The evening after their return from the System, Twilight trotted through Canterlot Castle. Dash and Celestia had slept through most of the day. While Dash seemed largely rejuvenated when she awoke, Celestia would need much more rest before she returned to normal, if Twilight was any judge. Still, she had risen and gamely joined in when Pinkie arrived in full party mode, and Twilight reflected that there would be more to Celestia’s recovery than mere sleep.

She found Dash sitting on a balcony, staring up at the stars over Equestria. Twilight thought she could just barely make out the soft glow miles away that was Ponyville. She quietly moved over and sat down next to the pegasus, gazing up at the night sky too. Dash glanced over at her and gave a tight smile when she saw the unicorn. “Hey, Twilight. Sorry to disappear like that. It was getting a little crowded in there.” She ruffled her wings.

Twilight mentally reviewed the attendance list of Pinkie’s Welcome Home Celestia party—six friends from Ponyville and two alicorn princesses in a banquet hall fit for two hundred ponies—and nodded in understanding. “No apology necessary. I think it’s perfectly normal, expected even, for you to want a little space.”

They gazed out into the night. Stars shimmered above them in a clear, soothing blanket. Dash sighed, and Twilight looked over at her. “Are you doing okay?”

Dash pursed her lips. “I guess so. I just can’t… stop thinking about what it was like, in there. I hated that place, Twilight. I felt so… so trapped! Normally I can fly home from anywhere, but…” She shuddered, and Twilight nodded.

There was companionable silence again for a while, and then Dash said, “I couldn’t believe it when I saw you in there. I mean you, you. Well, it was bad enough the first time, when I thought Spark was you. But then when you showed up for real I just—for a second I was so mad, because you were supposed to be outside to get us out of that mess, but I couldn’t stay mad, because at the end of the day, I was just so happy to see you. The real you.”

Twilight remembered that moment too, and then one that had immediately followed: meeting her program counterpart, being pulled into a hug, and hearing her own voice, weighed down by a millennium of regret, beg her to take care of Rainbow Dash. In her memory, she nodded back, a silent promise. She found herself echoing the motion in the present as a frown creased her brow, the hazy glimmer of something beginning to form in her mind.

Dash distracted her by snorting and saying, “Not that it lasted. I mean, right after that we had to deal with Cracken—err, APP—and those dragons, and then, well. Let’s just say for a while there I didn’t really think I’d be coming home.”

Twilight’s breath caught, but Dash didn’t notice. She was still looking out into the distance. “That rainboom was something else, though. It’s been… it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of those. And then when it… Well, I don’t think I’ll be able to top that here in Equestria.”

She turned to give Twilight a wry grin, but it quickly became a frown at the abject look on the unicorn’s face. “Twilight? What’s wrong? Everything’s cool, we all made it out in the end. Everything can go back to normal now... no worries.”

Twilight shook her head furiously. “I don’t think things should go back to normal, Rainbow.” Her throat got tight, but she forced herself to keep talking. “I owe you… I owe you an enormous apology. I was so caught up in trying to find Celestia, trying to figure out what she had been doing—”

“Twilight,” Dash said evenly. “I get it, it’s oka—”

“No!” Twilight nearly shouted, and Dash froze. “No,” she said, quieter. “It’s not okay. You didn’t deserve how I treated you, what I said to you.” Despite the vagueness of her words, Twilight could tell from the look on Dash’s face that they were both of them remembering the same very specific moment years ago. “I was so… so overwhelmed... But it doesn’t matter. You’re a good pony, Rainbow. A good friend. You always have been, even when I was too caught up in my own problems to see it.”

A tear formed in Dash’s eye and broke free, trailing down her face. She didn’t move, staring straight at Twilight, who held her gaze unwaveringly.

“I’m so, so sorry, Rainbow.”

Dash searched her eyes for a moment, then finally looked away. “I really, uh… Well, let’s just say I think I’d given up on ever hearing that.” She rubbed her face, and when her hoof came away wet, she looked down at it in surprise.

Twilight just watched her silently, that glimmering idea floating around in her mind, looking for something to latch onto.

After a moment, Dash cleared her throat and looked back up. “I couldn’t stand seeing you that way. I couldn’t understand how the others were able to just… just let you hole up down there. I thought if I could… if there was something I could do, some way I could help you, but…”

“But I pushed you away.”

Dash nodded slowly. “So I just… waited. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“And you were still waiting, until last night.”

Dash blew out a sigh. “Yeah, I guess I was.”

Twilight nodded. “So, no. Things shouldn’t go back to normal. Things can’t go back to normal. You deserve better.”

Dash smiled sadly. “It’d be nice to have my friend back.”

Twilight shook her head in perplexment. “I can’t believe you waited ten years for me to get my head out of my rear, as Applejack might say. You really are the Element of Loyalty, aren’t you?” she said fondly.

Instead of grinning back at her like she’d expected, Dash just looked uncomfortable. “I…”

A sudden thought, her mind making a connection. “And then you… and then you tried to…” Twilight trailed off, staring at her pegasus friend as that glimmer finally crystallized into full, true understanding. “And then you were willing to give up your life for me. To save me and Celestia.”

Dash swallowed hard. “I mean... you’d have done the same for me. I know you would have. Spark—well. What are—what are friends for?” Twilight’s keen eyes picked out the faintest rosy tinge on her cheeks.

She kept gazing thoughtfully at Rainbow Dash, and Dash grew more and more uncomfortable. Then the unicorn mare blinked and smiled. “Of course I would have, Rainbow. But even so, thank you for being such a good… friend.” And after the briefest moment of calculation, she leaned over and kissed Dash on the cheek.

Dash stiffened and then immediately relaxed, and it was like watching a lifetime of weight and tension evaporate in moments, and for the first time in a decade Twilight saw the joyful Rainbow Dash she’d known her first year in Ponyville, and she thought to herself that if either one of them was an idiot, it was her. Years like this, and I never even suspected… Oh, Rainbow.

She forced back the guilt again and vowed to do everything she could to make it up to the most loyal pony she knew. She already had an idea of how to get started; she made a mental note to speak to Luna about it at the first opportunity.

Twilight looked over at Dash, who had allowed a very stupid grin to spread across her face and kept glancing furtively back at her. She grinned back and stood up. “C’mon, Rainbow. Everypony’s waiting for us.”

Dash stood too, and they turned and walked back to their friends together.

“So this is what you’d been hiding all these years,” Dash said, nosing through some of the parchments on Twilight’s desk.

They had all returned to Ponyville several days ago, and as soon as the others had made the time, Twilight had shown them her basement lab. Spike had probably been the most affronted, astonished to learn what had been lurking under his home for so long, but by and large everyone had understood Twilight’s unhappy position, caught between her best friends and her princess’s wishes.

She had shown them around the equipment and then, realizing none of them had the necessary knowledge or inclination to keep up, around the simulation of Ponyville, which at least looked recognizable.

“Land sakes,” Applejack had said. “That looks just like the farm. Why, there I am, buckin’ that tree!” On the screen, tiny apples fell from a tiny tree into a tiny basket.

Rarity had expressed polite interest, though it was clear that in the end, she couldn’t quite see the point. Fluttershy had cooed at the little simulated animals. Pinkie had been excited to see her virtual double, and strangely the double had seemed nearly as excited, despite having no way of knowing they were there; the two Pinkies did a little jig together. Dash had lurked at the back of the group, until Rarity had suggested they should all move on, as Twilight and Dash probably had a lot to talk about. She had shot Twilight a very pointed look as they all called out their goodbyes and climbed the stairs to the library.

“Yes, this was it,” Twilight said, with a touch of false cheeriness. “Not much point to it now.”

Dash glanced around the lab, taking in the computational towers with their blinking lights, and finally turned to the screen. Twilight realized it was the first time she’d seen Dash acknowledge its existence, and she watched quietly as Dash stared up at it. She saw Dash’s eyes go hard and lips start curling down, and she turned to look up at the screen as well.

They’d left it centered on Ponyville’s town square, and stretched out on one of the clouds floating over the market was a tiny Rainbow Dash, snoring in the warm sun. Twilight looked back and forth from Dash to the screen, and then carefully made her way to the control console and entered a few commands.

The screen froze, and then the image on it defocused, fading to nothing as one by one her computational towers shut down. As the cooling fans spun to a stop the room became quieter than it had been in years, and she walked over to Dash, her hoofsteps echoing.

“There was a point to it,” Dash said abruptly. She paused, Twilight watching her closely. “What you were doing down here… it’s what let you save Celestia. Save me.”

Twilight nodded. “But that’s over with, now. I don’t need it any more. I’ve spent enough time locked away down here, ignoring everything else.”

Dash thought for a moment, then asked, “What’s Celestia going to do with hers?”

“She shut hers down, too, before she went to bed that first morning back. I think you had already passed out upstairs,” Twilight needled gently, and Dash offered up the ghost of a smile. “She said it was too far gone, the corruption too deep-seated, to save the simulation. She’d have to start it over. She’s not going to.”

Dash blinked at that, frowning slightly. “She’s not? But what about all the talk about… about testing things out before she does them for real, to make sure they’re good ideas?”

“She said she’d just have to wing it,” Twilight said, and Dash put her eyebrows up. Twilight grinned. “That’s what she said. That except for the occasional mistake, things had been going well enough without running predictions in a simulated Equestria, and, well, she didn’t want to risk…”

“Risk it happening again?”

Twilight frowned thoughtfully. “No, not this happening again, exactly—though she didn’t want that either, and I watched her melt the Gateway into slag after she shut the System down. I think it was more…” She pursed her lips.

“She told me she had originally intended to show ponies how to use these computational engines to make our lives easier, but she kept revising her designs, finding ways to improve them. She didn’t want to give us something half-baked. She thought a gift from a princess to her subjects needed to be as close to perfect as she could make it. She got so caught up in what she was doing, she didn’t properly consider the consequences of her actions, of what might go wrong.”

Twilight swept a foreleg through the air, taking in the lab around them. “I know what she means. I let the same thing happen to me, trying to follow in her hoofsteps. I lost sight of what actually matters.”

Dash made a noncommittal noise. “What are you going to do now?”

Twilight smiled. “Spend more time with my friends, for a start. And I can get back into my own research, things I’ve been meaning to study up on but haven’t had time for.” She eyed Dash. “What about you?”

Dash started, clearly not expecting the question. “What about me?”

“What are you going to do now?”

Dash shrugged, looked up at the sky—or where the sky would be, if they weren’t in the basement of the library. “Go back to work, I guess. Gonna have to make missing that shift up to Open Skies somehow. Same old, same old. I’m not the one who locked myself away for ten years.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you?” Dash stared back at her, uncomprehending. “Come on, I actually have something for you upstairs.”

They wound their way through the silent computational towers. At the top of the stairs, Twilight extinguished the lamps, plunging the room into darkness. They emerged into the library’s ground floor, and Twilight led Dash to a table by the front door with some scrolls and parchments piled on it. She sifted through them, Dash looking on curiously, until she found the object of her search and levitated it over to Dash. “Here you go.”

Dash took it and opened it, reading silently, confusion growing on her face. “I—what? ‘Dear Rainbow Dash, It is my pleasure to extend this invitation for you to join the Wonderbolts Academy summer training session. Signed, Spitfire.’” She squinted and peered closer at the bottom of the note. “‘P.S. It’s about time.’” She flipped to the other papers. “It’s an application. It’s… it’s already filled out. What is this?”

Twilight smiled softly. “Princess Luna’s last official action as sole ruler of Equestria was to ask the Academy Commandant to open up a spot for you in training. It turns out she hadn’t needed to; Spitfire’s been holding one for you for a few years now. All you have to do is sign it and send it back, and you’re in.”

Dash shook her head, retreating a step. “But— I—”

“Rainbow,” Twilight murmured, and Dash relaxed a little. “It’s okay. Celestia’s back in Canterlot and I’m back in the library. You don’t need to be quite so selfless any more. You can, and should, do something for yourself.”

Dash was silent. Twilight didn’t understand why she wasn’t more excited. Celestia had been right: this had been Dash’s dream since she was a filly. She gazed into her friend’s eyes, and was surprised to see a flash of fear there. Dash’s eyes widened a split second later, when she realized Twilight had seen it. The pegasus coughed and broke eye contact. She can’t possibly be afraid of making it into the Wonderbolts; she just outflew three dragons, and rainboomed in the middle of it. So why…

“It’s late,” Dash said, tucking the invitation under her wing. “I should get going.”

She’s hurt. I’ve… hurt her feelings? I’m encouraging her to follow her dreams… which means going to train with the Wonderbolts… which means going away. I did that in Canterlot and now she thinks I’m trying to push her away. Again. After everything. Oh, Rainbow.

“Ah… yes,” Twilight said. “You must be tired.” She went to open the front door, to show Dash out, but she stopped after a moment. “Unless… you’d like to have a sleepover? The new Daring Do comics came in yesterday, we could read those. I’m pretty sure we have some snacks, and in the morning, well, Spike’s been dying to try his new alfalfa pancake recipe on somepony else.” She smiled hopefully at the pegasus. “What do you say?”

Dash had been watching her carefully as she spoke, and Twilight couldn’t read her expression. But after a moment, Dash broke into a small smile. “That sounds really good.”

“Great! Why don’t you grab whatever you want in the kitchen? I’ll let Spike know we’re having company. Meet me upstairs?”

“Sure,” said Dash, and Twilight trotted off, pleased things had worked out.

She paused on the second-floor landing and looked down to the main floor. Dash was still standing by the entry table, staring into space. She came to and pulled the Wonderbolts application back out from under her wing, setting it on the table. She leafed to the last page, found a quill, scrawled something, then rolled up the application and left it sitting on the entry table.

After a moment, Dash let out a quiet whoop and did a somersault, landing nimbly on her feet with a little dance, a broad grin on her face, before cantering into the kitchen.

Twilight smiled to herself, warmth spreading through her, and went to find those comic books.

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Author's Note

PONY Legacy has been a long time coming; after producing a few chapters in 2011 and 2012, it ended up on the back burner as other projects, both online (the Vault, the occasional one-shot, Ponyfeather Publishing) and in real life (career, college, other hobbies), absorbed my attention. I also had an excellent idea of how the story would start and a fair idea of how it would end, but an extremely nebulous notion of how to get from start to finish, which didn’t help—yet over this past decade I’ve never forgotten about the ponies and programs trapped in the System, and slowly but surely I pieced together how things would work out. It’s a relief to be done and have Dash and Celestia back in Equestria where they belong.

It might be a little surprising that in my original treatment, Twilight Sparkle filled Sam Flynn’s role as the protagonist throughout the story, accidentally downloaded into the System and forced to escape RBD’s clutches with Celestia. I realized pretty early on that this gave me a lot of problems: Twilight isn’t exactly the most active character (especially when all I had to go on was Season 1), and she’d be much more interested in in-depth technical explanations of how the simulation and Celestia’s System worked than the audience. I wanted to avoid technical jargon as much as possible, especially because a lot of the technological words we take for granted probably wouldn’t exist in Equestrian. (For example, the word “digital” doesn’t appear anywhere in this very digital story, because its root is the Latin word for fingers and toes; so if ponies did develop what we call digital computers, I suspect they’d use a different word with a different Old Equestrian root for this.) Avoiding this kind of terminology is much easier with a main character who wouldn’t actually know any of it to begin with, so Dash made perfect sense. I also liked how it allowed Dash to confront a version of herself that had accomplished significant professional and personal goals which Dash had foregone, constrained by her loyalty to friends and home.

I had some fun coming up with names for the System versions of the Mane Six. Fluttershy’s is admittedly the least creative, but it fit so well I couldn’t resist. Rarity takes the place of TRON Legacy’s Gem, and really her entire aesthetic is already spot-on, so “Jewel” was a simple choice. Pinkie stands in for Castor, whose public name is a reference to a figure in Greek mythology, and private name is a pun that evokes another major mythic Greek figure (but is actually named after Konrad Zuse, a computer pioneer) -- so Pie’s private name references a figure in Roman myth, as well as her Equestrian counterpart’s middle name. As the program responsible for attempting to keep Celestia safe during RBD’s rebellion, “APP” stands for Autonomous Protection Program; TRON’s corrupted persona Rinzler was named after a Lucasfilm editor, and APP’s corrupted persona Cracken was named after another production company insider -- Lauren Faust’s husband, Craig McCracken. “Quorra” is derived from the Latin word for “heart,” “soul,” or “mind,” and Twilight’s soul is the “Spark” that activates the Elements of Harmony.

Writing this type of crossover, where you take the world and characters of one universe and mash them up with the plot and storyline of another, is sort of like a puzzle or thought experiment; it was a lot of fun figuring out characters’ motivations and how to end up with roughly the same story beats and set pieces while remaining internally (and, as much as possible, externally) consistent. It can be tough making characters bend to fit their needed roles without breaking them and ending up in out-of-character territory, and for PONY Legacy to work I had to make Equestria itself bend: ponies live in a world that’s more or less equivalent to the turn of the 20th century, so I spent a few pages (worrying pages, because I know the average reader probably isn’t going to give a damn about the history of computers) trying to make a server farm in the basement of Canterlot Castle believable.

PONY Legacy mashes up My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and TRON Legacy, but it’s filled with both abstract and concrete references to many of my favorite works of science fiction as well. Given the core idea of downloading a real being into a virtual world, it should be no surprise that there’s a nod to the film The Matrix early on, in the book used to access Celestia’s secret computer lab: a hollowed-out copy of the same book, Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, is where Neo stores valuables in his apartment (and was required reading for the production crew). This also ends up serving as something of a meta-foreshadow of the final threat of the story, since RBD’s plan to download herself into Dash’s body echoes Agent Smith managing to download himself into a human’s body in The Matrix’s sequel. The description of Dash seeing herself “upside-down and foreshortened” in the lens of the Gateway laser recalls a similar image in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, another novel about virtual reality (responsible for popularizing the term “avatar” to describe a virtual representation of a person). A paragraph where Celestia explains all the information she loaded into her computers is very nearly a direct lift from Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which also featured the notion of using a powerful computer to predict future events. The idea of being transported into an “evil” world is a time-honored (perhaps time-worn) trope, but I was inspired heavily by Diane Duane’s specific take in her Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Dark Mirror (and in a few specific places by a few of the TOS-era films).

Finally, I want to take a moment and thank everyone who’s helped me over the long years with this fic. I am indebted to SleeplessBrony, for being both the first and last person to read and give (repeated) feedback and encouragement on the entire story start to finish; to device heretic, for an early discussion about Celestia’s characterization; to Saddlesoap Opera and Sunny Pack, for feedback on early chapters; to Saddlesoap (again) and Hidden Brony, for a very instructive, wide-ranging conversation early on that made me realize I had to give Twilight and Luna a more active role in the story (and in which Hidden Brony coined the amazing term “eQuestria” for the System); more tangentially, to bookplayer and Bad Horse for their excellent, thought-provoking blog collections, which really helped me crystallize my thoughts and identify weaknesses during revisions; more directly, to InquisitorM, who lived up to his handle and asked me penetrating questions about the story to make sure I understood what I was actually trying to do with it; and last but in no way least, to my girlfriend-turned-fiancée-turned-wife, who’s put up with a great deal of my bizarre nerdy bullshit over the years. Of course, any errors, omissions, or mistakes within PONY Legacy are mine alone.

Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed it.

I also wrote a somewhat rambly companion blog which you can read here if you find yourself with nothing better to do.