The Modern Prometheus

I can well remember the lump of Angel Bunny curled by my hooves in bed. Back at the hospital, his presence was as constant as Fluttershy’s herself, and mostly I enjoyed it. He demanded her attention, and in my blacker moods this was awful welcome. Since her death he had become morose, drooping about at Apple Farm as if he wished to die. I was surprised he did not—I spent several days in expectation of the news, that her favourite rabbit had died of a broken heart; longing for it, almost. He had survived: and part of me wonders if he knew she would return. Animals have a wisdom all their own, as Fluttershy knew well, so perhaps he did, and this is why he clung on so very long. In any case, planned on not, his endurance was rewarded, and I am told reliably his cause of death was happiness when she came home. His heart stopped quite cold upon his seeing her, and Doctor Fauna assured us that, while far from common, this very thing was not unheard of. Poor Fluttershy—to see, so soon upon undoing her own demise, the death of her Angel. A tragedy for all concerned, I’m sure, had not I just invented a way to chase death off. Angel Bunny was not long cold before he jumped to life again, and undead mare and rabbit reunited joyfully. What a wonder! What a miracle! What delight! Ponyville was full of laughter, and Pinkie threw her very first ‘Welcome-Back-from-Beyond-the-Pale Party.’ All was celebration, for a while. Fluttershy was returned, and the wound within our hearts began to heal, within mine most especially—at last, I had my moment of heroism, at last, I had found my dream anew.

Fluttershy was only cheerful, if bewildered, though asked me more than once how it was I’d brought her back. Flush with pride, I showed her round, and at my introduction, the fear that she’d been harbouring, as she told me later, that some other creature had exchanged their life for hers, was put to rest.

Luna and Celestia descended from on high to see my work, and frowned and hummed and hawed at my machine, though failed to find a fault with it, for I had, I own, broken through that final barrier: I had remade life, and not with any weird technique, involving magic dark and perilous, but words, and potions, and nature itself: even they conceded my success. I had defeated death, and at no cost. I had found a purpose, and saved a friend. Life was glorious, and would never cut short before its time again.

Two months after my first, twin victories, I had my second pony patient. My machine had not been quiet in those intervening months: no, it had been working almost constantly, churning away from dawn till dusk as I worked upon my project. For, you see, having beaten death, I now determined I should find out how I’d done it. For all my genius in putting the thing together, in collecting the scattered clues of

THE MODERN PROMETHEUS,

in piece by piece assembling my machine, I knew not how it worked. Yes, there were connections; yes, there was a certain sense to how the whole thing functioned, but to take such simple parts and make of them this masterpiece, this thing that could with ease defy the laws of nature, was far more art than science, and I hungered to learn its secrets.

My newest subject returned as quickly as the previous. Carrot Top, although forewarned by Pinkie, had been killed by the falling sign of Pony Joe’s, her chest and lungs crushed flat by the heavy wooden board, and was still bleeding when I strapped her into my machine and brought her back to life. She gasped, and gasped again, and before my eyes I saw her chest inflate, her lungs expand, and she could walk again. This, I thought myself, could only be a sign, another hint at the explanation of my machine. Fluttershy’s corpse had been long interred, and mouldering for a year, when we pulled it, stinking, from the ground and brought her back to life. Since then she had improved; her skin had mended, her fur returned. Her very life force seemed to heal her body, and this too had happened to Carrot Top. What I had invented cured not death only, but any thing, and I resolved to test this next on a pony who had succumbed to disease. Fluttershy would not let herself be an exception, and I supported her in this: I wanted as many ponies as I could to test my creation, with as many different types of death as possible. I was, as Twilight said incredulously, collecting data.

With the extraordinary healing of the body after resurrection, I could not help but imagine what other possibilities might await the pony who dared to reach for them. I wondered, for example, what would happen if I changed a pony’s form before I brought them back; sewed on wings, perhaps, or grafted on a horn. Would the changes stick, or would they fall away? I longed to know, and dwelt privately for many weeks in consideration of it. For I knew what nopony, not even the mare herself, did: Fluttershy’s hoof had been so mangled by the shovel as we dragged her out, I’d gone back later and dug up another body to replace it. Her left hoof was somepony else’s, and I did not remember whose. I’d tried to get the fur as close to match as possible, and it seemed I’d chosen well: nopony had noticed it quite yet, even though there was a difference.

It would be the work of years, I knew, to figure this all out, and I dread to think how long it would have taken, had I had the patience for it. The world, I imagine, would still be using my machine, had I stuck to only those who came to me for help. But I was never good at waiting; the Elements gave me Loyalty, not Patience, and for once this flaw proved to my benefit—and the benefit of every pony, too.

I know not how many years went by before I worked it out. Oh, I’m sure the number could be calculated, if I cared to do so, if I had not burned every scrap of evidence of my successes, if I had not tried, for far too long, to put it out of mind, forget it all. Long years, I trust, and many; long enough to start to age, to look into the mirror and see a face too old, for grey to start to show along my mane, for my back to start to hurt at every step. In all those years, though its secrets strayed my grasp, my creation shot me to fortune so high I thought it near to fine as flying. Ponies, when they heard of the device, flocked from all across Equestria to see their friends be born again: to see their sister, killed by Tirek, brought back to life; see their husband, drowned at sea, come back again; see their filly, dead by suicide, alive once more. At one point, the machine so popular, and in such high demand, I resorted to asking payment before I’d bring them back—and they would pay, despite the price, they all would pay it, for what’s worth more than life itself? The Princesses came down upon me for that, and asked me rightfully what in Equestria I thought I was doing. I told them a mare must eat, and after some deliberation they agreed: I was to become a part of the state, the machine folded into their public health sector, and I was given the rank of Lady. Lady Rainbow Dash—I enjoyed that all too much.

My experiments continued through this, though, and I discovered in the course of them the machine had limits few indeed. As long as there was enough of a pony left they could conceivably be alive, the machine would make them so: if there was not enough; if there was only half a pony, or a head, or a pony disembowelled, the machine would do its best, and I would have to put the thing brought back out of all its screaming misery. I came little closer to its true nature, though, within those many years. No, that would not come until the day just after Rarity’s fifty-first, when we all of us realised that Fluttershy, although she should be old as we, looked no more than twenty-five. Less than half her age—and however much she protested the benefits of time in the sun and the calming effect of animal companions, it was becoming obvious. The mare was not ageing. As the rest of us grew older, she stayed young, as our cheeks sagged, hers did not, and as Rarity exclaimed, too enthusiastically, how lucky she was her fur was white, for how well it hid her grey, Fluttershy looked away.

That realisation brought another: surely rabbits did not usually live so long. Angel Bunny was just as lively and aggressive as ever, and even Fluttershy had to admit that he was now impossibly old for a creature so small.

I had, it turned out, made Fluttershy immortal. She did not age; she could not wane. She was joined in this by only two types of thing: the other ponies I’d brought back, and the princesses of the realm. Nopony knew how old Celestia and Luna truly were, and Twilight, we knew, was set to last as long as either, and showed as much sign of her age as Fluttershy did.

I comforted myself this was a good thing. Discord stood outside of time, and in the beginnings of their relationship there had been worries—never mentioned before her, of course—about such a couple that could only end in tragedy. Now, that issue was resolved: Discord would never have to suffer the same fate as Cadence, who saw her husband grow daily older as she stayed same. She would bury him one day; I had spared Discord that. Fluttershy and he would live forever, it seemed, and I wished them well, however alive the rest of us were to the fact that Twilight, Fluttershy, and Spike would all live to see us dead.

But what, you ask, was wrong with any of this? Nothing, it seemed, aside from the fact I’d be outlived by a rabbit. No, for all this time Fluttershy, and the rest of the returned, were perfectly sensible: they were all as they had ever been in life—exactly as they had been in life.

And so I began to glimpse it.

There were experiments, early on, about how far the machine extended—what type of death it could undo, how long dead a pony could be. Skeletons did not work; there had to be flesh left on the bone, otherwise they lived a moment in gaping horror before collapsing. Likewise, it could not cure old age. A pony dead of natural causes at age one hundred might live for a day or two longer after resurrection, but no more than that—which is why the immortality of Flutteshy surprised me as it did. It could give a pony back the life they had before they’d died; if they were old, they were old, if they were lame, they were lame; if they died crashing into a tree fast enough to lose their head, the body must be found and reattached before they could be brought back. It could heal a lot, but hardly everything.

Immortality was an unexpected side effect. It was not the only one. A mare returned could not get pregnant; a stallion returned was quite infertile. A child returned would not mature.

These were trifles, though. Foolish as it was, these seemed piddling things to pay for making death antique. I was commissioned to make duplicates, and by the time of Twilight’s ascension to the throne, sudden death was as small an inconvenience as the common cold. Oh, there were some who shook their heads and warned it unnatural, some who put down in slips of paper they did not want to be brought back, but these were outcasts, exceptions: it was as normal to die, and live again, as it was to get a cast to heal a broken limb. Indeed, some ponies, less patient even than I, preferred the extraordinary healing powers of resurrection to the weeks to set a shattered bone. Sometimes young, stupid ponies, or even, to the embarrassment of all, ones older, would take suicide as a dare. Some of these ended disastrously when, in leaping off a cliff, there was not enough to be recovered; but this failed to truly discourage those drunk, or stupid, or high enough to attempt it.

How awful all this is to you and I now. How normal it all seemed then.

I have hinted before at the truth that was soon to strike me, that I started to see when I discovered Fluttershy would likely live forever. I am ashamed to say that, even with all that I knew, it was another ten or fifteen years before the real cost of all this mockery became apparent. You will say I am responsible for this lapse in good judgement, and I will agree. That is not to say I was alone in it, but it was my invention, and my obsession, and so my fault, in the end. In truth I did not want to find it out. My work had brought me almost everything I could have wanted, and I harboured a secret desire then when the time came, it would deliver me that last wish, too. I looked at my project with too close, and too loving an eye: I had changed the course of history. I had brought my friend back. I was, all in all, a hero, certain to be remembered throughout time as the mare who bested death. What was an athlete to that?

For far too long, Fluttershy was all right. If it had been any other mare, I suspect we might never have seen it; but Fluttershy was Fluttershy, so it could not have happened otherwise. She was sixty-five when she snapped at last, and provided fresh worry for my great project, and fresh sorrow for all the rest of us.

I was in my study, reading afresh my copy of

THE MODERN PROMETHEUS

(not, of course, my original copy, that one had been taken apart into its two hundred and fifty-three component pages and hung in a museum long ago) when reality fizzed, and my hair stood on end, and a tear opened up to the realm of chaos just before me. A claw reached though, and pulled me in, and then my study was empty.

What did you do.

It was not a question, it was not something I heard, it was something that filled my mind, that echoed throughout the universe in the screams of stars and nonsense planets. I struggled for comprehension, to make it out among the noise, even though I knew quite clearly what he was asking.

“I— I don’t know!” I called, and a red fury took the world, anger lighting up the hundred moons of a distant galaxy as well as it did the china teacup that shattered and reassembled and shattered again two inches from my face.

WHAT DID YOU DO.

“Please!” I tried, “I didn’t do anything!”

LIAR.

And suddenly he was before me, in all his godlike splendour, powerful as I had never seen him, angry as only a universe could be.

“What did you do.” He grabbed me by the shoulders, slamming me against a wall that appeared just then behind me. Pain shot through my legs, my back, my broken wings. My head filled with stars, each one of them firing rage.

“I— I don’t—”

The wall behind me vanished. The universe seemed to cool. Discord stared at me with an icy temper. “Look,” he growled, and suddenly I was back in Equestria, and the universe of noisome suns was gone, and I could think again.

“What. Did. You. Do.”

Fluttershy’s cottage. She had never moved on from here, for what ever reason, and I had always supposed it to be because, with Discord, here could be anywhere. Now here was scarlet.

Fluttershy sat upon the couch, raising an empty teacup to her mouth every now and then, a vague, vacant look in her eyes. Her muzzle was smeared with red. Her hooves were smeared with red. The teacup was smeared with red.

At the other end of the room, her pack of animals quavered, shivered, and I felt I might almost have smelled their fear, if another scent hadn’t filled the room with dread. Iron stung my nose, lay thick and heavy on my tongue, invaded my fur. Blood sprayed the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Now that I could see him clear, blood sprayed Discord, too. Something red and stringy dripped from the light. In the middle of the room, something small and white and broken lay in two separate pieces. I knew it immediately.

I’m sorry it took so long for me to understand it, truly. But not for this, I doubt I would have seen it at all.

Fluttershy looked over at us, a dainty little smile upon her lips. “He’s dead,” she told me, with some satisfaction. “I finally got him. He’s dead. Oh, it makes me want to laugh.”

And so she did.