It was October when Flim and Flam returned to Ponyville.
They arrived, as always, in a carnival jalopy, a mish-mash wagon of awkward wheels and patchwork parts, no two fitting together quite the right way, its cloth sides a dozen different colors stolen from an unguarded circus pavilion. Steam cylinders let out a constant wet hiss as they came to a stop in the town square, an off-key piano belting out a broken carillon to catch the ears of everypony present.
When the crowd had assembled, as it always did for Flim and Flam, the two brothers appeared on a folding stage. They danced out, and Flim announced, “Greetings Ponyville! We’ve come again to answers your prayers!”
“To fill the holes in your dreary lives!” Flam responded.
“To solve all the problems you forgot you had!”
“To fill your hearts with ever-lasting cheer!”
The brothers jumped down from the stage. They staggered a bit, and here ponies noticed how rough their coats were. That their manes, normally slick, appeared unkempt. Dark circles surrounded their eyes, and they both limped as they pushed through the crowd, away from the slowly fading notes of the mechanical pianola winding to a rusty stop in the wagon.
Flim stopped at the edge of the square. He turned, while Flam kept walking, and for just a moment Starlight Glimmer, who had meandered into the square to see what all the commotion was, noticed something even more odd. Lurking in the creases of Flim’s face, in the set of his lips and the hollows of his eyes, she saw regret. No, that couldn’t be. From these two? Starlight shook her head.
Flim lifted a hoof, about to turn around. But something seized him, and with a wild air he shouted back at the crowd.
“And this time it’s free!” He belted out. He sagged, as though the words had been the only thing holding his spine straight, and then he stumbled around and chased after his brother, who hadn’t looked back.
And that is how Ponyville acquired its wonderful Memory Machine.
* * *
The wagon’s engine died after a few hours. Out of fuel, somepony said. Starlight didn’t notice. The machine in the wagon was what held her fascination.
“At first glance, it appears to be nothing more than a simple crucible,” she said. Beside her, a floating notepad and quill dutifully transcribed her every word. Steps away, at the entrance, a bevy of pony heads peered in, curious to hear the local sorceress at work.
“The main body is a large stone bowl, perhaps three feet across and just as deep,” she continued. “The walls are almost as thick as my hoof. In the bottom of the bowl there appears to be puddles of melted dross. The interior is scorched black and I can smell the products of oxidation. Some sort of smelting device, perhaps?”
She peered underneath. There was a furnace there, as expected, but there were no ashes or residue of fire in the box. It was cold as stone. She frowned.
“There is no apparent energy source. And yet… I can feel the magic in it.” She closed her eyes. The world seemed to tilt ever so slightly, as though she stood on a slope leading toward the crucible. The angle grew steeper and steeper, and eventually her knees buckled, and she tipped forward to rest against the lip of the bowl. Her eyes opened, and the world resumed its flat aspect. The wobble in her legs faded.
She put a hoof in the bowl. Nothing. She snorted and looked around the wagon, found an old wooden tankard that had seen better days, and tossed it in.
The crucible filled with light. A searing heat curled the hairs on Starlight’s muzzle, and she flinched away. When she could see again, the bowl was empty. Only a smear of ashes remained.
But… She remembered the tankard, now. She’d stolen it years ago, but a petty bit of pilfering, an easy grab from that tavern outside Las Pegasus. She’d been drinking with her brother Flam when they finished the last of their beers and decided it was time to go. Flam asked the waitress for their check, and by the time she returned they were gone. The tankard fit neatly in her knapsack and then they were in the crowd, too far away for the waitress to bother chasing.
That was years ago. The tankard had been through a lot since then; near misses with monsters, temporary confiscation by an angry mob, filled more than once with rotgut poison that should’ve dissolved its simple walnut finish. But somehow it had persisted, just as she and Flam had, lasting for years in their mish-mash carnival wagon, an unseen and unheralded little part of their lives. She remembered drinking from it a thousand times, and every drink tasted just a bit sweeter from the knowledge that this cup belonged to him and nopony else.
And now the tankard was gone. Just ashes. Starlight gasped in a breath, blinked, and stumbled away. She stared at the crucible, her thoughts spinning around memories that hadn’t existed until moments ago.
“Ooh…” she whispered. She stood and walked across the cramped interior toward the crucible, and stared in wonder at the slowly settling ashes inside.
“How marvelous.” She picked up another object at random with her magic – a set of worn binoculars, with one of its lenses cracked – and tossed it into the machine
And she remembered it.
* * *
“It’s nothing I’ve seen before,” Twilight Sparkle said. “Did they say where they got it?”
“No,” Starlight said. “Just that it was free. And their usual spiel about how it would solve every problem.”
They’d moved the machine out of the wagon and into the town hall. Starlight had wondered, at first, if that was the best choice – leaving powerful magical devices in public where anypony could access them was a fraught option – but Flim and Flam had been clear. This was the town’s machine. Neither she nor Twilight had any right to lock it up in the castle’s basement laboratory and play with it themselves.
Besides, it was just a curiosity. They’d worked out the particulars after only a few experiments. Toss any item into the machine and it would burn to ashes in an instant. And the pony who put it in the machine would remember everything about it, as though it had belonged to them for years. It quite literally turned objects into memories.
Twilight frowned. “Flim and Flam don’t do free. Or, if they say something’s free, there’s a catch. Some kind of hook for them to get you later.”
They both stared at the crucible. A little filly ran up to it, tossed in a broken nacre comb, and gasped as the fire inside illuminated her face. Her eyes widened with sudden understanding, and she ran back to her mother, babbling in a high-pitched voice. Starlight caught something about an old zebra who lived by the sea.
“So, what’s the catch, then?” Starlight asked.
“I don’t know.” Another frown. “I don’t like it, though. Those two don’t have much sense beyond what it takes to con ponies out of their bits. If they’re giving something away for free, it’s because they don’t want it.”
“Why wouldn’t you want this, though?” Starlight asked. “It’s such a wonderful tool. You can learn almost anything with it.”
“Then why were they so eager to get rid of it?”
“Well.” Starlight tilted her head and considered the crucible again. She had a mental list of items she wanted to toss into it, and as the day wore on, the list grew longer. It would last forever, she suspected; the world was filled with memories. “We’d have to ask them.”
* * *
Flim and Flam never returned to Ponyville. But that was fine. Starlight didn’t dislike the brothers as much as some of her friends, but she couldn’t say she missed them.
The town hall was empty at night. Technically it was closed and the door locked, but that was hardly an obstacle for a pony like her. She teleported into the hall, conjured up an illusion of darkness and quiet to mantle herself, and beheld the crucible again.
“Who made you?” she mumbled. The rough stone bore no chisel’s marks. No sign of any craftsmare. It might as well have emerged from the earth, already perfectly formed. She’d never heard any mention of such a device, and something so wonderful would surely have caught the attention of scholars. They would have turned over the world to acquire such a machine. Ponies would sing legends about it, if they’d known it existed.
So, perhaps it hadn’t. Perhaps it had lain waiting, buried in the earth, for somepony to find. Perhaps, in their wanderings, Flim and Flam had stumbled across it in some distant land. And not knowing how great it was, they brought it here.
To her. Where it belonged. How wonderful of them.
She began feeding items into the fire. One of Twilight’s old quills. A rusted hasp stolen from Applejack’s barn. An abandoned birds nest from Fluttershy’s cottage. She closed her eyes after each feeding, and let the memories fill her. Joy, and sadness, and loss, and happiness. A second-place rodeo ribbons; a melancholy mix of pride and resentment. A signed Wonderbolt’s poster; giddy excitement. A bejeweled satin fascinator; accomplishment.
These were not her memories, Starlight knew. But it was a distant awareness, a knocking on a door far down the hall. Nothing that mattered. More, more, more important was the life it gave her. A life not filled with regret. A life not built on the suffering she had caused. A life filled with proud, little accomplishments, the kind ponies deserved but she’d never had. A harmony built from myriad disparate pieces, fit together like a broken jigsaw in her mind. A pile of borrowed reminiscence, slowly burying her failures.
Long Starlight spent that night with the Memory Machine. Outside, the dawn came, and ponies wondered why the Town Hall remained dark, and why the scent of smoke drifted out.
Starlight was not done. She still had fuel to burn.
Author's Note
Who wouldn't want such a machine?
