Quantum Lottery

by Doctor Axiom

Rating: teen
Tags: Princess Celestia, Dark, Death, Alternate Universe, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Science Fiction, Suicide / Self Harm, Horror
Length: 12417

Sometimes the faculty at Celestia's school are too smart for their own good. Follow Dr. Rosen Bridge as she finds ways to trick the universe into giving her what she wants.

Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns attracts the best and the brightest students, and correspondingly only hires the best and brightest faculty. Sometimes, the faculty are a little too smart for their own good.
This is a little slice of the multiverse, as perceived by Professor Rosen Bridge. This story is probably best categorized as science fiction.

Fair warning: I realize that there are one or two subtle hints at jokes in here and humorous wording, but despite my flimsy attempts at whimsy, this story deserves its dark tag, especially if you’re vulnerable to existential horror (is that a real thing?).
The T rating is mostly for the existential implications, which are related to suicide. There is no explicit gore except in the metalogue.
I’m serious I went for maximum edge it just doesn’t hit hard until the end m’kay?

Cover art credit is by this loser. They kind of suck so leave them some hatemail.

All chapters are mostly written aside from minor things that will be filled in by readers who enjoy getting homework from their fanfiction, and will be published every 3 days for 4 chapters.

Published 2019-12-13 05:50:01 UTC
Last updated 2019-12-24 09:03:11 UTC

Chapter 2: Phase

Forewarning: Explicit and implied mathematics in this chapter. If the thought of numbers makes you squeamish I suggest you skim parts of this chapter. The paragraphs are spaced to make it obvious where the action starts. If you like math I apologize for the lack of detail.

It was a glorious clear sky, her leg was feeling almost back to normal, and it was the perfect kind of morning for Dr. Rosen Bridge to buy a lottery ticket and end a life-long abstinence from gambling.

Well, she supposed that wasn’t strictly true. She gambled with her career quite a bit, staking her funding on her ability to create solutions to impossible problems. And sometimes she had almost lost those gambles.

She had also potentially been gambling with her life for the past week. Did it still count if she knew with near-certainty that she would win that gamble? She wasn’t sure. It didn’t really matter.

She entered the lab through the back door, turned into the hallway, and locked herself in her office. All her lab staff knew not to disturb her when she did so. She thankfully didn’t encounter Bill at all on her way to the office. Her Mark V Q.S.D. was still neatly hung up on the wall where she left it. No one would be finding her dead in any of their realities today.

Tomorrow, of course, was another matter, if she had her way. The lottery would draw their numbers at 5 in the morning, the newspapers would publish the numbers by 7, and by then she would have bound her fate irrevocably to the numbers they came up with.

The Equestria Daily and the Canterlot Times would both print the Las Pegasus Sweepstakes numbers in the morning, and the odds of a misprint on both should be smaller than the odds of winning the lottery. The Equestria Daily was, annoyingly, as a matter of reputation less prone to error than the Canterlot Times and would give her a higher likelihood of actually winning in the realities where she survived. She set to work estimating the error rate of her best language parsing spell.

15 years of lab work meant 15 years of data from various experiments. She coupled her reading spell with a scribe spell and had it copy data tables from every project in her library, then checked the work by eye. It was tedious work, but no more than her usual obsessive project. Besides, what would the point of it all even be, if she stopped now?

About 800 pages into her 10,000 page bank of numbers, there was some whispering outside her door. She thought she saw a silhouette that looked like Bill and another that looked like Grass Tie, one of her other lab managers. By the time she reached her door to peek outside, they were already gone. Rosen Bridge brought a hoof to her currently bare neck and shook her head. Then she closed her door and went back to work.

The sun had long since peaked and almost finished its descent by the time she finished.

1 in 30,000. Her reading spell misread approximately 1 in every 30,000 numbers. She furrowed her eyebrows.

By most measures, this was an acceptable error rate. To win the lottery by quantum suicide, she knew this was nowhere near sufficient. Wearing a Q.S.D, there would still be an order of magnitude fewer universes where she actually won the lottery than universes where her spell thought she won because it misread the numbers.

She quickly estimated probabilities on the back of some student’s thesis. For a lottery with 6 numbers drawn, this still made it about a hundred times less likely that she won than that something else went wrong, like her spell misreading the lottery numbers from the paper, or the paper misprinting it. Most of the realities where she lived would be ones where her spell malfunctioned, not ones where she won. She crumpled up the paper and chucked it in the trash.

She got up and begin to pace. A quick glance through the door told her the rest of the lab had gone home for the day. Fewer distractions. She left her door open and paced the hallway.

There was always a clever solution. The obvious, dumb solution to her problem was just to keep playing the lottery until she won. Unfortunately, she had foregone or intentionally misperformed most of her responsibilities at the school, and she would likely soon lose access to most of the resources that allowed her to quickly build a Q.S.D. to spec.

In other words, repeatedly playing the lottery might just cost her her career before she won, even with (relatively, for the lottery) high odds like 1 in 100. Then she’d really lose her ticket to everything, and be out of a job.

Rosen blinked at that thought, and then grinned suddenly.

This was just another career gamble. And she didn’t lose those. She could tackle this the way she tackled any other problem.

So what did she know about the problem? She knew, of course, that much of what she was dealing with weren’t pure probabilities in the quantum sense. Her spell would be affected by a myriad of things that were likely already determined instead of pure quantum randomness. The only thing that was truly random was the lottery draw itself, which was decided by multiple automatically casted fair coin spells. The fair coin spell relied purely on thaumon decay, and would give pure quantum randomness. Everything else- the blocks of type that were used at the newspaper’s printing press, the different editions that were going to be printed, these could all be predicted by how the press organized their printers, and how many people were going to buy the paper. Which meant that for best effect, whatever her spell was would have to be locked in before the lottery was drawn and all the papers were printed. Otherwise the lottery numbers drawn would probably not be the ones she picked, and the only realities in which she lived would not be ones where she won the lottery, but rather ones where she couldn’t cast her spell because she was incapacitated somehow.

That ruled out casting the spell on later editions of the paper, even though papers printed later would be less likely to have errors. She knew from experience that they set the type on the printing press independently for each edition.

Wait! That was it. That was her solution. Different papers, printers, and editions.

Dr. Bridge ran back to her desk and used her reading spell to spot check a few of the numbers it had misread previously. A few of them, like a smudged out 5 and a sloppy handwritten 3 where the ink was faded, were consistent. Others, it recognized when she scanned the papers from a slightly different angle, or in different lighting.

So, then. She might be able to reread the paper several times, and get better results. It would be even better to read each copy of the newspaper twice, and read multiple copies through different printing cycles. If she went by the newsstand and cast on it in the morning, she could have her spell scan every copy that someone bought. By noon her spell could pick the most common numbers it read and use them to determine if she won the lottery or not. In most realities those numbers would all just be the same, but she needed to be absolutely sure.

Better still, she could read both papers sold in Canterlot, both the Equestria Daily, and the Canterlot Times. If she covered multiple printing cycles the odds of a misprint and the odds of a misread would become vanishingly small.

She estimated the probabilities again. 340-to-1 odds of winning the lottery in all realities where she was alive. There was probably a paper or two she could publish in that idea about a spell that could automatically gather a consensus from mismatched data. It didn’t even matter.

She rubbed her hooves together and grinned.

She set her Q.S.D on her desk, cast her coded key spell, and undid the safety latches on the casing. She popped out the trigger unit. Using the actual trigger unit from her Q.S.D for testing would yield the most accurate results. Thanks to all her work during the day, she now had several copies, hornwritten and spell-copied, of all her data. If she used her spell to form a consensus between the three, she could calculate lower bounds on how accurately her spell would perform on a printed newspaper.

She grabbed her test data and her trigger unit and practically danced all the way to the computation engine room. Since she couldn’t just force Bill to help her for a myriad of reasons, she would have to use the computation room automate her testing further. She fumbled with the door’s time lock for a bit before simply overpowering it with her magic.

The night passed quickly. She organized her runes, worked out her spell fundamentals, and checked and double checked her abstraction matrix. She ran a short test and found two misaligned runes.

The moon was at its peak now. She fixed her runes, set her spell running on her test data again, and headed outside to think.

She needed to know where there were newsstands in the city. She knew about the big Equestria Daily stand in the city central, right next to the Equestria Daily press building. She had been in that area once or twice for interviews with the press regarding her new spells. There was also a stand right in front of the School for Gifted Unicorns. She also remembered there being a Canterlot Times stand at the end of restaurant row. There was both an Equestria Daily stand and a Canterlot Times stand at the train station.

The big stand was about three times the size of the other stands, and it was in the busiest part of the city. She remembered Draft Print, the Equestria Daily editor-in-chief, bragging that the paper made just as many sales from paper stands as it did from deliveries. She had, in almost the same breath, bragged about selling a hundred thousand papers daily in Canterlot alone, almost twice as much as the paper named for the city. Assuming all those numbers were correct, each of the dozen Equestria Daily stands in the city sold about 4000 papers over the course of the day. The big stand in the city central then, allegedly sold about 12000 papers.

Halve that for arrogant exaggeration, and she could still read 2000 papers for each newsstand she cast her spell on.

She arrived back at the computation room just in time for the computation engine to finish evaluating the probabilistic performance of her spell. She looked through the numbers. They looked promising. She plugged in her estimated newspaper printing numbers, and set another simulation running. Then she took a short nap.

She awoke to another printout from the engine. It was done. If she just hit one newsstand, it was best to use the big Equestria Daily newsstand in Canterlot central, and her estimated odds of winning were only 2.3-to-1 for that. If she hit two newsstands, it was best to use one Equestria Daily newsstand and one Canterlot Times newsstand, which gave her 8.1-to-1 odds of winning. 11.4-to-1 if she hit three newsstands, two Equestria Daily stands and one Canterlot Times newsstand. She frowned. Her spell was performing much worse than she had initially estimated. She set her numbers running again for larger numbers of newspaper stands.

She didn’t sleep this time, and simply paced in front of the machine until she got numbers back for 4 and 5 newsstands. Best case scenario: 13-to-1 and 14-to-1. Diminishing returns. She frowned and rubbed her temples. It could be her trigger unit malfunctioning. She had certainly given it a workout yesterday by taking the Q.S.D. off her neck with the mana crystal still in place. She thought about replacing it, but at just that moment, the moon began to shine through the west window. She glanced up in alarm.

She needed to cast her spell before the lottery was drawn at 5 in the morning. It needed to be impossible for her to live unless she won the lottery BEFORE it was drawn, or else the realities in which she survived would probably just be the ones where she flubbed the spell since the lottery would have already drawn incorrect numbers. And those would also in all likelihood be realities where she had no future. She glanced at the clock. It was 4:15. 14-to-1 odds would have to do.

Rosen Bridge ran.

Academics are typically not known for their physical stamina, and Rosen was no exception to this generality. In the back of her mind, she was torn between pushing herself to hit as many newspaper stands as possible and taking it easy so she was not too tired to cast the spell perfectly.

It was probably better to cast the spell perfectly. She turned the corner from the bridge leading to Celestia’s school and paused to take a breath before casting. This was the closest paper stand, an Equestria Daily stand. There were no papers stocked, and nopony minding it. It was too early still for that.

Fantastic.

She readied her mind, and cast.

The glow of her magic settled into the desk at the stand. It looked perfect. But she couldn’t help but use another valuable minute to double check her work. It felt perfect through her magical probing as well.

One newsstand down.

She glanced at the clock tower. 4:27.

Haste.

Heh. That was funny to think about, since she there was no way she’d be able to perform the haste spell as she was now. That was alicorn-level magic. It would really come in handy right now. She didn’t even know why she was thinking about this. She should be preparing to cast the next segment of her consensus spell.

She skidded to a halt by the Canterlot Times paper stand next to restaurant row. She collapsed on the floor and wasted 10 valuable seconds catching her breath. When her vision finally cleared enough, she read the clock through the window of Hot Cuisine. 4:34. She could still make this work. She could hit 3 stands before 5.

She closed her eyes and cleared her mind, then cast her second instance of the consensus spell on the stand of the Canterlot Times.

It looked and felt perfect to all her senses, magical and otherwise.

Two newsstands down.

4:38. She might even be able to hit two more stands if she was lucky.

She brushed the hair and sweat and tiredness out of her eyes and ran again.

She had to head north for the next closest Equestria Daily stand, and it was the large one directly in front of the Equestria Daily building. Much of her good odds would rely on being able to cast on that stand.

A left, a right, another left.

She glanced at the clock tower as she was swinging around the bank. 4:40. She could at least make the big stand. She would be fine.

She turned the corner and immediately collided with somepony.

She shook her head and got back up.

“Sorry,” she said, “I wasn’t expecting anypony to...”

“Well well! Doctor Rosen Bridge!”

She looked up straight into the smug smile of Draft Print, her least favorite editor-in-chief.

“What is my favorite professor of applied mathemagics doing out and about before the sun is up?”

A grin twice as smug as Draft’s slowly spread across Rosen’s face. She gestured to her neck.

“I’m just showing off my fancy new—”

Her hoof met her bare neck.

Her smugness vanished instantly.

Rosen Bridge couldn’t tell if her mind was frozen or racing. There was no point locking in her spell unless she was wearing her Q.S.D; she was pretty sure that if she wasn’t wearing the Q.S.D. before the lottery was drawn, the only universes in which she survived would be the ones where something happened to render her incapable of putting on the Q.S.D.

She had to go back and wear it, but she had only cast on two newsstands. Her odds of winning the lottery were poor. Well, relatively speaking they were quite good, but – Oh WHY was she trying to be specific about terminology in her own head at a time like this!?

“Are you, uh, alright there, Dr. Bridge?”

Should she try to cast here or return to her office and just wear the Q.S.D? Risking the cast seemed like it might cost her the opportunity to wear her device, and wearing her device seemed like it might cost her the opportunity to win the lottery here and now.

Safe option, safe option. Which was the safer option?

It didn’t matter did it? She already had 8-to-1 odds, and she could probably try again tomorrow. That meant the best option was to see how her spell performed, win or lose. Lack of sleep was making her slow, and she really just needed to get back to her office and sleep.

“Hey! I’m talking to you, don’t walk away!”

She whirled around so quickly and with such fury that Draft actually took a step back.

“Draft Print,” she monotoned with fury, “you’re an arrogant blowhard who doesn’t know progress when it bites her in the butt. Buck you.” She about-faced and broke into a run again.

She rounded the corner of restaurant row and continued towards the center of the city. Her Q.S.D. was on her desk, and its trigger unit was in the computation room. She couldn’t forget either one. She doubled her speed.

Adrenaline warred with fatigue, blurring the edges of her vision as buildings flew past. At times she was aware of nothing but the feeling of her hooves hitting the ground in succession. She had a singular purpose: to don her neckwear before 5 am.

She tripped as she came up on the bridge to the school. The impact with the ground barely registered. Someone helped her up, probably the night guard. He asked her something to which she just shook her head without processing. She was too busy trying to clear her vision enough to read the clock. Her throat burned. 4:55. She ran again.

She came to her building and opened the door. She walked to her office and paused in the doorway to catch her breath. Her wall clock read 4:56 through the glass on her door.

Oh.

Oh buck.

She had almost forgotten the trigger unit. She galloped to the end of the hall and stepped down the stairs as quickly as she dared. She ran down the tunnel to the other building.

The door to the computation room was still slightly ajar, as she had left it. She threw it open and dashed over to her rune matrix, then removed the wires connecting her trigger unit to her makeshift automation system. She tucked the trigger unit behind her ear.

She raced back through the tunnel, mentally estimating the time she had left. She ran up the first flight of stairs and her legs promptly gave way as she reached the landing. She groaned and propped herself up on the railing.

She was never going to exercise again.

She pulled herself up the other flight of stairs as quickly as she could.

She stumbled through the door and limped into the hall. Her right leg felt almost entirely numb. The edges of her vision seemed to flicker on and off to the rapid beat of her heart. Her door key wouldn’t fit. She fumbled with it twice before opening the door and collapsing on the floor.

Oh she wanted so badly to just pass out.

She could just do this tomorrow when she was better prepared. This exertion wasn’t worth it.

No.

She couldn’t pass out.

She couldn’t pass out.

She needed to WIN.

She peeled herself off the floor and shambled towards her Q.S.D.

The school’s clock tower began to chime its soft morning chime.

Eyes wide, she leapt for the peytral and grabbed it with both hooves. She desperately threw the clasp around her neck and fastened it.

The clock chimed again.

She fumbled with the trigger unit, trying to slot it into place.

The clock chimed a third time.

It clicked into the recess, but the door wouldn’t close. She flopped onto her belly and tried to get a better angle. The fastener just wouldn’t fit!

The clock chimed a fourth time.

She got back up and took the trigger unit back out. It looked fine. This didn’t make any sense. She sighed with resignation.

The clock chimed its fifth and final time.

They must have drawn the lottery already. Now she only lived in the realities where she couldn’t put her Q.S.D. back together again.

Ponyfeathers.

With another sigh, she took off her peytral and set it on her desk. Sleep and rest beckoned. She slotted the trigger unit back into the peytral for safekeeping.

Wait, what?

No way.

It fit in just fine.

She felt it with her magic. It was secure and the circuit was closed.

She put it around her neck and fastened the clasp.

Her fail-safes engaged and she felt nothing wrong through her magic.

Rosen Bridge blinked and shook her head. A slow smile grew on her face.

They hadn’t drawn the numbers yet.

The whole struggle had been due to clumsiness and haste. But now she had won the battle, and she would find out about the war soon enough. She lay down right there on the rug and fell deeply asleep, awaiting her fate.

Author's Note

Fun fact: a full half of this chapter was written with a twiddler keyboard. Learning a grossly nonstandard keyboard sure is fun!

When I decided I'd give out riddles, I grossly underestimated the number of
1) people who would read the author's note
2) People who would read a new fanfic by a new author as it updated.

R.I.P.

But far be it from me to let my dreams be dreams.

More Riddles: What determines whether Dr. Rosen Bridge calls herself “Rosen,” “Dr. Bridge,” or “Rosen Bridge” in her head? I apologize for any apparent inconsistencies, though I believe I’ve been careful not to have any.

Bonus question: What is Bill’s last name?

Bonus question 2: Grass Tie is the proud mother of a young colt. What is her son’s name?

Bonus question 3: Why did Rosen Bridge fumble with the door on the computational engine room?

First correct answer to each question gets to come up with a fantastically unlikely circumstance™ for the final chapter (not the next chapter, so y’all have some extra time for these ones). I’ll PM you with details of what I mean if you get the right answer. Nothing inappropriate as deemed by the author.

Chapter 3: Resonance

Author's Note

The chapters following this are the ending of the story and will be posted two days after this one (hopefully as long as work commitments don't eat me alive). If you’d prefer to read the climax and ending in one shot, wait until then.

I really like trying to convey the feel of working on a deadline in this fic, don’t I? Please let me know if I’m doing it well.

One last puzzle, another easy one this time: Twilight Sparkle comes up with clever proofs, apparently. What do you think Rosen Bridge saw her prove most recently?

First correct answer gets to give another fantastically unlikely circumstance™ for the final chapter.
Again, that chapter in question, as well as the metalogue and final author’s note, will be posted the day after tomorrow. One day shorter than the usual wait.

Chapter 3: Resonance

Rosen Bridge lay on a recliner next to her pool, sipping a cocktail and awaiting the final touches on the remodeling of the west wing. She couldn’t help but marvel at the changes in her life over the past two weeks.

The day after her grand experiment, she won the lottery.

Immediately afterwards, she was sacked from the school.

Well, technically she was still faculty, but she had all her teaching privileges revoked. She knew it would happen; tenure or not, uncaringly giving all your students a zero on their final exams was one of those things that got you fired, no matter how employed you technically still were. She just wasn’t expecting it all to happen quite so promptly.

The grading incident quickly lead to an investigation that dismissed her from her lab as well. Apparently, Bill had tried to hide her mismanagement from the authorities, and he was faced with a disciplinary hearing at some time this week. She couldn’t help but feel slightly bad for him.

Her own disciplinary hearing was meant to be today, but she had no intent to attend and waste their and her time. Easier to just let them find her guilty.

Regardless, she was glad that she had decided to spend all that effort to actually test her spell on the lottery itself, and she had gotten very lucky to win the lottery on the first try.

Not quite as lucky as ponies who normally won the lottery of course, but she didn’t need to be that lucky, because she had cleverness on her side. She wouldn’t have been able to rebuild or repair her trigger unit for better odds if she hadn’t won the lottery, because all her lab resources were locked away thanks to the celerity of the disciplinary committee.

One of the students in her class had been the new Celestial Scholarship recipient, and failing the Princess’s personal student on a flawlessly executed geometry exam really expedited the disciplinary process.

She took another sip from her cocktail.

Fair was fair. Twilight Sparkle was an incredibly clever young unicorn who came up with incredibly clever proofs and she probably deserved better. Just not, unfortunately, in Rosen Bridge’s reality.

Luckily, Rosen Bridge’s reality involved having a fancy new mansion, which really took the edge off the guilt.

It also involved a fancy new lab, and an immense supply of starstone which had, due to a slight lack of foresight on her part, cost her the west wing of the aforementioned mansion.

But that was a trivial matter for her now. She didn’t need to worry about having to rebuild things or consuming resources, and she certainly didn’t need her professorship. She could now simply follow her desire to tinker and invent, with no need to circumnavigate the bureaucracy or other naysayers. She could probably double her already prodigious productivity.

“Miss Bridge?”

Doctor Rosen Bridge very pointedly swirled her cocktail glass around and took another sip.

“Umm… Miss—oh ponyfeathers.”

She could practically hear the eyeroll, even though she wasn’t looking at him.

“Doctor Bridge?”

She smirked, and lowered the glass from her lips.

“Yes, Mortar?”

The Block siblings were some of the best in their trade, but there was no way she was letting them forget that she was the best in her trade.

“We’ve done the marble on the west floors like you asked, and well, we couldn’t help but notice that the layer of deadrock under– ”

“Wait HOW DO YOU KNOW– ”

She paused when she saw the intensely flat look on Mortar Block’s face. She had toppled her chair over with her outburst and took a moment to right it and compose herself.

“We’ve done contracts for the castle, Doctor Bridge. There are plenty of rooms that need anti-magical shielding for one reason or another.”

Rosen blinked.

Mortar looked her straight in the eyes. “As I was saying, the layer of deadrock had a cracked section in it from the meteorite impact which you insist a little too emphatically you had nothing to do with. We did our best to re-align it, but if you had a secret lab or something down there which you were trying to keep magically isolated, you might want to recheck how well it’s sealed.”

Rosen Bridge’s mouth was a little dry. She tried and failed to rectify this by taking a sip from her now-empty cocktail glass.

Mortar’s face remained hard, though he raised an eyebrow when she started to speak again.

“I’m sorry, Mortar.” She looked down at the glass, and then sheepishly up at Mortar. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention.”

Mortar’s eyes softened slightly. “It’s no problem, Doctor Bridge. We’ll send you the bill.”

“Bill? Oh yes! Yes, that will be fine. Thank you, Mortar, and thank Brick for me as well.”

Mortar Block gave her a single nod and left her courtyard.

That was incredibly embarrassing.

The Block siblings were indeed the best in their trade. Pride goes before the fall, Rosen. She sighed as she gazed through the entryway to the west wing. The floor was immaculate.

She moved to her bookcase and flipped “Prophecies and Predictions” upside down. The bookcase slid left and she continued down the staircase behind.

Yes, she supposed. It was best to quench her arrogance now. She had defied the laws of probability already, but she could easily destroy her dream unless she accounted for every possibility. She was aiming to become a god.

The machine she was building in her basement needed to be absolutely flawless. It needed to be several billion times more likely to kill her than to malfunction. Imagine if it left her alive because it only destroyed a leg. Yes, she would need redundancies, and subsystems, and redundant subsystems. It couldn’t just kill her, it would need to annihilate her.

She ran a cursory glance over the deadrock ceiling. Cracked, but intact. Probing it telekinetically, she couldn’t feel any of her magic seep through. Excellent. No distractions and she could get on with her work.

Wait.

No arrogance now, Rosen. Check and double check. With some effort, she conjured a mana crystal and placed it near the crack. She grabbed a thaumometer and ascended to the west wing again to check the seal. The instrument showed the barest hint of an occasional bump in magic in the area she estimated the crack was. She nodded to herself. This was acceptable. Celestia herself could stand next to it and not distinguish it from the background magic. She closed her eyes and fixed this state of mind. Pride comes before a fall. Then she opened her eyes with a calm fury and reentered her secret lab.

The next few days passed by in a blur. She stopped only to eat and sleep. All else was science. She theorized, she tested what worked in practicality, and she built. And she built. And built and built and built.

All of her detection systems to detect a kind of pony magic were brought up to her courtyard and tested on live subjects who she paid.

Each of her kill systems were also, regrettably, tested on live subjects that she procured from the local veterinary hospital. It bothered her at first, but she couldn’t afford to be arrogant and assume her work would function without testing. Besides, from the perspective of those animals, they wouldn’t really die anyway, right? Quantum suicide and all that. She pushed onward.

Each device was assembled around her kill zone with meticulous precision. She had plant growth detectors, thaumic motion detectors, airflow laminarity detectors. She had crystal dart guns, flamethrowers, and several large lasers. Nothing was left to chance as she slowly created her sinister assemblage of machinery. A single door lead into the cubical death chamber on the inside. The entire contraption was covered in heavy duty thaumic suppressors to wick away any magic that she might attempt to use on the structure itself. She estimated she would not be able to overwhelm them unless she had continuous alicorn level output of magic for more than 30 seconds.

Simulations on simulations to verify, of course. She didn’t have … her usual computational resources, but she did have a very expensive computational engine she had purchased. She used redundant parts this time, and the actual trigger units only for the final tests.

4 days later and she was done. One of her fastest turnarounds, and she had not skimped on sleep this time either. It was Friday. Bill would be having his disciplinary hearing today. She swallowed hard.

No use thinking about that now.

She ate a simple lunch and prepared herself mentally for what was to come. She would lock herself in death room for 6 hours and ruminate on Starswirl the Bearded’s unfinished spell. The spell was rumored to be a powerful incantation, meant to potentiate the caster and render them capable of alicorn level magic. Even if that weren’t true, she had an array of other high level spells: haste, duplication, time-reversal, and mirror phase, that she would attempt to perform. One of those would catapult herself into alicornhood. She also had an array of potted plants, a small bed of fertile soil and tomato seeds, and a cloud she had captured from outside.

At the end of those 6 hours, her death room would activate if it did not detect large amounts of all three types of pony magic within a single individual within its boundaries. She had backup systems for each individual type of magic. Therefore, at the end of those 6 hours, she would only observe realities where she turned into an alicorn. Her entire lab was sealed and impervious to outside influence. If anything unforseen happened to destroy her death room, she would simply try again with valuable data on how improbable it really was to ascend to alicornhood.

She was ready.

She walked into the death chamber and locked the door behind her. Her failsafes engaged and the timer began its countdown. Now there was no way out without becoming an alicorn.

“From one to another, another to one. A mark of one's destiny singled out alone, fulfilled.”

That was the wording to Starswirl’s incantation. Everyone in the School for Gifted Unicorns knew that the Princess handed the incantation to her protegees at some point along their studies as something of a test. Now it was her job to pass that test.

“A mark of one’s destiny singled out, fulfilled” clearly referred to her cutie mark- a mark of destiny. “Fulfilled” seemed to suggest she had to manifest the full potential of her mark. That certainly made sense, but her mark was for making clever shortcuts, and she was already making the cleverest shortcut of all time for everything. By that logic she should already have ascended.

“From one to another, another to one?”

Now that was just ambiguous. Was that suggesting that ascension could not be achieved on her own? She would have to think about that some more.

She spent some time mulling over the possible meanings in her head, and before she knew it an hour had passed.

It was time to try something else and come back to Starswirl’s spell later.

5 hours later and she had botched 3 haste spells, a duplication spell, two age spells, and had failed to spontaneously develop the ability to manipulate weather or grow plants. As a result of the aforementioned, she was tired.

She tapped her hoof on the floor in thought. Of course she wouldn’t be lucky enough to discover the secret to ascension within the first 5 hours of her 6 hour period. Tartarus, maybe even the stress of the final hour was needed to help her transform.

She glanced at the clock. 48 minutes remaining. It was time to return to Starswirl’s spell.

“From one to another, another to one. A mark of one's destiny singled out alone, fulfilled.”

Again she read the incantation and focused on whatever power she could produce through it. Her magic just seemed to disperse into the ether. It did not seem to echo through the universe as a powerful completed incantation should.

She meditated and pondered.

“A mark of one’s destiny singled out alone, fulfilled.” That did not seem consistent with the earlier phrase: “From one to another, another to one.” The first half of the incantation implied teamwork of some kind, where the second half of the incantation implied solitude. Her mind churned, looking for a flash of insight.

The two phrases of the incantation needed to be consistent with each other. There were two possibilities.

Possibility 1: The first phrase was the inherent truth, and the second phrase needed to echo it somehow.

She gulped. This possibility might imply that she could not accomplish this alone, and would need a friend. She had driven away her only friend, and most of her potential friends, and locked herself in this room alone. She glanced at the clock. 27 minutes remaining. She shook her head to clear it.

No. She had engineered this situation so she was fated to succeed. She would not die here. Which meant the solution was the other possibility.

Possibility 2: The second phrase was the inherent truth, and the first phrase needed to match.

Which meant that alicornhood was achieved through fulfilling your own purpose individually.

A flash of inspiration.

“From my past to my present, my present begets more. My destiny is my own making, I will see it fulfilled!”

She felt power echo through her, and through the world around her. She felt she could see the magic around her- for all of two seconds, before this incantation also fizzled away.

No!

She had to be close! Maybe she just didn’t have enough power? She breathed deeply, prepared herself mentally, and tried again, with more emphasis.

“From my past to my present, my present begets more. My destiny is my own making, and it is fulfilled!”

Again, a mild surge in power that seemed to come from the universe itself, and then nothing.

“From my past to my present, my future lies in store. My destiny is my own, and I will make more!”

Barely a trickle of innate magic this time.

“From my past I make my present, and my present will bring more. I mark out my destiny, and it is fulfilled!”

Perhaps slightly more than last time? It was hard to tell.

She glared angrily at the clock as she panted. 19 minutes remaining.

She cycled through all of the incantations she had tried so far one more time. Each one seemed to produce even less power, and she began to grow even more exhausted.

5 minutes left.

This didn’t make any sense! She didn’t have enough power to do this! That wouldn’t be a problem if she weren’t alone. But if she was fated to survive here then she must be able to do it alone, because otherwise she would die here. So where was the flaw in her logic? There must be one.

Possibility 1, possibility 2. Possibility 2, and possibility 1. Except Possibility 1 was an impossibility. She was locked in her death box properly, every redundant subsystem checked, which paradoxically meant she was destined to survive. And the only way to survive was to become an alicorn. Right?

4 minutes left.

Maybe she should just give up and she would become an alicorn just before the time ran out with no effort on her part? No that should be a last resort. There has to be something she was missing about the incantation. Was there any way she could do this with the help of anypony else? Was there anyone who helped her reach this point in her life? No. She had made all her major accomplishments of her own ability, with her own cleverness, and her own luck.

3 minutes left.

Well, she did have Bill’s help for many of her accomplishments. She watched the seconds tick by as she pondered this. Was that enough? Bill wasn’t involved in this project at all. She did have some help from her test subjects. And Brick and Mortar, she supposed. But how would their help echo in this incantation here? Her cutie mark was about making clever shortcuts. None of them had truly helped her do that. She watched more seconds tick by.

2 minutes left.

She was the one who supplied the shortcuts. Always. But what did that mean? How could she indirectly receive power from someone else for this incantation? She watched the seconds tick by on the clock, and felt the slightest hint of despair in the back of her mind. Frustration. Not despair, just frustration, she said. But… what if she had actually just been fantastically lucky all this time, and quantum suicide was a myth. Maybe she had been winning the cosmic lottery over and over and over and her luck had finally run out.

1 minute remaining.

No. This was a counterproductive thought process. Even in the near infinitely improbable case that were true, she would still have to do her best. So would this power be from her? Or would it be from someone else who somehow helped her? She stared at the clock with a grim determination.

30 seconds remaining.

Her or someone else? Her or someone else? Her and someone else together? Wait.

This was her own arrogance again. Science is an inherently collaborative field. She hadn’t done this alone, she had never done this alone! Even her clever shortcuts were between concepts that other ponies had invented, and made possible by generations and generations of clever scientists and engineers. She couldn’t have designed every device in her death chamber from scratch! There were lifetimes of technology behind it. And that was barely the beginning of her indirect collaboration with the great minds of the past.

10 seconds remaining.

She smiled and closed her eyes.

“From me to the world, and to me from the works of many. I stand on the shoulders of giants to mark out my destiny!”

A rush of power. Sustained. She opened her eyes. She could see everything. The magic in her mechanism, the magic rushing through her, and she could see something deeper in the world around her, from which this magic was coming. The air around her became something tangible and she could feel the slow metabolism of the plants within her detectors. Her horn flared with a bright turquoise corona. She was aware she was floating in the air, and instinctively knew that if anyone could see her, her eyes would be glowing white.

The clock read zero.

A click, and a sharp pain in her back. She looked behind and frowned. Her crystal tipped neurotoxin darts had fired and several had pierced her. No matter, she could fix this. She was destined to survive. She removed the darts and began to focus on the weakness spreading through her body, neutralizing the toxin with her magic. She noticed the plants around her experienced a surge of growth, and wind was rushing around her body.

A hum from her side. She whipped around, eyes wide. Her lasers were turning on. She studied her mechanism with her rapidly evolving new senses. It wasn’t detecting enough of the three kinds of magic within her yet, despite her ascension.

She put up a mirror shield to deflect the lasers, and immediately felt more sharp pains in her flank. More toxin starting to spread through her. More offensive traps began to fire. She enclosed herself in layers of shields and tried to focus on neutralizing the transmutation spells and neurotoxin rapidly flooding through her body.

Then the lightning generators activated. The feedback through her shields was overwhelming. She screamed in pain.

The world was starting to get a little fuzzy. She surged her magic again, this time outward and indiscriminately. She would just rip this mechanism apart from the inside. She pushed as hard as she could. She felt the mechanism start to come apart but her vision was still getting fuzzy and her body was going numb. She noticed she was surrounded in a golden glow but could not remember what she had done to create it. She pushed as hard as she could and felt a great release. She saw the sparks of broken mana conduits out of the corner of her eye, and she heard hundreds of clattering pieces of broken machines. She was having trouble focusing. She needed to remove the darts, nasty transmutation spells and crystalline corruption that were still working on her body. She could barely see anything. Except a large blur of white? The white was getting bigger. She saw faint gold as well. She tried one last counter-spell with as much power as she could muster.

Then all was black.

Chapter 4: Collapse

Rosen Bridge woke to an irregular, quickly beeping noise. “I did it!” she thought. “I'm still alive!” She felt a strange tingle on her back and felt… feathers? “Wings? I hope those are wings!”

Then she noticed that there was someone familiar speaking something beside her. She tried to open her eyes to see who it was- but found she could not.

“…and they’re going to take you off life support soon. They say given the damage to your spine and brain, it's impossible for you to come out of that coma. We… we all agreed to it.”

It sounded like he was crying.

“Bill! No no! I succeeded! I'm still alive!” she tried to say, but found she could not.

“E- Even the princess couldn’t…”

She heard rapid receding hoofsteps. He had run away.

She began to notice some more things. She was not breathing on her own. Her throat hurt, and there was something forcing air into her lungs. She tried to fight it and breathe against it, but her body was not responding to her will.

Deeper, slower hoofsteps, with a light metallic sound accompanying them.

“My dear Dr. Bridge.”

Princess Celestia.

She still could not speak.

“I know it’s… unlikely you can hear me. However I will speak anyway, if only for my own closure. I attended Dr. Neigh’s disciplinary hearing. He was very distraught. He was very concerned for you, you know.”

A long sigh.

“He told us about your quantum suicide experiments immediately. I was intrigued by your thinking, and it certainly explained the fortune you had recently. From… our perspective, I suppose.”

The Princess paused for a moment.

“But this was dangerous thinking, and Bill expressed to us that it seemed you were obsessed with the concept. Given that and the recent headlines you’ve been in, we realized you would only continue to experiment.”

Hoofsteps moved around her. A chair creaked.

“Bill also expressed one additional possibility that he was worried you might not have accounted for. The possibility that you might be unlucky enough to survive one of your experiments but be irreversibly crippled by an injury.”

Another sigh.

“Credit where it is due: you did take precautions.”

Her mind raced. This couldn’t be it. This couldn’t be the way it went down. She was supposed to be an alicorn! She was supposed to win! She always won!

“After the hearing in the evening, I flew to your mansion fearing the worst. There didn’t seem to be anyone home, so I teleported inside to investigate. I thought I could apologize in the worst case scenario. No sign of you around, but I am an adept scryer. I felt around for magic and found a tiny, odd spike coming from the floor of your west wing. I left it as a fluke initially. I went into your study next and found a bill from the Block brothers.”

Celestia! It was her interference somehow!

“It included an item about repairing deadrock. I wasted no time after that. I went to your west wing and tore apart the floor. Just in time to see a partially torn cube of death, with you floating in the middle, eyes glowing but flickering out. I surrounded you with my aura immediately and tore your machine apart. It was difficult even for me. Very well engineered, Dr. Bridge.”

No, no, no! No! Was it Celestia? Did she survive because an external alicorn came in and removed her from the situation?

“I did my best to neutralize everything you had inflicted upon yourself. I must say that your bone-to-mercury transmutation spell was devilishly clever. Unfortunately, even I am not fast enough to heal that many fatal injuries.”

It was Celestia! She would only survive by alicorn magic, and Celestia had provided that magic. She accounted for that possibility! Her lab was shielded! But she did not account for the fact that the probability of Celestia noticing her lab might be higher than the probability of her succeeding on her own.

“And now here you are. You ascended. Wings, horn, and strength together. But your spine is shattered and mostly dissolved. Third degree burns all over your body. The electrical activity of your brain suggests you are having frequent mild seizures. Many injuries, and worst- you seem to have cut yourself off from magic entirely.”

No! She tried to push magic through her horn. She tried to feel with her unicorn senses. There was nothing.

“The last possibility I can think of is that you may not be cut off from the dream realm. If my sister were here…”

Rosen Bridge could no longer think of anything.

“I wouldn’t wish an existence like yours upon anyone, Dr. Bridge. The doctors here will make it swift and painless. But I hope there’s not enough left of you to worry about that. The only thing I fear now is that there still exists a reality where you’re conscious, alive, and experiencing all of this.”

That brought a chill to her remaining senses.

She heard someone else walk in beside her, briefly talk to the Princess, and then move next to her. She felt a cold sensation run through her arm and into her shoulder. Everything started to feel strange. Someone pressed something beside her with a click. There was a loud beeping sound. Another click.

“Is something wrong?” she heard Princess Celestia ask.

“The machine won't turn off!”

Several more clicks sounded in rapid succession.

“Have you tried simply removing the power?” she heard the Princess suggest.

“It’s fused into the machine!”

With a grim horror, Rosen Bridge understood what was happening to her. This was the reality where she was conscious, alive, and experiencing what she had done to herself. And she was trapped here. She couldn’t die from her perspective.

“I can’t get the crystal out!”

More hoofsteps, other ponies in the room.

“Maybe if you just- OW! It zapped me!”

They struggled with it for some time.

“I got it-” A loud whoosh of wind and a crackling of electricity. “Where did that thundercloud come from!?”

“Sorry!” A voice sounded from seemingly outside the window.

“It’s fused in even harder now.”

“Let me try.” The princess’s voice! Yes, if anyone could fix this.... but she had already failed her, hadn’t she.

“Rrrrhahhahhhhhhhhhnng!” She could hear the strain in her voice, and she swore she could feel the concern of onlookers.

Then just huffing and puffing.

“I... am sorry. I am still exhausted from the amount of healing magic I used for her.”

“Let me get my hammer.”

“And I’ll get my tools.”

“I’ll get some deadrock to try to negate the charge.”

Rosen knew it was futile. Her mind raced. There must be something she could do to indicate she was still here. She couldn’t even blink. She could feel the movements of her eyes, and they were random. She didn’t seem to be able to influence them in any way.

She heard shuffling around her, and occasional metallic clinks.

Her heart rate! If she were stressed enough her heart rate would increase. She listened for the beeping of the monitor next to her. It was already so rapid! She didn’t have any way to count, but it seemed it was beating already at two times a second. She strained with mental effort, but nothing she did seemed to slow it down or speed it up.

BANG BANG BANG. A rhythmic banging noise. Then a slip. A crash of glass.

“It flew out the window!”

“And took my tools with it!”

Rapid hoofsteps to the window.

“Is that... the technician we called that they fell on?”

“Yes!”

“What are the odds of that?”

Despair. She gave into it. They continued to work around her, but each time they tried something supremely unlikely would happen to prevent them from turning off the life support machine. Her life was bound to this machine, and therefore neither she nor the machine would ever stop working. She was immortal, just as she had hoped. And her immortality was hell.

The princess washed her hooves of the situation within a few hours and stopped trying to help. She presumed because the princess realized it was only a matter of time before fate killed the princess to keep her alive.

After a week, she heard curious scientists come in around her to examine the phenomenon. After a few months, she simply became a tourist attraction and she began to lose track of the days.

Her last sane thought was 4 months later: “I’ve filled the multiverse with corpses gone mad.”

Metalogue: Superposition

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Thoughts

Author's Note

Thanks for reading!
If at any point in the story you weren’t clear on what was going on, please let me know! I’m sorry I didn’t convey myself adequately, but I’d love to explain further if you’re curious.

There are a lot of points of failure in Rosen Bridge’s setup which she’s probably addressed, but I have failed to describe in hopes of not being obtuse. Feel free to complain about them.

Full disclosure- this work is honestly pretty much a heavily expanded version of a 999-word mini-fic I submitted to a site called “Quantum Shorts” in 2013, which wanted quantum mechanics related fiction. The original version, I confess, had nothing to do with ponies. Unfortunately, I decided it wouldn’t be morally objectionable to re-weave the concept of the story into the universe of MLP, so now you all had to read this garbage. I’ll also have you know that the pun in Rosen’s name existed in the original work, where her name was “Alberta Rosenbridge.” I’d post that here too, but I think it would violate site rules by explicitly having nothing to do with pony?

A few weeks’ worth of free time over the course of four years have gone into flushing this out the way I wanted, and the process has made me gain an amazing amount respect for the writers here who are both far more prolific and far more competent than I. Thank you all for reading a busy amateur’s daydream.

If you were fascinated by the implications of this work of fiction, I would google “Quantum suicide” and “Quantum immortality.”

If you were terrified by the implications of this work of fiction, first of all, I’m sorry, and I understand.

I’ve been prone to some pretty abstract irrational fears. When I was 10 years old and I first learned an innaccurate notion of the many-worlds theory from a pseudo-scientist in some movie, I had nightmares for days because I thought I was stuck “in the wrong universe” somehow and that this wasn’t my “real family,” or my “real house.” My parents had a lot of fun with that one. So I understand your terror at the implications of this fic and I do apologize for instilling it in you.

If that’s you (whether or not you’re significantly older than 10 and have significantly more rational fears about the whole mess), please keep in mind that we don’t actually know if this is how quantum mechanics works, and there’s some thoughts on the subject of why subjective immortality might just be a load of hogwash by Max Tegmark (thanks wikipedia!), which I happen to subscribe to myself.
Being an “observer” isn’t as special as you might imagine, and our brains are constantly dying (and reforming, I suppose) in a sense. If quantum immortality was possible, you would have already noticed because the state of your mind would probably be pretty static. For starters, it would probably be impossible to fall asleep from your perspective. Probably.
Heh.
I’m not going to enumerate the set of counterpoints to that because honestly— it’s just more and more conjecture from there on out.

Go read up on it and form your own opinion, I promise it’s probably not as terrifying as this fic makes it seem, especially because you’re not going to take the route Dr. Bridge does here.

If you were terrified by the metalogue, I did warn you. If you weren’t terrified by the metalogue, I’m sorry, I’ll try harder with my descriptions of atrocity next time.

Oh! I’m supposed to always conclude with what I learned from doing this. It’s a personal rule. This story I was trying to learn to set up my character flaws subtly early on so that when they fail it doesn’t seem out of the blue. I think I succeeded, let me know if I could do better! Rosen Bridge’s flaws are mine, or what I perceive mine as a child were when taken to the extreme, so I suppose I had some reference here. This has been “Pros and cons of a type A personality- the fic”

Cripes, what a pretentiously long author’s note!

Happy Holidays! See you next time!

Chapter 1: Entanglement

Dr. Rosen Bridge was, and always had been, an incredibly smart cookie. She got her mark, two stars stretched around a slightly swirled polar grid, when she was 8, for proving, by herself and unprompted, that there were an infinite number of prime numbers. Her talent, to her, meant she was good at finding simple and clever shortcuts to solving a problem. She was accepted to Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns when she was 14. She published 8 papers as first author while she was there and created 5 new spells while she was still a student. She graduated with perfect scores as valedictorian when she was 18. Since then she had authored two dozen more papers despite the mess of bureaucratic paperwork required, created 20 revolutionary new spells, and failed only 2 students from her class over the entirety of her 15-year career. Celestia herself had met with the good professor on two separate occasions to congratulate her on her achievements.

She was also a mare of some renown: she had appeared in the Equestria Daily twice. The first when she documented the effects of stellar resonance on the image of the Nightmare on the moon and the implications of her findings. The second was when she proposed phase-shifted amniomorphy for medical imaging.

They portrayed her as crazy both times, but hey, any publicity was a win right?

She glanced around the corner before continuing to limp down the hall. Her assistants would be on the lookout for her. Today was the last day to submit grades to the School, and they would know she had to come in today to finish grading. They would be waiting to catch her.

A twinge of pain shot through her leg as she stopped in front of her office door. The price of lack of caution. One of her newest cursed crystals had nicked her flank before she installed it in its intended device. Although she neutralized the deadly cocktail of magic almost immediately, her leg still burned.

It was her own fault, really. She had gotten used to being the best and she wasn’t used to losing.
It was a good chance to learn caution. She supposed that was common for very smart cookies like herself, including, as she understood, the eponymous pony from which the term was originally coined.

Also like the original Smart Cookie, she could occasionally be a little crazy, but no one paid her occasional kookiness much mind. She had been an effective teacher thus far, and she ran her lab tightly and efficiently, so a few funny hats, some gaudy necklaces, and the occasional hallway dance routine would be forgiven.

Although- she had just consumed the lab’s entire budget, so it was supremely unlikely her latest gaudy necklace would go unnoticed for much longer.

She blew a lock of pink hair out of her eye and smirked to herself. It was ironic that she would use the word “unlikely” to describe anything at all that would happen to her in the coming days. She was pretty sure she had transcended the notion of probability altogether.

Just as she sat down to begin marking her stack of exams, harried hoofsteps sounded in the hall. The same kind of hoofsteps her wonderful assistant made. Oh Bill, dear, sweet Bill. Always loyal, to a fault. If she was the captain of her lab, Bill was her first mate. He was the major reason she could run as efficiently as she did. Bill had the amazing ability to know exactly which student to give which job. And he could calculate square roots in his head, so that was always a plus. No need to rent one of the school’s computation engines when you have someone who can more-or-less instantly do all your statistical analysis.

But this was too soon. She would have to finish this quickly. Perhaps a subtle act of rebellion before she left this bureaucracy behind. Without reading the first exam, she dipped her quill in red ink and wrote a calligraphic red F on its front page, then circled it and moved onto the next.

Rosen circled the third “F” in her stack just as Bill entered her office, out of breath. Third try was the charm, she’d gotten her calligraphy skills down to a T. Or, she supposed, in this case, down to an F.

“Dr. Bridge,” began Bill, “If you have a moment...”

Bill faltered after seeing her.

She smiled at him.

He stared blankly for a bit, but regained his composure in an impressively short 5 seconds.

“That’s an awfully fancy peytral, Dr. Bridge. Even for you.”

“Do you like it?” she grinned, gesturing to the sinister looking spiked mess of a device around her neck. “I calculate ten-to-the-three-hundred-and-fifty-two to one odds that it will kill me upon detecting a single thaumon. Also, the trim is real gold.”

Rosen grinned even more widely at the flustered sputtering this effected from Bill.

“Is where this month's lab budget went!? A suicide device that doesn't work?”

“On the contrary, a quantum suicide device, which works perfectly well.” Her grin became positively Cheshire.

“You’re still here, Dr. Bridge, so I’d say it doesn’t really...” Bill trailed off as he turned to the large collection of similar devices on her desk.

Rosen Bridge watched him run his eyes down the line of prototypes and settled on the mark IV Q.S.D. The mark IV had a delightfully Machiavellian aesthetic, but sadly didn’t have a high enough detection probability to stop crystalline mana from decaying completely.

He seemed to study it for a while. Long enough for Professor Bridge to stop watching him and stamp her elaborate seal of failure on a dozen more exams. Ostensibly long enough for someone as smart as him to fully grasp the mechanism of the device, though probably not the true function.

“Ooookay Professor. This is a bit far to go for a joke.”

She wordlessly picked up the Mark IV with her hoof and added it to the already deadly ensemble on her neck.

“Are you mad?!” She could hear the strain in Bill's voice. “Is there not enough magic in the air to trigger it!?”

She held up her hoof.

“On the contrary,” she paused to relish the collision this caused between Bill’s hoof and Bill's forehead, “I've placed a small piece of crystalline mana in its detector.”

“You haven't, or you'd be dead.”

She smiled knowingly and removed the devices from her neck carefully with her hooves. As soon as they came away from her neck, they began to tick rapidly, and with each tick, extended a series of sharp, obsidian-like shards into the space where her neck had been.

“Corrupted crystals from the frozen north,” she said in response to the look of shock on Bill's face. “Each one is also coated with a cocktail of manticore venom and cyanide. The mark V Quantum Suicide Device here that I had on when you entered also has a nice array of decay spells and a blood-to-phosphorus transmutation on it.”

She levitated the mark IV back to the end of her desk in her blue aura, and it stopped ticking and stabbing the air as her aura left it. Ignoring Bill's exclamation of horror as she replaced the mark V around her neck, she was satisfied to find that it too, stopped ticking, and the blades of crystal withdrew into the recesses on the inside of the device just in time to avoid nicking her skin.

Bill sat down on the floor in front of her with a thump, eyes blank.

She turned her attention back to her stack of exams. This one contained a particularly elegant proof of the Piaffagorean theorem. She marveled at its cleverness as she completed the last horizontal stroke of an ornate glyph over the top of the page. Her “F” was particularly elegant as well, she thought.

“Okay Professor.”

She had almost forgotten Bill was there.

“I don’t know how you accomplished this, and it’s an amazing prank, but this is a gross allocation of resources that we NEED for the lab.”

Dr. Bridge frowned.

“It’s no prank. The device is indeed designed as it appears to be designed. I've been wearing it every day this week with increasingly larger mana sources.” She stood up to reveal the scar above her right cutie mark. “The crystals are just as deadly as they appear.”

“Then how-!”

She held up a hoof to interrupt. “I'll explain. You are familiar with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, yes?”

“Yes. Every time an event has two possible random outcomes, it is as if there are two universes, one in which the first outcome occurs, and one in which the second occurs.”

“Precisely. Now there are two possible universes here. In the first, the crystal randomly emits a thaumon, which the detector detects, and I die. In the second, the crystal loses no magic, and I live. The second universe is astronomically improbable. But I can't observe the first universe, because I would be dead. No matter how unlikely the second universe is, from my perspective, I will always live in a universe where the crystal did not emit a single thaumon. I can use this technique to access any impossibly unlikely circumstance, even something like winning the lottery.”

“That can't possibly work!”
Rosen simply grinned and repeated the exercise of removing and replacing the device around her neck. This time, she observed, Bill simply looked thoughtful.

“So, wait. The crystal won’t decay at all, as long as it’s in the detector?”

Dr. Bridge smiled.

“You’ve got it.”

“Dr. Bridge, that’s incredible! You’ve actually stopped mana decay!”

Bill paused and scrunched up his face in thought.

“Well, at least from your perspective. If what you’re saying is true, in all likelihood, I’ll still see the crystal decay.”

Then he looked at her in horror.

“Wait, professor, if that’s correct, then you've spawned millions of universes where I've watched you kill yourself in front of me.”

Rosen Bridge frowned. “I… suppose that’s true.”

He turned his head and covered his eyes.

“In fact, from my perspective, you’re just killing yourself in front of me right now!”

“What- no! Bill, look at me!”

“No!” Bill retreated towards the door with his eyes shut tightly.

“Bill, what are you doing?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Bridge.” His voice wavered. “I don’t think I should even be around you until you stop this.”

He rounded the door and Rosen Bridge heard no more from him but the rapid clopping of hooves on tile.

She was… not shaken. No, she was not shaken at all. Her hoof had somehow started fumbling with the latch on her Q.S.D and she stopped it. What was the point if she wasn’t going to commit to it? Bill had always been a little too sensitive, a little too cautious. She shook her head to herself. She had already decided on her path.

But… she supposed she could take a little break. She reached up again, removed the mana crystal from her deadly neckwear and set it on her desk.

Free from the range of the detector, and thus unbound from her fate, it slowly dissolved into the air with white wisps of magic. She pushed her remaining exams aside to make space for her elbows. She rested her head on her arms and sighed. Was she doing the right thing?

No.

Of course not.

But she knew that when she started. She remembered the first day the idea occurred to her. It was laughable, insane, even! But she couldn’t let go the possibility of tricking the universe into showing her the most unlikely of scenarios. One late night she had shut herself in the lab and built her first quantum suicide device. That one just used a simple fair-coin spell to decide whether to kill or not. She remembered trembling as she considered wearing it, all common sense and reason telling her it would just kill her outright.

But her curiosity got the better of her. She put it on, and she didn’t die with the first random outcome. Then she didn’t die with the second, or the third, or the fourth. She wore it for hours.There were hundreds of completely random decisions that all miraculously ended with her survival. The whole experience gave her a sort of existential high- one she was still riding now. She quickly got to work trying to use it to crack an impossible problem of some sort. It turned into an obsession, and here she was now.

And now! This was her ticket to whatever she wanted, if only she played her cards right. Stopping mana decay was an impossible problem, and she effectively accomplished it in less than a moon. And it was probably the least of what she could do. With the proper set-up, she could make anything fantastically unlikely happen. Bind her device to a water detection spell and she’d never get wet in the rain, because every drop would miss her. If she could find a good way to cast an identity spell on a railroad, she’d never miss her train again.

She shook her head again. Those weren’t even real problems to solve. Those were far too frivolous problems to solve with any kind of suicide, quantum or not.

Starstone. You could never have enough starstone for alchemy, but stars rarely fell from the sky, and even when one did the odds were low that she would be the pony to claim them. She just needed a spell that would kill her unless it was exposed to a falling star within a week, and she would witness the fantastically unlikely event of a star falling near her.

Still thinking too small. She could ascend to alicornhood! A spell that would trigger her device if it didn’t detect a vast quantity of all three types of pony magic within her. Now these were problems she’d gladly give her life to have the solution for.

She laughed out loud. All the villains of history had tried complex spells and rituals to gain absolute power. She was going to do it just by being willing to risk her own death for science. Her world was her oyster now. But maybe she’d start small. After all- she wouldn’t want any unhappy accidents like the crystal that had nicked her earlier today. No. She needed to be cautious and account for every possibility, and then she would win.

Her initial fantasy had been to find a way to use her device to win the lottery. A fantastically unlikely event made likely, and one that would give her enough resources to pursue anything. That was still a good way to start.

Imagine what the newspapers would say when she was done! “Lottery-winning renowned alchemist ascends to alicornhood: Will she be pronounced queen?” She actually giggled to herself. She could imagine the blowhard editor at the Equestria Daily trying to paint it poorly again, like so many of her spell discoveries. But she would be untouchable. Hay, she would even be able to just cast a haste spell or time-stop spell, and edit the type blocks in the press to get the paper to badmouth itself before anyone even noticed. This was going to be good. She would make this good.

Rosen Bridge unclasped her peytral and hung it up on the wall.

Filled with determination, she finished marking the second half of her stack of exams with an “F” and packed her belongings, aware of the significance of the absent weight around her neck.

Author's Note

I love the phrase “eponymous pony.” It’s so fun to say.
This story has three more chapters and an epilogue of sorts which I have all but finished (except for last-minute final edits). They will be published at a rate of one chapter every three days (as long as I don’t find anything I feel compelled to change drastically). It’s not a very long story, as you can probably tell from the chapter length, but I felt it was best broken up this way because it helps with the flow, and this way I can give out riddles like the massive nerd I am.

Riddle for this chapter: How big is the class that Dr. Bridge is teaching, and what subject does she teach?
First correct answer posted in the comments gets to name the newspaper pony in the next chapter (Only if you want to. I’m perfectly fine with you solving a riddle for riddling’s sake. I’ll PM you with details). Nothing inappropriate as deemed by the author.