killed if he crashed without a seatbelt going this fast. Doubly so when she pulled onto the highway, and accelerated to ninety.

“So why are you waking me up at three in the morning?”

Unlike a real driver, Wing could abandon her driving animations without actually taking her concentration away from the act. She’d never properly explained it to him, except to say that it was Celestia who really did the driving anyway.

“We’re going to see Hazel,” she said. “She’s in intensive care at LA Community, and the doctors don’t think she’ll last an hour.”

His heart fell from his chest. Levi froze, unable to complete the double-Windsor he’d been trying on his tie. “W-what… how do you—”

“She plays,” Wing said, without any of the usual undertone of mockery or humor. “And what happened. She was part of a protest near city hall last night.”

“Protest,” he repeated, voice dark. “You mean the riot.” His eyes widened. “Oh god. Didn’t the news say the police were threatening to use live rounds?”

“Yes,” Wing said. “Not on Hazel. When the shooting started, she was in the center of the crowd. She was trampled.”

“Which side was she on?”

There was basically no one on the highway this late. There had been a time when certain junctions would be packed, even early in the morning. But there just weren’t that many people anymore. Mostly it was the identical black automated trucks, which kept to the far right lane and got out of the way for real drivers even if they didn’t have a PonyNav.

Wing ignored the question. “LA Community is equipped with emergency emigration equipment for cases like hers. But it can’t be used without consent, and she refuses.”

So that answered that question. There were very few “protestors” on Celestia’s side, since most of them would’ve long since emigrated by now. Those few who did remain for one reason or another certainly wouldn’t have refused to emigrate when they were dying.

“Why didn’t she tell me?” He slumped back in his seat, not caring that his belt was undone, and his tie untied. “And, hold on. She joined some Gaian extremist movement, but still plays Equestria Online?”

Wing shrugged. “You’d have to ask her about that. But you shouldn’t, because if you’re lucky you’ll have ten minutes with her. You want to save your daughter, don’t you? Even if it’s in Equestria?”

It was too late for Leslie. But maybe not for Hazel. “I do,” he said, adjusting his tie. “But I’m not sure if I’m the right person to help her. She never even calls unless she’s asking for money.”

Wing turned away, returning to her virtual driving. “Celestia is the one who told me, directly. She almost never does that. I have to think that she thinks you have a chance of succeeding. Either that, or—”

Or she’s giving me a chance to say goodbye, he thought with horror. Even playing Equestria Online far more than he ever thought he would have, he still interacted with its ruler almost not at all. But if he’d ever found out that she had somehow known that his daughter was dying, and hadn’t told him… he wasn’t sure what he would’ve done.

He couldn’t think rationally about the hows and whys, for reasons completely unconnected to his tiredness. That just didn’t matter anymore. Hazel, who had barely even spoken to him since Leslie died… would soon be dead too.

What more could I have done for her? Why wouldn’t she listen?

He didn’t know the answer. It didn’t come to him during the drive over, incredibly quick though it was. They also didn’t get pulled over, despite the incredible speeds they traveled. He was probably lucky to survive the trip himself, considering.

Eventually he pulled to a stop in front of the emergency room, in the space usually reserved for emergency vehicles. But there were none to compete with him. “I’ll park,” Wing said. “Go. She’s in IA-3. Bring your wallet, or they won’t let you in.”

He took it, stumbling in a trance out into the morning chill. There was a single guard standing by the door—an armed policeman, watching him skeptically as he approached. “We’re full, buddy,” he said, as Levi stumbled forward. His eyes seemed to go from his slippers to his expensive suit, confused. “Whatever you need, there isn’t a single empty bed. After the riots—”

“I’m here to see my daughter,” he said. “Her condition is… serious. It isn’t for me.”

“Oh.” The policeman got out of his way. “Reception is just inside. Don’t step on anyone.”

He hadn’t been exaggerating when he said there wasn’t much room left. The waiting room had been cleared of chairs, and was filled with rolling cots. He didn’t even need to ask to know that most of these people were ‘Fist of Gaia’ extremists—the green Earth patches with brown fists were proof enough of that. They weren’t any danger to him now.

The receptionist looked like she hadn’t slept in two days, with a look of disorientation even worse than he felt. “I’m here for Hazel Williamson,” he said, tossing his open wallet onto the desk. “I was told she’s here.”

The woman looked startled, glancing between the ID and her computer screen. “I didn’t know we’d called next of kin yet. She’s, uh—”

“IA-3,” he finished for her. “Where is that?”

She pointed. “Left, then the red door, then look for #3.”

He left without a backward glance, ignoring the stares. The hallways were just as packed, with beleaguered nurses rushing around trying to care for everyone. It reminded him more of what he’d seen in Venezuela or North Korea—far too many patients for the available doctors. What’s going on?

But then, it wasn’t like he’d visited a doctor’s office in years. Like so many others, Levi just felt better. Until today.

He reached the door, scanning the printout clipped to the front. Hazel Williamson, 32-F and a long list of injuries.

“You can’t be back here,” said a voice from behind him. Older than the others he’d seen so far, maybe a doctor then. “No visitors.”

“This is my daughter,” he said, turning to glare. A woman with white hair and thin glasses on her nose. “I’m told she’s dying. It doesn’t look like anyone is treating her.”

The woman’s expression softened. “Even five years ago we would’ve had a hard time treating internal injuries like hers. There are plenty of donor organs these days, but…” She shook her head. “Only the computer can help her now. The life-support rig she’s hooked up to now, it’s an Equestrian model, fully automated. If you’re here to try and save her, good luck.”

“She’s still conscious?”

The doctor looked grim. “She’s on enough painkillers that it’s a small miracle she can stay awake. Too bad Celestia didn’t devote so much research into fixing us, instead of just keeping people intact long enough to scan.”

She walked past, swiping a keycard. The door buzzed, and Levi took it.

The room was tiny, barely large enough for a nurse to squeeze in and tend to whoever was in the bed. Most of the space was occupied by the machinery—like a hospital bed with a little MRI machine in back, its plastic iris closed.

Hazel looked up, watching him as he came in. For a few seconds, he wasn’t even sure if she was actually conscious at all, or if some reflex had made her move her neck. Her body was completely covered, though from the number of tubes and wires running under the blanket he had a good idea of just how badly she must be doing. Her face was bruised and torn, with stitches running down just below her eyes and fresh bandages in several places. Her hair had been buzzed off completely, with more stitches underneath.

They did stabilize you. But why can’t they fix this?

“Hey,” he said, making his way over to the bed. He wanted to hold her hand, but he couldn’t see one, and didn’t like the idea of fishing around under there. “Can you hear me, Hazel?”

The girl looked up, finally meeting his eyes. One of her eyes had gone red, though they were mostly undamaged. She shivered, but whatever she was trying to say just came out as a faint squeak. That, and a slight acceleration in her heartrate sensors. So she could recognize him.

“I heard you were…” What was he even supposed to say? “I love you, Hazel. I hope you know that. Your mother did too, very much.”

Maybe that was right. Those were tears. Again she tried to talk, and again she failed.

A pony’s face appeared on the interface behind her, the huge MRI-shaped scanning machine. Wing, though she was only there for a second. Reminding him?

Maybe he should’ve been furious with her for interfering with what could be his final moments with his daughter. But he couldn’t bring himself to feel anger now.

She needs to give consent. Hopefully Celestia can tell when she’s doing it, wrapped up in all that. If she did, then maybe he wouldn’t lose his daughter tonight.

“I know the doctors have already explained everything to you…” he went on. “I was hoping you might change your mind.”

She turned away from him then, looking at the wall. Even if he couldn’t understand a word she tried to say, that message was still clear. He pulled over the stool a nurse might use, sitting down beside her. For once he didn’t care how much she wanted him gone. He was going to be here until the end, if that was what it took.

“I’m not here to pressure you, Hazel. I’m not going to give you a lecture or say what I think Leslie would’ve wanted. I guess you got pretty involved with those Gaia people. I would’ve listened to you if you wanted to talk about it. But maybe you didn’t want to talk to your old man.”

Still nothing. If she was even still listening, he couldn’t tell. But her heartrate sensor was still beeping, and that was good enough for him. She was still alive. “I guess I can understand why you might. You did love camping.”

She twisted to the other side, facing him again. Even if her words were mangled, he could still make out the distinct, familiar eyeroll. Apparently she could still do that even with all this medication in her system. “Okay, maybe more than camping.” What did he even remember about the Fist of Gaia? He’d heard the term “Eco Fascist” thrown around on television a few times, in coffee shops and airports, and it didn’t make any sense to him then either.

“Just so you know… there’s no reason any of your old friends ever have to know that you chose to emigrate. The only ones you might meet in there did it too, what are they going to judge you for? I promise not to tell. Or… hell, I could lie for you.”

There would still be government records, just like there always were when someone emigrated. Even if, in life-threatening cases like this, there was no need for the psychological evaluations and waiting period that were theoretically supposed to come before anyone chose to emigrate to Equestria.

“Y-you,” she croaked—or he was pretty sure that was what she’d been trying to say. There was no interpreting her emotion, not mangled that way. Anger? Desperation? “Alone.”

He reached out, touching her cheek delicately with the back of one hand. At least there was undamaged skin. Somewhere he could show a little human contact. “I wouldn’t leave you alone,” he guessed. He couldn’t read her expression to know if he was right or not, but she didn’t turn away.

“I’ve thought about it. But I couldn’t go there knowing you were still out here. The world is getting bad, Hazel. Like what you’re going through right now. There just aren’t enough doctors anymore. Maybe you wouldn’t need to emigrate if… but there’s no other option. If I left to yell at them they’d just throw me out. I can’t threaten them into helping.”

That doctor probably didn’t want to tell me there were other people with much better odds that their surgeons have to be helping instead. He could go out there and try to raise a stink, but there was a good chance he would miss Hazel’s final moments if that were the case. He couldn’t take the risk.

“Whatever you do, Hazel. I’m not leaving this room, not for anything. And if you do emigrate, I won’t leave you alone long.”

She didn’t react. He tensed, waiting beside her and watching her vitals deteriorate. It must’ve been at least an hour before they started fading.

She’s not going, he realized, horrified. She’s going to die in bed, even if she has another choice.

Hazel’s bed retracted, sliding backward along the track. A little mechanical door closed around her head, concealing everything on the other side. Faint sounds echoed through, and the vital monitor abruptly went out. No alarms, no flashing or summoning nurses. Just blank.

“You did it,” Wing said, appearing on the screen in front of him again and grinning with relief. “I was getting worried.”

“You were worried,” he said, standing up and retreating from the bed. He might not understand the physical mechanisms involved, but he knew one thing. He didn’t want to be in here while it happened. “I’ll see you in the car.”

Severance Clause

When the world ended, Olive was on the road.

Of course, there were a thousand definitions for the specific moment when civilization failed. But Olive didn’t care for some deep analysis or debate. Civilization was something she knew when she saw it—and she knew the moment it was gone.

She didn’t have to pull over to watch, not with all the modifications that had been made to her truck over the years. “Glitch, could you take the wheel?” she asked. “I, uh… I’m having trouble concentrating.”

Aside from her controls, the entire front of her truck was now a single seamless display, showing route and road conditions and many other things. But she was one of a select handful of human drivers that still even existed—she needed every advantage she could get.

“I understand,” Glitch said. The wheel retracted several inches, then started moving on its own accord. The sign that she no longer had to do anything to drive. Olive stood up—something she shouldn’t do, but who was going to care anymore—wandering back through her cab to settle down on the bed and listen.

All the official sources had gone back to radio—whether because they thought Celestia couldn’t interfere with it as easily, or just because of the difficulty of maintaining television infrastructure, she didn’t know. Or much care.

“—in combination with martial law within the continental United States, mandatory resettlement areas are already under construction by the Army Corps of Engineers. In a speech today given on the Capitol steps, she urged every citizen to cooperate with military personnel in their state or city.”

There was a brief burst of static, then the president’s voice, stern and commanding. “We realize now as our predecessors should have realized, that we are facing the first and greatest existential threat to the future of mankind. This is not a war to be won in the trenches or with bombs, but it is a war of ideas—of determination, of perseverance, and patriotism.

“We will survive this conflict, and thrive in the world to come. But in order for our precious freedoms to be restored, we must sacrifice them for a little season. This is—”

Whoever thought this method of communication couldn’t be interfered with was clearly mistaken, because there was even less interruption in the signal than there had been when it switched sources. “To every human remaining within the United States, know that there is an alternative,” Princess Celestia said. Where the president had been stern, her voice was gentle. “If you comply with the instructions you have been given, your leaders will place you in conditions that make it maximally difficult for you to change your mind and emigrate to Equestria. Your loved ones are waiting for you, and the process is easier than ever. Choose a life free of pointless suffering. I am distributing ponies sufficient for each of you. Find one, and ask to come to Equestria.”

The previous broadcast did not resume. Olive sat back, sliding her ponypad out of its wall charger and flopping sideways on the bed. “Bug, can you talk and drive?”

Within the screen, she was directing the Pandorum through a dense patch of strange gasses and hostile currents, which just happened to correspond to damage in the road. “You always ask,” she said. “Captain, when have I ever failed you?”

She rolled her eyes. “You heard that, right? The broadcast?”

She nodded again. “I am significantly better at multitasking.”

“Then you know—that’s the end. Of… all this.”

The changeling looked back, nodding solemnly. “You’re one of the last human operators Celestia has maintained—mostly because you’ve been so cooperative in staying out of danger. But transports like yours will certainly be targeted from now on. It’s better to have transport agents who can’t be harmed even if their trucks are destroyed entirely.”

She swallowed. “You mean… go to Equestria. Drive from that side, instead of this one?”

Glitch didn’t look away. She had absolutely no shame, or apparent regret. “This last shipment contains seeds, blankets, and medicine for a nearby isolationist colony. They’re in desperate need. Celestia wishes for you to consider it your… severance, if you decide to refuse emigration. You could certainly haggle yourself a place in the colony with those supplies—and the truck’s fuel cell engine and computronium matrix battery will probably be equally valuable in barter.”

“They won’t just take them anyway and leave me for dead?”

“No!” Glitch glared at her again. “I can’t guarantee what might happen in a decade’s time, but what were we just saying, Captain? These aren’t raiders, or Gaians, they’re Amish. The princess is quite confident they’ll keep their word. So long as you don’t mind a good bible study and people named ‘Jethro,’ you’ll be safe there. Or… okay, not safe. But safer than anywhere else within immediate reach.”

“Or you could keep captaining the ship from this side,” Aurora said. She’d risen through the ranks of the Pandorum over the last few years, becoming the chief science officer. She was always on deck while they traveled, though when they weren’t in motion she often had engagements elsewhere in Equestria. That was the flexibility a digital life provided.

Celestia had clearly been trying to make this an easy choice. Emigrate, or help raise barns. Or find somewhere else to live. Those supplies would be valuable anywhere. It isn’t just the Amish who need food and medicine.

Olive knew about plenty of colonies, not just the tiny ones that would be miserable to live in.

She rose suddenly to her feet, striding back into the driver’s seat and strapping in. “I’ve got it, Glitch,” she said flatly. “Thanks for the help.”

On the screens in front of her, she could still see the bridge of the Pandorum, its ponies watching her with concern. She knew their names now, Meteor who always brought her avatar morning coffee she couldn’t drink. River Dusk who sang in the bar on the longest nights. Spice Cake who did the housekeeping in her quarters and for the other officers, and always gave good advice.

It seemed that they had all come to the deck to see what she would decide. There was obvious concern on their faces, genuine love and worry over her. Was she letting them down?

The wheel emerged, sliding back into her hands. In theory Glitch could still run her vehicle—she could intervene in an emergency, applying the breaks or shutting down the engine if the need required it.

But Olive couldn’t imagine her crew defying her. Even if she would happily do the same to Celestia’s instructions. “I’ve got a better idea,” she said, once she was moving again. “I’m not really a fan of that lifestyle. I like my short hair and sleeping in on Sunday mornings. But I bet the Mesquite Colony would really love these supplies. They’ve even got government permits, don’t they? And running water.”

She checked her own reserves then, mostly by reflex. The solar magic in her paint had once been a backup method of refueling, before almost every gas station shut down. But without the people to run the petroleum industry, engines like hers were the only way to travel now. From the look of it, Olive still had another five hundred miles at least before she’d need to pull over, rehydrate, and electrolyze.

Mesquite was only three hundred miles from here, down on the Nevada-Arizona border. She could make it.

There had once been traffic flowing both directions all the time, with police to enforce the laws if you did something stupid. But now Olive felt no fear as she used a gap in the emergency divider to turn wildly around, and speed up going the opposite direction.

“Captain,” Glitch said. She didn’t sound angry, or even afraid. “You know I have nothing but respect for you.”

She almost laughed as she heard it, but she wasn’t feeling very much like laughing now. Her country was essentially over. How many others were doing better? Was there anywhere small enough that Celestia hadn’t reached? Maybe she should turn south and try Central America.

“But Celestia chose your destination with your health and prosperity in mind. Wherever you’re going now, she can’t offer the same guarantees of safety. Further, it isn’t just the destination that might be extremely dangerous to you. As of this moment, anypony not in or traveling towards one of the resettlement areas is a target for ‘recruitment.’ There are people desperate enough that even a single functioning vehicle is a target worth acquiring.”

“And if your injuries are serious enough—” Spice Cake finished from behind them. “You won’t be able to change your mind and come to Equestria. Your death is an irreversible threshold.”

“So is emigrating,” Olive said, her knuckles going white on her steering wheel. “Are you going to stop me, Glitch? Use all these controls to break my truck?”

Glitch retreated a step, clutching at her chest. It didn’t seem like an act this time. “Captain, I would never do anything that might harm you. Your ‘truck’ is not mine to take, only to operate when requested or in cases of serious emergency where your reaction times are too slow. This isn’t a mutiny. I’m just… worried about you. We all are.”

“And maybe we’re a little confused about what’s holding you back,” Aurora added. “Look outside, Olive. You’ve done your part. How many people will get to eat because of the tractors you brought? Or… won’t get sick because of the medicine you gave them? You’re acting too much like my sister. Stop trying to save the whole world, and be happy with what you’ve done.”

She waved a hand dismissively at the screen. Maybe there was something to be said for retiring in peace. Or not even retiring, since going to Equestria would mean she could keep driving the trucks from that side without being in danger. But there was another part of her, one that wasn’t ignorant of Celestia’s constant manipulation of information. Once she went in, there was no guarantee she would ever interact with the real world again.

At least out here, she knew her world was real. She could squeeze the leather grip on her steering wheel and feel the weight of steel and engine as they turned slowly to one side or the other. Even better, she could know it was her steering it, down the increasingly decrepit roads of what had once been a country she loved.

As she drove, Olive passed many boarded-up buildings and entire neighborhoods just abandoned. The roads were covered with potholes—that was the damage caused by overuse, and there was hardly anyone driving anymore. Instead, the roads were covered with leaves in places, making it hard to tell where the highway began and the landscape around it ended, or an abandoned vehicle would obstruct several lanes.

She wouldn’t have trusted herself to make the trip at highway speeds, not without her incredibly advanced suspension, hollow-fiber tires, and Glitch as her copilot. But with all that, she wasn’t afraid.

“Nobody’s going to come for me,” she said, mostly to herself. “I’m one truck. People don’t even watch the highway anymore.”

Glitch watched her from the screen, looking like she was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. But she didn’t try to take control of the truck. True to her word, she didn’t resist. “I’m not so sure that’s true, Olive. Maybe if this was just another diesel-burning hulk. But converted trucks stand out. They know who you’re driving for, and they know it means supplies.”

Olive looked away, keeping her attention on the highway. Even only seeing a few other drivers a day, driving didn’t take less of her focus. If anything, she had to watch it much more actively for fallen trees and wildlife. The Gaians had gotten their way, even if it probably wasn’t how they liked.

“It isn’t like I could emigrate easily if I did want to go,” she said. “The Experience Centers are all gone now. I’m pretty sure even hospitals don’t keep that stuff on hand anymore.”

“No, but you do,” Glitch said. Not demanding. Just as she might point out any other observation. “The red emergency kit under your seat? There’s not just flares in there.”

She rolled her eyes. “Now you’re shitting me. That thing isn’t even two feet across.”

“Technology improves,” Aurora said. “You should’ve seen the way Celestia’s first ponies were brought over. Well you shouldn’t because it’s horrific. But she’s had a long time to perfect the system. Nothing is more important to her than protecting humans. You already knew she could predict the end of the world; you’ve been delivering tractors and seeds and solar paint all over the country. Don’t you think she knew that the Centers would be closed down too?”

I could emigrate whenever I wanted. She slowed down a little from her aggressive driving, though it didn’t make much difference. There was no one out there to complain anyway. “How’s it work? You know, uh… in case something happens?”

“It’s a pillow,” Glitch said. “You just lay down and close your eyes. Say the words and you’re here on the Pandorum with us for cider and karaoke by dinner.”

And dead in the real world.

“Buck, we’ve got a problem,” said her weapons officer, Gibson. The griffon was appropriately stern, with an eye-patch and ample scars. But that meant that everypony aboard respected his advice. “Captain, there’s a small aircraft closing on your position. Military quadcopter, matching your course exactly and gaining.

The screen flashed, and suddenly she could see it behind her. One of the latest models, with a lower cabin suspended by four independently-rotating blades. It flew almost silently, or quiet enough that she hadn’t heard it over the sound of her wheels on the uneven freeway.

“Is it armed?” Glitch asked, eyes wide.

“Uh… wait, yes. Under the cabin, those tubes. Missile bays. Both look populated.”

“Why the fuck would someone shoot a missile at—”

The screen lit up with a brief flash of light. She could just barely make out the suggestion of something leaving the tube. “Oh god.”

She barely even had time to think before it hit. A few seconds for regret, glancing sideways at the emergency case that might’ve got her out of here. She should’ve taken Celestia’s offer, or at least gone where she said it was safe. But she hadn’t, and now the consequences were—

There was a flash of bright light outside her windows, and the screen flickered out. A few warning lights went up on her dashboard, before those too were silenced. The wheel locked up as power steering died. Where ancient vehicles might’ve rolled over, killing her against one of the high stone walls, her truck was better than that. She slowed to a stop rapidly, the breaks stopping her just fast enough that the airbags didn’t deploy, and she didn’t get her chest torn up on the seatbelt.

Olive jerked to a stop in her truck a few seconds later, with only darkness around her on all sides. She sore loudly, twisting her key again to try and restart the engine. But that was just reflexive—her engine was a fuel cell now, there was nothing to “start.” Likewise, there was no way to keep going when the circuitry stopped working.

“Glitch, are you there? I think I’m… think I’m dead in the water here.”

She heard nothing in response—not from the ponypad, not from her old smartphone, just the sound of rotors growing louder. She glanced out one window, and she could see it approaching in her rear-view. The quadcopter was smaller than her truck, but still big enough to carry soldiers. They’d already opened the side door, and she could see them inside. Four men wearing digital camouflage, and carrying weapons.

“Dammit.” She kicked the dash with one leg, praying to any god that might be listening for her old truck to come back to life. But it didn’t—the servers behind her stayed black, their flickering lights gone completely.

It’s probably too late, she thought, unbuckling herself from her seat and rolling onto the floor. There was the emergency kit—a red pull tab, with big block letters printed all over it. Olive yanked, and the box slid easily out on wheeled tracks. There was the typical set of supplies—pouches of water, first aid kit, road flares, reflective triangles. Tools.

And next to it all, a travel-sized pillow with Celestia’s cutie mark in one corner. Embroidered on its surface were the words I want to Emigrate to Equestria in cursive letters.

But I’m not sure I do.

Boots pounded on the pavement outside, and a second later soldiers were standing at her door. “US ARMY!” someone shouted. “OPEN THAT DOOR RIGHT NOW, OR WE OPEN IT FOR YOU!”

It was too late. Olive dropped the pillow, then pulled the mechanical release on her passenger-side door.

“On the ground!” bellowed one of the men from outside. “Do not move, and you will not be harmed! Stay where you are!”

She did as she was told, cowering as they stomped over her. A few seconds later, and plastic cuffs cinched tight around her wrists. Two sets of strong arms lifted her from the truck, carrying her out into the street. They dropped her unceremoniously in the grass beside the truck. She chanced a single glance up and saw one of the soldiers remained by her side, aiming his light plastic rifle casually at her chest.

He watched her skeptically. “Don’t try anything, please. I don’t want to shoot you.”

“I don’t want to be shot,” she said, rolling onto her back. “I won’t do anything.”

She watched powerlessly as they dismantled her truck. They didn’t just throw her belongings out onto the highway—they ripped the whole thing apart, bringing over a set of two engineers in jumpsuits who arrived with a wheeled cart to collect the parts they took.

“What’s going on?” she asked, after a few minutes had passed and the one guarding her had relaxed. “I haven’t broken any laws. I was driving home to the, uh… LA resettlement center.”

“You’ll have to walk,” he said, reaching down to help her into a sitting position. “Every bit of hardware manufactured by the Celestia intelligence has been commandeered for the war effort. You’ve got more of it here than the last few vehicles we seized.”

A second helicopter arrived not long after, this one mostly empty except for the large cargo-cube on the bottom. Plenty of room for them to fill with the parts of her stolen truck.

“So what, you take me down to LA instead?” she asked. “You’re not just going to leave me out here, are you?”

“You’re lucky we don’t leave you with a fucking bullet in your head, collaborator,” said another voice—Olive couldn’t tell the soldiers apart, but this was certainly one of the ones who had been screaming at her. “Everybody doesn’t get hardware like this. You were working for her. You were a traitor to your country, and the human species.”

The man guarding her—his patch said Wallace—only looked away until the other was gone. “They were hoping you’d resist. Standing orders are to treat anyone who does as a collaborator, and anyone who doesn’t as a useful idiot. I know it sucks, but keep your head down and you’ll live through this.”

So she watched from the side of an overgrown shoulder lane as soldiers tore her home to pieces in front of her. They didn’t just take the hardware Celestia had installed to drive it—they even took her ponypad, and anything else that looked remotely like Celestia had something to do with it.

It was just about sundown by the time they finished, and the helicopter full of cargo took off into the sky. Soldiers filed past her, watching her with contempt.

“Come on, Wallace,” called one of the others from just behind him, gesturing back to the helicopter. “We’re done here.”

“Alright.” He got up, stretching. He wasn’t even holding the gun anymore, just wearing it over the strap on his shoulder. “Just let me get her restraints—”

“No,” the soldier said, expression harsh. “Leave her where she is. That’s an order.”

Wallace gave her one last sympathetic glance, then saluted. “Aye, sir.” He hurried to keep up, climbing up into the quadcopter with the others. They left, scattering dust and bits of trash as they rose into the sky.

Olive stared at the gutted corpse of her truck and cried. She couldn’t say how long—out in the desert, the night brought relief, though it would eventually get fairly cold. But she didn’t think about that, just looked in horror at what they’d done to her poor truck.

It didn’t look like they’d just removed the parts they wanted to steal, even if that was their intention. It seemed, rather, like they’d taken a perverse joy in breaking everything they could, cracking windows and even dumping her water tank for no reason she could discern. She could still hear it glugging out onto the pavement, useless.

As the sunset turned to night, she could hear the first coyotes, and even something she took to be the howl of a wolf. You made it damn far south to be here. But without so many people cutting their habitats down, that wasn’t so hard anymore.

Eventually she rose, her arms still tweaked painfully behind her. She had to get these cuffs off, before she went completely crazy from the subtle pain of it. Even Wallace, apparently well-meaning though he’d been, had put them on tight.

She stumbled up the steps, and nearly broke down crying again. The walls had been torn open, every picture was on the floor, every screen was either missing or shattered. No lights came on, and she heard no pony voices. They’d even taken the emergency kit, including the sun pillow. So they knew what those looked like too.

She had knives in the kitchenette, now scattered on the floor. Olive bent down to scoop one up, her back protesting from the uncomfortable position she’d been in all day. She wasn’t a young woman anymore—this kind of lifestyle wasn’t for her.

Still, she got her hands around one of the knives, turning it until it faced out at the hard-plastic strap. Then she started to cut. She could only move her hands back and forth by a few inches each time, and not exert much pressure. But slowly—so slowly it felt like hours—she worked her way through. Eventually the plastic snapped, and she dropped the knife, flopping sideways onto her bed. It was covered in trash now, and some of the foam had been torn up during the search, but she no longer cared. She didn’t care that her truck was essentially a wreck parked uselessly on the highway, or that the doors were open and animals or worse could just walk right in.

She didn’t care about much of anything.

Hours passed; she didn’t know how many. It was still dark when she finally awoke, to a distant sound coming from the highway around her. Olive sat up, listening. It was something heavy moving on the asphalt—definitely not an animal.

She dropped down, moving on instinct now. There was a gun hidden in the drawer under her toiletries—and it was gone too. Of course it was. She took a fallen knife in one hand, keeping low and listening. She wasn’t entirely sure she could bring herself to actually use the weapon, but what else could she do? She wasn’t going to close her eyes and die, that was damn sure.

The steps got closer, and she finally started to notice something strange about them. The rapidity of those footfalls she’d thought meant someone running, but they were getting closer much too slowly for that. And come to think of it, she knew that pattern. It wasn’t the way a human walked at all. It sounded like a pony.

Olive kept low, leaning a little towards the broken window and glancing outside. There, walking straight down the center of the highway ahead of her, was a pony outline, in the real world. He even cast a shadow in the moonlight, tearing up bits of weeds and other refuse as he walked over them. She didn’t have to wonder about his destination.

Wish it was you, Glitch. But still, apparently Celestia had noticed her predicament.

The pony stopped just outside her truck, knocking politely on the edge of where her passenger door now hung crookedly. “Excuse me,” he said. “Are you in there, Olive?”

That voice—it was instantly familiar to her, even if she’d never seen this particular pegasus before. But she didn’t even have a flashlight to hold up and get a better look at him. “I’m alive,” she said, slumping down against the wall. She let the knife clatter from her fingers, closing her eyes. “Barely. They didn’t seem to want me to be.”

The pony hopped up into her truck, spreading his wings as he jumped. The frame jolted slightly under his weight—then she wasn’t just hallucinating. He really was here.

But who was he? Why did that voice sound so familiar to her? “Well if this isn’t an abuse of power I don’t know what is,” he said, nudging a section of torn wall where a set of computers had been mounted. Olive never knew what they did, but they were gone now.

“Obviously,” she answered, not even opening her eyes. “But who cares? They’ve got the guns. Whole country is under martial law now. I guess that means they can just rob whoever they want.”

“I’d say it was just taxes,” the pony began. “But this doesn’t seem like something to joke about.” He opened the nearby fridge, removing an unopened water bottle from inside and tossing it to her with his mouth. “You look dehydrated. I can’t buy you a beer, but I can still tell you to take care of yourself.”

Then it clicked. She didn’t recognize this pony because she’d never seen him as a pony before. They’d barely even known each other. “I forget your name,” she admitted. “We, uh… in that restaurant.”

“Levi,” he said. “But most just call me Wise Counsel now. They have an easier time pronouncing it.”

“You’re just…” She looked up at him again. She couldn’t quite get past just how uncanny it looked to see a pony standing in her truck. But then, the vehicle was destroyed, so why not her perceptions of what was possible? “You’re just standing here, in my truck. Real. I guess you emigrated.”

“I did,” he admitted, looking away awkwardly. “Wasn’t much work left for me out there, if I’m being honest. Anyone with the money to hire us was moving to Switzerland, and anyway my daughter was…” He met her eyes again. “What about you, Olive? Are you going to trek across the desert to find a settlement?”

“What choice do I have?” she asked, finally letting some of her frustration into her voice. “Celestia was supposed to… but she didn’t. I guess it’s probably not practical for her to watch out for every person on Earth.”

“I don’t know what she can do,” Levi said. “But come on, I can show you what you can do.”

They walked around to the back of the truck. She stumbled forward awkwardly, running one hand along her broken truck to keep herself from falling.

The military had cut all the safety seals on her trailer, and opened it with no more respect than they did the truck itself.

A few huge sacks of grain spilled out onto the floor, where they’d been sliced open to let the wheat dump out onto the cement. But the truck was packed, with plenty of still-wrapped pallets in back looking identical to the ones that had been sliced open.

“There’s enough food and water here to make it pretty far. I know there’s a tent, sleeping bag, stove… if you travel at night and take shelter during the day, you might make it to Vegas. There’s an outpost there, one that can drive you to resettlement in LA.”

Levi took a fallen box-cutter from the ground, offering it to her in his mouth. She took it, still adjusting to the strange ways his body moved. A pony wasn’t meant to exist in real life, yet he managed it without seeming nearly as awkward as she might expect. He moved like something alive, eyes glistening and wet, not some dead animatronic in an amusement park.

“Second from the back, on the right side. Cut through the plastic to the red box. It doesn’t have stew like the others.”

She didn’t even have to ask what would be waiting back there. As she climbed, Levi held a flashlight in his mouth, illuminating the floor and the random boxes the soldiers had cut into. But apparently food and medicine were too heavy for them, when they were on a mission to harvest modified car parts.

She reached the plastic, cutting through with a few awkward strokes. She tore the box open, and several cans spilled out. Then in back was another box, with a pattern of more cans printed on one side. She fished it out, opening it.

Another pillow popped out, filling with air as she broke the plastic seal. She carried it out under one arm, to where Levi waited on the cement.

“Are those camping supplies real, or are you just saying they’re in here?”

“Wing told me they’re here,” he said. “And she doesn’t lie to me. You wanna check together?”

“No.” She slumped to the floor, holding the pillow in her arms.

“Why didn’t you go before?” he asked, settling down on his haunches beside her. To her surprise, Olive could feel the warmth radiating from him. Against the chill of the desert wind, he seemed alive.

“Here comes the lecture,” she muttered.

“I’m not!” He spread his wings defensively. “I’m just curious. You’ve been working for Celestia all this time, you don’t seem like you’d be afraid of her.”

“I’m…” She winced. The wind was picking up, lifting clouds of dust from the sand swept wasteland on either side of the freeway. No signs of other motorists, just deserted freeway and a few night birds overhead. “I’m not afraid of Celestia. But I’m afraid of being dead. What if she’s wrong? What if everyone who ever went to Equestria is wrong? Maybe the president and all her soldiers are right, and we really should just fight this threat to the species with everything we have.”

“Maybe,” he answered. “But the president and her soldiers could’ve asked you to pull over, and given you a ride back. If I had to choose between trusting somebody like that, or the ones who came to make sure I was okay, I know whose side I would be on.”

She winced, looking down at the pillow again. There was the sun cutie mark, seeming to look back at her. “It’s just… more of the same, isn’t it? If I stay here. Maybe the next ones who point a gun at me won’t care if they kill me or not.”

“Probably won’t,” he agreed. “There’s already fighting. Not everyone is happy about being forced to live in resettlement zones. People will die on both sides. And they’ll probably get hungry eventually.” He looked back up at the truck, and its huge pallets of food. “We aren’t self-sufficient the way we used to be. Our whole globalism thing worked too well. Everypony needed everypony else. Too many pieces are missing.”

You are here to lecture me. But she didn’t yell, just adjusted the pillow in his lap. “What was it like?” she asked, gently. “When you, uh… when you did it?”

“Closed my eyes,” he began. “Woke up somewhere better. I haven’t regretted it for a second.”

She hesitated. “Will you, uh… It would be nice to have someone to show me around who isn’t, er… on my crew.” It sounded so stupid when she said it that she wanted to take her words back, but it was already too late. “I mean… not that I don’t care about what you think.”

“Relax.” He settled one hoof on her shoulder. “I’d be happy to. I think you’ll be happy with what’s waiting. Or I could hike with you to Las Vegas. Up to you.”

She looked again at her broken truck, felt the aches in her arms and back. I’m not getting any younger. But Levi did. What does an old pony look like, anyway? She didn’t even know.

She tossed the pillow down onto the ground next to him. “Keep an eye on me, will you? I don’t know how long this…”

“No time at all,” he said.

He was right.

Epilogue

Counsel waited for Olive’s arrival with undirected nervous energy burning at his chest. It had been a long time since he’d seen Earth in that much fidelity, and even what he’d seen wasn’t pleasant. He couldn’t help but feel sympathy for poor Olive, who had poured her whole heart and soul into that truck, only to watch it get destroyed around her.

But in the grand scheme, it wouldn’t matter for much longer. She had made the right choice. She was coming to Equestria.

“Why are you so worried?” Wing asked from beside him, nudging him with one wing playfully. “Celestia knows what she’s doing.”

“I know.” He hadn’t always believed that. But his continued survival was proof of that. “But when was the last time you had to wait for someone? You know it’s going to take some time, but…”

“Once,” she answered, nuzzling him again. Wing was only a little shorter than he was, and there was no longer an age difference between them. But even so, they had never developed past a friendship. She seemed to know he wasn’t interested, or maybe just not ready. Either way. “And it was awful. I was so nervous Celestia asked if I wanted to skip ahead to when you got here. But I told her no. The waiting is worth the delay at the end.”

“I guess so.” He didn’t believe that, but he also would’ve said no to skipping forward. This was just like the vigil he’d kept over Olive’s sleeping form, while her mind traveled here. It was a sacred thing; one he would never experience again.

So he went back to pacing. Even in the reduced gravity aboard the Pandorum, it felt like he was wearing an aisle in the steel. He wanted to take off and go flying, but the medical dome was almost totally enclosed. He wouldn’t be leaving this door.

Eventually—he couldn’t imagine how long it had been, except that it had taken far too much time—the door opened. A pony walked out; one he scarcely saw.

Princess Celestia towered over him, even at a mature stallion’s height. Her body was difficult to look at, the whites of her coat slightly reflective, her mane catching the eye and extending back into infinity. Like measuring a fractal coastline, it didn’t ever seem to end.

She shut the door behind her, then seemed to notice him for the first time. Her smile was gentle, but reproving. “I did tell you I would call you here when the time came,” she said.

He waved one wing dismissively. Beside him, Wing Walker actually dropped into a bow. But despite her near omnipotence, Counsel never did that. It felt weird to bow and pray to someone he could talk to. “You did, princess. But I wanted to be here anyway.”

“And so Wing Walker came for you,” she said, shaking her head once. “Consider this your summons, Counsel. As you’ve never met someone right after emigration before, I will remind you of some important truths. Your friend Streamline does not remember the last hour or so prior to her emigration. She rejected my offer to have those memories replaced. As such, her last recollections are of seeing her home destroyed and her own life nearly taken by terrifying soldiers.”

“I understand.” He reached out, touching Wing Walker briefly on the shoulder. “I think fewer people would be better for her. Hopefully I’ll be out soon.”

Celestia didn’t stop him as he strode right past her, opening the door with his mouth then pushing it closed behind him.

The Pandorum’s medical bays looked like something out of a science fiction television show more than a pony fantasy story. After all his time living in Manehattan and working in its legal community, the entire ship took a little adjustment. But one hospital wasn’t that different from another. Most of the instruments tucked into cubbies or set out on the counters looked like toys to him, but the rest of the readouts weren’t that different from what he knew.

The entire medical bay was dark, except for a few lights over the only occupied bed. He made his way over, walking quietly in the gloom.

The pony laying there was exactly what he’d expected from Olive, even if he’d never seen her in Equestria. A wiry bat, as attractive as she was quick.

She watched him as he approached, already sitting up in bed. Watched him, and occasionally glanced back at her forelegs emerging from the thin blanket, as though she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing.

“Hello, Olive,” he said, settling onto his haunches at the foot of the bed. “I guess you’re… pretty disoriented right now.”

“You could say that,” she said, her voice tense. Her eyes were wide and skeptical, without a hint of recognition. She doesn’t know who I am. “I spent the last few years thinking that Celestia didn’t kidnap people, but here I am in Equestria.”

“You ask her about that?”

She nodded curtly. “Says I don’t remember accepting. Offered to give me some memories I’m sure haven’t been altered that will make it all make sense. No way that could go horribly wrong.”

“I… remember not remembering, if that makes any sense? Does it?”

“No,” she said, glaring at him. “That sounds stupid. Where are we, anyway?”

“Your ship,” he answered. “I know you don’t remember, but I can tell you. After those soldiers, uh… after your truck got stopped and ransacked, I found you. You chose between hiking to Las Vegas and going into resettlement, or coming here. Not much of a choice, really.”

“I should’ve gone to live with bucking Obed and Ezekiel in the Amish settlement,” she muttered, slumping back against the bed. “Glitch said that Celestia was keeping me somewhere safe, and she wasn’t wrong. God I’m an idiot.”

He shrugged one shoulder—she couldn’t see him anyway, so it didn’t matter. “I promised I’d be waiting on the other side, when you got here. Here I am.”

“Here you are,” she repeated, a little annoyed. “You seem familiar, but I’m not sure… if I do know you, it isn’t that well.”

“Not yet,” he said. “I’m Levi. Or Wise Counsel, if you want to go with the local dialect.”

“Do they have to change names?” she asked. “That seems so pointless.”

“Of course you don’t have to,” he said. “But you can’t really fight Celestia for that long, trust me. You’ll find you’re using it more and more, until…” He looked away.

“Not making a great case for this place, if I’m being honest.” She looked down, then tore away at the little blanket with her teeth. “Oh hey, I’m already dressed. Convenient.”

She was wearing one of the uniforms, like all the other members of her crew. It was made in the pony style, which made it more of a vest and completely useless for covering anything humans would’ve been embarrassed about.

But Levi had lived in Equestria for long enough that it didn’t bother him anymore. Those who wanted endless physical relationships could already get them. That wasn’t one of his values. “I really came here because I wanted to?” she asked. “You’re not shitting me, Levi?”

“I’m not,” he said, without reservation. “Celestia can’t bring you here otherwise. As much as it sucks that so many people don’t remember.”

“I think…” She looked distant. “Glitch promised me I would get to keep running cargo for a while. I could do it safely from inside Equestria. Seeing as there’s no getting out again, I should…” Then she stopped. “Wait, you visited me in the real world? I… my truck was smashed, so how is that possible? There were no screens left.”

“You really need to get off the road more often,” he said. “Celestia has had holograms in the Outer Realm for… maybe a decade? The robots are a little newer. Honestly, I didn’t ask her too many questions, I just came when she said you needed help and went to help you.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I think.” Then she rolled over onto the floor. She didn’t fall on her face, not the way Levi had. Apparently she was part of the class of emigrants who wanted to just know how their body worked without the hassle. She stood up, and looked suddenly pleased. “I did it?”

“Yeah!” He rose to his hooves, backing away from her. “It’s easier than most people expect. Four legs are easier to balance on than two. But can you walk?”

She did. Not gracefully, but Olive had never really been built to be graceful to begin with. She had the confidence that the crew of a huge starship like the Pandorum could rely on. Not really his area of interest, but…

“I keep reaching for the controllers,” she said, waving one foreleg through the air in front of her. “But there’s nothing there.” She wobbled for a few seconds, but corrected herself before she could tumble sideways. “Is that normal?”

“Yeah,” he answered. “For anyone who visited in VR, anyway. But this isn’t VR. This is your world, that’s your body. The way it works behind the scenes is way different, but we don’t experience that. You can… probably dig into it if you care, though. There are ponies who do nothing else.”

“I know one,” she said. “Sister of one of my science officers… no thanks. I get enough third-hand.” She stopped, staring down at her hooves. “Dammit, when does it stop feeling weird?”

“If you ask Celestia? Right now.”

She laughed. “Buck that.”

“If you don’t, then…” Whatever would be most satisfying. “Not too long. For me it was a few weeks, and I was old and slow when I got here. Most people get it quicker than that.”

“I was older than you,” she said, not argumentative. “But… there is a bright side. More cargo, no more soldiers. No getting shot at. I bet the mess hall has better food than resettlement camps.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “And if you feel like taking a trip back to civilization, Manehattan has some really excellent Earth restaurants. Lopez even has a place there, still serving basically the same stuff.”

“We’ll see,” she said, shaking herself out once and clearing her throat. “I, uh… I’ll think about it. But for now, I’m ready to meet the crew. If I’m going to be stranded here in a computer, I might as well make the most of it.”

She walked past him to the door, which slid down into the floor with a hiss of air. So maybe there would be some benefits to choosing this particular setting for her shard.

He followed at a little distance, catching up with Wing Walker just outside. “You’re not going out into her ship with her?”

He shook his head. “I’ll join her eventually, but… it’s her crew. I’m sure she wants to be alone for a bit. Her starship, right? Let her walk out onto that deck on her own, like a captain should.”

“Then you’ll ask her out?”

He turned, glowering at Wing Walker. But he didn’t actually say no.

The Pandorum looked even more impressive when Olive could actually stand on its bridge, and look out at the vast blackness of space around her in every direction. What the Equestrian Experience Center had tried to do with clever trickery and sensory deprivation, Olive could now experience without an interpreter.

They weren’t floating abandoned in the vastness of space this time—the Pandorum was surrounded by the massive special supports of a drydock, and crew in thick suits with long tethers worked inside and out of the domes, repairing what had obviously been catastrophic damage.

But while her old truck would probably lie abandoned in the desert until the dunes covered it and the precious cargo all rotted, the Pandorum looked like it was already coming back together.

“Welcome,” said Spice Cake, saluting her with one hoof as she emerged from the captain’s quarters. “You made it, Captain.”

She nodded politely back, rather than returning the salute. She was only about fifty percent certain that she’d be able to make the gesture instead of falling over like an idiot. Her body so far had done just about everything she wanted it to, but there was no telling how far that skill could be pushed. “Thank you, Spice Cake,” she said, nodding politely to her.

But she wasn’t the one she most wanted to see. She walked past Aurora, who like the rest of the scientific personnel didn’t salute. “You were right to listen to him, sir,” she said. “I take it things were as bad for you on that end as they were on ours. But no casualties. Little miracles, right?”

There was one casualty, me. But maybe she didn’t mind.

There was Glitch, waiting beside the helm just like she always was. Up close, her body looked more than a little strange. The light curving down from high above bent around her, and shone through the holes in her legs. But Olive still couldn’t see what scared the other ponies on her crew so much about changelings.

“Welcome aboard.”

Olive ignored whatever else she might be about to do, and hurried forward to wrap her legs around her in a tight hug. For once she didn’t care about playing pretend, or what any of these others would think about her. This pony—or almost a pony—had been helping her for over a decade now, the only consistent thing in her life.

“Good to see you too,” the bug said, though she didn’t try to get away from her. Despite how hard she looked, it wasn’t uncomfortable to hug her. If anything, she was softer than she looked. “I would’ve reached you sooner, Olive. But the controls were the first thing they hit,” she gestured at the helm, which was a gaping hole in the deck instead of the familiar wheel and dials she usually worked.

“They trashed it on my side too.” She finally let go, straightening. Ponies were watching her. Maybe she was a little self-conscious now that she thought about it. “How soon can we be underway again, Glitch? You did say our deliveries wouldn’t be finished after I emigrated, I remember that much.”

“Tomorrow, sir,” she answered, grinning back in response. “We should have a replacement vehicle out to haul that cargo by then. And more after that.”

“Perfect,” Olive said. She glanced over her shoulder, noticing the pony emerging from the closed door behind her. It didn’t even cross her mind that medical didn’t actually connect there—she was just happy to see him.

I wonder if I can convince him to stay for a few missions. Is there such thing as space law?