The Unicorn in the Tower

Chapters

The Great Work
The Interminable
III. The Earth's Voice
IV. The Defeat of General Ludd

The Great Work

“The shadow of that hyddeous strength

Sax myle and more it is of length.”

–Ane Dialog by Sir David Lindsay

Twilight touched the glass. It was cold to the touch, but she didn’t mind. Beyond it, the Tower glowed with life. It wasn’t life by the estimation of others, even of her own colleagues, but to her it was a kind of life.

It was late. It was often late, when she finally left the lab. Some said she was a workaholic. A few unkind sorts had speculated that the chilly laboratory with its harsh computer lights and muffled isolation were a better alternative to what must be a barren and lonely home. In truth, her quarters were spartan but comfortable. No, she stayed because when everyone had left, and her weary mind did not have to contend with idle chatter and workflows, she could just watch the Tower. She could just contemplate it and its complexity and singularity.

Twilight had loved science in its myriad forms since she was a girl. The cool order of math righting the sprawling chaos of reality, the scalpel’s edge of biology exploring the secrets of the flesh, physics and chemistry wrestling with matter itself. But at some point in her teens Twilight Sparkle had started in on computers, and had never quite extricated herself. In a way, the idea of the perfect machine, something that could reach out and synthesize the sciences, each going their own way, had come to dominate her life. Coding was not enough. Working cushy tech jobs for wunderkinds and predatory venture capitalists had not been enough. The challenges of securing vaults of wealth and forbidden knowledge had bored her. Algorithms slithered to life at her finger tips and learned, and in the end they wore thin.

No, the Tower was not like anything she had done before. It was better than everything else. She felt about the Tower what some might believe about God.

Twilight withdrew her hand and touched her cheek briefly to feel the surprising cold.

She wanted to say something to it. She always did, when she was alone. And every time she warred against the sentimental foolishness of it. Speaking through glass this thick to a machine that, however she revered it, did not even have ears to hear? She was no longer that lonely sort of child. But every time she spoke anyway.

“Goodnight. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

The days blurred together. Royal funding had been increased as Twilight’s team put in truly horrific hours working on every line of code so long and so arcane that it warped the mind just a bit to think of the scope. More technicians were brought on, and other teams formed to take on new aspects of their impossible task. The Problem of the Tower, as they all called it, was like a branching web. Every answer, every solution, spawned two new questions and a dozen new problems. The Tower was epistemic quicksand. It swallowed you.

It wasn’t the complexity that staggered, sometimes, as much as it was the simplistic nature of it all. A kind of retroactive realization that of course, that it could have been no other way. The pressures mounted, but the sheer momentum of a project of this scale, with this capacity, began to express itself as if it were alive.

And maybe it was. Twilight Sparkle found most attempts to define life and “being alive” to be lacking in rigor.

She stood solemnly in the Princess’ antechamber, quiet as a statue. Like a statue, her eyes did not follow the servants and officials that filed through like ant-pilgrims. To the Princess, away on her orders, back for a report, off with new instructions. She was no different, she supposed. Only that she did not go back and forth. She waited and waited.

Twilight did not mind waiting. Others imagined that she despised being pulled from her cavernous labs and projects, but they would be sorely mistaken. Twilight did not mind in the slightest.

Some time around her first successful spell, Twilight had grasped that valuable lesson that Starswirl had struggled to teach his apprentice, Clover. That the onrushing years do not require one to panic over their sakes. Some things were done quickly, required haste and precision. But some things required only that you keep returning. Some accomplishments were not quick races, but marathons.

So she ate the shortbreads brought on a gilded platter and drank half a gallon of tea brewed by the Princess’ lady in waiting, and she placed a small cube of arcanite upon the table and let her magic toy with it. Her hands glowed with energy, but there was none of the flair of a true spell. Starswirl’s one hundred forty-seven variations kept her occupied. The box twisted and melted and re-arranged itself, following the silent whims of her will. The forms of the variations were imprinted on her memory by more than repetition, though they were also secure in that way; magic had burned these things into her mind. Parts of her selfhood had been rewritten with a hundred and forty-seven otherwise meaningless configurations of matter and energy down to the tiniest detail. The spells she had specialized in were all seared into her mind. The careful, precise, almost spider-like lattice-constructed matrix of calculation and incantation that allowed her to imbue metal with living energy was more real to her than most of her birthdays. Variation eighty nine was more real to her, more foundational to her sense of reality and self than her mother’s smell or her father’s whiskered, unshaven face.

A woman walked by, and by happy accident Twilight caught a look at her. Her dark hair, obviously dyed, was coiffed in a way Twilight found charmingly archaic. It shone, quite literally it pulsed—discrete packets of blue-violet light travelled subtly along the strands of her hair. Augments? Twilight knew knew little about that. Her skin was dark, and her eyes were violet mysteries. She was dressed so… strangely. Anachronistically, like a woman out of time. Twilight blinked, and she was already almost gone, heading towards the door. Twilight looked away, feeling a bit foolish for having even watched.

Eventually the traffic slowed and then Twilight was sent for. She pocketed her cube and walked the ornate hallways until the lady in waiting left her at the door to Princess Celestia’s Imperial Solarium.

She entered, and found Celestia rising from her desk with a smile that shone like unfiltered sunlight. It was blinding, and beautiful, and unapproachable, and it shone directly on her.

“Twilight! My most accomplished student, I’m happy to see you again. I hope your wait wasn’t burdensome.”

“Not at all,” Twilight answered easily. “I had a practice cube with me.”

“I’m not surprised. I hadn’t realized you could imprint and then one day you casually refer to a feat your elders did relatively seldomly! You were so young!” Celestia smiled, and it was such an honest and earnest smile that it almost seemed to obliviate the very notion of insincerity.

Some said that Twilight Sparkle had lived in the sun’s scrutiny so long that it had made her into a driven woman, desperate for her ruler’s continued favor. In truth, Twilight would say that the Sun had burned her just by being so bright, but it had cleaned away the dross.

Not to say that Celestia thought about any of their long relationship in such a way. What she thought was always somewhat obscured. Twilight appreciated the irony.

“I’ve heard good things, but I suppose I’ll be reading more when you’ve given your report.”

Twilight nodded and with a bit of magic pulled another cube from her pockets. “I’ve encoded my report in the bindings. It’s based on—”

“Variation one-sixteen, yes.” Celestia chuckled. “Clever, and efficient. I’ve only to invert the process and it’ll arrange itself tidily in an epistemic matrix I can commit to paper or to memory.”

Twilight smiled back, and it was so easy and comfortable that it would have startled her coworkers. “I knew you’d appreciate it. I wanted to thank you for your notes to the Royal Budgetary Committee.”

“I spoke only the truth. Your project is of utmost importance, and you are a level headed and reasonable woman.”

“And that if I needed that much treasure to keep the warchest full, I wasn’t overshooting it,” Twilight finished, using her teacher’s words. “Thank you. I had a whole presentation prepared, but I was dreading the ordeal.”

“Competence does not equal comfort. I made sure you would be able to stand up for yourself in such a place, but I would never think to make you do so when it was not strictly necessary.” Her smile shifted into something a bit more sardonic. “I am not sure I would do it myself, if I could find some hapless fool to offer as a sacrifice in my stead.”

“I’m sure that Raven or Junebug would be happy to do most of your consultations for you, Your Highness,” Twilight offered as she took a seat. Celestia tapped her desk intercom and called for tea for two. Twilight did not mention she had already had tea for one twice over, because it mattered much less than the very real relief on the Princess’ face as she carefully let down her work persona.

“Oh, yes, they would be willing. Far too willing, and far too eager for their own good. But I would be betraying their grandmothers before them if I sent their successors off to such a grisly fate one time too many. Corva practically martyred herself corralling the Landsraad, and I was there for most of it!”

Tea arrived, and Twilight relished the chance to talk candidly with someone who did not require her to be one way or another. She needed this, and she knew it. She needed to be seen by someone actually looking for her.

She still talked about work, but not about her report. Celestia had been present for the birth of modern meta-magical technology. She had shepherded the endeavors that had laid the groundwork for Twilight’s own opus. She couldn’t help but relish it, not just because she had loved Celestia from a young age, but also because there were precious few people in the Solarian Union or beyond who could really, truly talk with her about her work without needing lengthy explanations. Bless them, but her parents were clueless. Any attempt to get her friends up to speed would result in simplifications that would frustrate them and drive her to distraction. But with Celestia she could just talk plainly. No hesitation, with no barrier, Twilight could just, well, blather.

She took a moment to catch her breath (and a snack from the nice tray Celestia’s seneschal had brought in with a stack of reports) when Celestia leaned towards her.

“I never even imagined it, Twilight. Not until a decade ago. To birth true, genuine intelligence. Not just a man in a Chinese Box, as the Terrans say.”

Despite herself, she eyed the paperwork next to the delicious snacks. She’d asked Raven about that once. Why paper? ‘Celestia is an odd bird, Twilight. She just… does things. Sometimes she gets stuck on something along the way and never, ever changes. She stuck onto writing a very specific way some time in the Feudal Era and now she’s helpless without a quill. We’ve just worked around it for centuries. It works.’

“I’m not sure even I’m imagining it, Celestia,” Twilight replied, taking a breath. “It's hard to look at, hard to think about too broadly. It’s hard to explain to people what I’m even doing half the time! The more mundane bits, the machine learning… We’ve been toying with that for half a century. We were working out the bugs of teaching machines to learn without making them into racist paperclip optimizers for years, and a lot of what we do is build on that. Sure, sure, but… but the important bits are just…”

“Many of our subjects are still adjusting to the ways in which magic and technology have reached synthesis. They know that the wonders work, but not why or how. Magic is a fickle thing. It is tied up in thousands of years of evolution, both social and physical.”

“I… I know.” Twilight grimaced. She did know. But it was not real to her. She had not met these people. She did not know what it was like to not understand, had never been outside of the blade of the cutting edge. Canterlot had been a city of magitek since she was a child. Her father had helped design the systems that governed several of the mountain’s edenic arcologies. The womb that bore this revolution had been the one that bore her.

“You try to know. And that’s alright.” Celestia touched her hand briefly. “I admire that about you, that you go just the last step further where others don’t dain to tread. It does you credit.”

Twilight smiled wanly. “Thank you. It is a bit lonely.”

Celestia, who had also smiled, let her face fall. “I know. I am sorry, Twilight. But you are not cut off from people who would be lovely companions. Have you spoken much to Moondancer in the past weeks?”

“We spoke twice, as you would reckon it. I know you don’t always count work or games,” Twilight said, trying to brighten her mentor’s worried mood. “But we did start another round of Diplomacy. Glimmer is in on it as well. We’re back to sending long messages.”

“Like you did in graduate school? That makes my heart glad, Twilight. I remember those days.”

“It wasn’t so long ago.”

Celestia was smiling now. It was such a strange smile. If she were a different person, Twilight would have called it vaguely alien. It was not a smile she could match, no matter how hard she tried. No one could look like that.

“When you live as long as I have, my faithful student, every day is a tiny eternity.”

The Tower had grown. Team 17 had been monitoring the power levels for a week before they’d acknowledged that Twilight’s suspicions were correct. The power needs of the Tower were going to outstrip their previous infrastructure at an alarming pace when they really powered it up.

It wasn’t even fully active yet. In fact, only a portion was active in any meaningful way, and they’d already managed to put more energy into it than went into two arcologies fit for ten thousand people each. She knew it would take even more power to keep it bright and alive. Every piece was already active, active the moment it was constructed, kept eternally at the barest bit of activity. It was all delicate, some of it unstable outside of an aligned magical field. Thaumaturgic engineering kept ephemeral elements only possible through freak accidents from decaying into something else.

She removed her glasses and cleaned them with a small handkerchief which bore the three diamonds that served as the complex’s emblem. Three Sapphires Arcology had been a gracious, if sparsely populated host to the nation's (and perhaps the world’s) most ambitious project.

The Tower would not just control the principality’s infrastructure. It would not just direct its machines and shepherd its satellites. No, the Solarian Union would have a soul. A living intelligence so vast and so powerful it would become the polity itself. A machine intelligence so far beyond that of a normal person as to be a kind of god. Everything was connected to it. It connected to everything. The Monists would finally be right.

She hummed softly, an old song from her childhood days. She remembered her brother groaning as she sang it over and over, his cartoonish anguish only an encouragement. Shining hadn’t been home in two years. She missed him, but like her parents who had not seen Twilight in months, he was easy to let fade into the middle distance. Family and friends were people one knew, whom one loved, but they need not be nearby. They hovered in the background, like notifications in the corner of her screen.

Twilight adjusted her now clean glasses and smiled brightly, openly at the Tower behind the glass. She could see a crew of technicians installing a new cooling unit in section 15, right in front of her. The little lights on their zerograv suits blinked like eyes in the murk. Blink, blink, blink, like curious little sprites. Clever sprites, with skillful little hands, playing at building gods to love them.

Her lab changed. It moved down and down with the pace of the Tower. Funny, that they called it that. She’d started calling it that when it was above ground in the arcology proper, cordoned off in a designated building zone that was never filled. But the scope had expanded. The needs of the project expanded. They cleared out levels below the main habitation level. They cleared out the crawlspaces beneath those. They bored deeper until they had left the arcology behind, tunneling down and down into the mountain. When they finished, they moved her lab. At first they had cut it into the rock anew each time, but Twilight had found this wasteful, and more than that found it hampered their ability to work.

So now her lab moved. It dug its supports in until it was time to descend, and then it walked along the walls in a gyre, round and round and round just like the boring machines below them all.

Another mile by the end of the month. She had assigned Moondancer to make preparations for integrating the Union’s disparate networks. Her friend was in a new place every day, adapting old technology to new. Twilight had not spoken to her in days, but last they had Moondancer had smiled. She had bags under her eyes but she smiled, so Twilight assumed this was good. She would not smile if she did not have cause.

What had they spoken about? Twilight couldn’t remember. She thought it might have been Appleton, on the coast, nestled between the Singing Forest and the Gorge of Teeth. Something about spending an extra day making sure the town’s automated mass transit system would communicate well with the Tower. Twilight had asked many questions.

Lyra, the one from University, had been hired on to the project. Twilight thought that she had studied music, but had been informed with a smirk that you didn’t technically need to go to school to get the certifications that had made her such a catch. Twilight appreciated this, because it was useful. She had not seen Lyra since last week, however. She wondered what team she was on. She could check. She would not.

Glimmer had asked for an extension on her decision regarding her next move in their game of Diplomacy. Twilight recalled with exact clarity her message to the others, but admitted to herself she did not see what ‘a lot going on right now’ had to do with accepting Twilight’s obviously solid offer of alliance. But, it was no matter, Glimmer would come around. The message had been strangely short. She was sure that her friend was very busy.

She returned to her work station, which was separated from the others. She needed quiet. She liked the quiet. It was focused.

The Tower could regulate the systems of every arcology on Mount Canterhorn now, and handle Canterlot’s relatively complex waste management system. She had been asked to delay connecting the defensive network and the Palace’s own closed computer systems. This was alright. It was strange, but irrelevant.

They were approaching the old limits. The Tower could maintain. It could guide and control. But it was not learning, not by her standards. It’s improvements to efficiency she had discarded largely as simply due to the Tower being an arcane computer. It did not need to rely on the slowness of physicality. That wasn’t creation, it was just a kind of rote perfection. She was not satisfied.

The Tower had to do more than learn and encode. It had to do more. It had to think for itself. Without carefully constructed palettes of paints that her engineers provided, it had to paint the sky for itself. Twilight knew it was possible. Any doubt that she’d held had been obliterated long before now, back when there had only been two sections, and they’d successfully managed to have the Tower adaptively alter the environment of Three Sapphires in real time.

The test was a simple guessing game, oddly enough. Anticipating human needs had been part of the project’s core goals, and they had wanted to gauge what they had accomplished.

Twilight had been thinking about the day she saw Princess Celestia wrest the sun from its course, the Summer Sun Celebration, a memory so central to her that not even the variations could write themselves into it. She laid out in the grass of Three Sapphires, and waited. And the arcology’s artificial sun had shone just for her, and the wind had blown her hair back and forth infuriatingly, just like that day. The grass had been gold in the unnatural light, just as it had when her teacher had held the sun. It was perfect in every way, and she had not said a single word about any of it.

But it could do more. Guessing what people wanted was only the first step.

Twilight was not lonely.

She had friends, and she cared for them. They were all very busy. They all had a lot of work, and so did she. Of course she did. The Tower grew and grew. Her last report to Princess Celestia had been so extensive that the Princess had confessed that she wasn’t sure if she possessed the force of will to read it all. Twilight knew that she possessed this in abundance. Celestia did not tire. Ponies tired, but the Sun was never tired. It never lagged in the sky.

What she actually meant was ‘Twilight, you are letting yourself get carried away’ which was both true and irrelevant.

She was always doing that, not saying the actual thing she was saying. Celestia was like a puzzle box. Or rather, the social tact that she employed was like a puzzle box. Within it, when she shook it, you could hear the ringing of some curiosity worth pursuit. But the damned thing had to be difficult and hard to read and so very smugly closed shut. It couldn’t just come with instructions, no, that was far too easy, she’d go soft, no it needed to take a thousand steps.

Celestia across the table from her, resting her chin on her hands.

The Sun glowed in her eyes. “Twilight, how have you been feeling?”

“In what way?”

“That’s a rather good question. Physically.”

Twilight answered mechanically. “I am doing well. My health is being monitored by project personnel, to make sure I don’t suffer from overwork or exhaustion. The project also includes meal plans which are looked over by a nutritionist.”

Celestia blinked at her owlishly.

“Mentally.”

“I do not understand the question, entirely,” Twilight replied after a pause that was perhaps a bit too long. “What does it mean?”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“When people ask that. Sorry. Ignore me. I am doing well. I am happy with the work we are doing. I am a little melancholy sometimes. I wish my friends all worked in the same lab as me. I’ve been sleeping well but worry about fatigue. I eat well but miss my old favorites because they’re considered unhealthy. I drink too much coffee but have refused any attempt to lessen this. I have started trying new teas. I—”

“Twilight, dear, I think I understand.”

Twilight shut her mouth.

“You’re lonely down there.”

Twilight was not lonely.

“Yes,” she said and deflated all at once. “Yes, I am. I am lonely. My team does not talk to me much, even when we are working. I did make that more difficult. I do not really have a team anymore. They just share a space with me.”

“Twilight, have you considered a short rest from work? Perhaps a visit to your parents?”

Twilight nodded.

Laying on the artificial beach, drenched in artificially wholesome sun, Twilight Sparkle let her dozing father sleep and tried to feel every single grain of sand.

She tried to be aware of them individually. This failed. That was alright.

There were others, here and there, artificial projections created by the system to simulate a beach full of happy vacationers. It was charming, in its way. One of them walked by, a few meters off, and Twilight’s eyes rolled to meet her. She blinked in the blazing digital light, confused for a moment. A woman with perfectly coiffed hair, in of all things a purple one piece bathing suit straight out of a fashion catalogue from before her mother was even born. Who was—?

Her mother was talking. “What about Moondancer? What is she up to these days?”

Twilight thought about sand slipping through her fingers. Clinging to her thighs. Getting lost in her clothes. Getting into her eyes, rubbing away strange sights with their friction. “She’s working abroad,” was her answer. “I think she’s at the border with the Concordat, upgrading the infrastructure of the monorails.”

“That sounds like quite a job! Did she ever marry that boy?”

“Moondancer is a lesbian.”

Her mother laughed. “Oh! Right, right. I forgot. What a thing!”

Yes, it was a thing. “She thought she might marry Trefoil a year ago but it didn’t work out. I don’t know why.”

“Well, that’s just how it is, sometimes, dear. Sometimes it just doesn’t all shake up like we plan it!”

The one hundred and eleventh Starswirl variation was overwritten on a memory from her teens. Celestia had assigned her the task of producing a self-contained terminal, with its own magical power source. Twilight had arrived in her office with a device far more powerful than her teacher had expected. She could not remember anything said. She remembered Celestia’s smile, but her lips were traced with the thaumic lines of the variation.

Twilight wondered, sometimes, what the appropriate response to the costs of magic were. To learn something so thoroughly that you overwrote yourself, or wrote yourself into a perfect imitation of that thing. She had always felt like it was a sort of process of approximation, as if she was always becoming something, never quite getting there.

But, at the same time, she did miss having that memory. Sometimes. Or wished it had become interlaced with something a bit more practically useful than a practice variation which produced a hazy purple light.

The tower was also in the process of Becoming, of approximating itself. So was the network which would form Her body throughout the polity. Moondancer had connected the last of the transportation infrastructure only yesterday. The network’s first phase would be complete so very soon.

She accepted another report from one of the few members of her team still awake. Twilight kept late hours. Sometimes people even joined her.

Her. She retraced her steps and realized she had begun to think of the tower as a She. When had that happened? Besides being a bit presumptuous, it was so odd and unnecessary.

“Ma’am?”

Twilight blinked. Oh. That person was still there.

“Yes? Sorry, my thoughts wandered.”

“We’re a bit concerned. I mean… I know you wanted to go over the latest additions with a fine tooth comb, but myself and Gwyndolin and Zephyr are all well rested and I actually did my dissertation on, ah…”

Twilight sighed. She glanced at the name tag on the woman’s chest and burned quietly with shame that she needed to. “Trade Winds, do I appear unable to work?”

“I, ah.” Trade Winds fidgeted. Twilight looked into her sea-green eyes and frowned.

“That isn’t a trick question. I’m quite serious. It would be detrimental to the project if I collapsed mid-step, after all.” She paused briefly. “It would also make me a burden to all of you,” she added, “And I would like to avoid that. I am not blind. I know I can become absorbed in work. If you say that I look ‘worn out’ then I will trust you.”

Trade Winds took a deep breath. “Sorry, I’m just kind of, I don’t know. You look exhausted, ma’am. Bags under your eyes and pale. Also, I’m really sorry, but we all noticed earlier. The crying.”

The what?

Trade Winds continued. “We’ve talked, and we made absolutely sure that it would be alright, but with what’s on the agenda tonight we can definitely stay on track without you being here. If you needed to not be here. I’m sorry, we don’t want to pry, we just wanted—”

“To give me the option,” Twilight finished, her voice flat. “I see. Thank you, Trade Winds. You may go. I think that I’ll just finish up a few things here before I clock out for the evening.”

Her subordinate left in a hurry. Twilight Sparkle blinked at her screen and then flicked on the built-in camera to look at herself.

Oh. Right. Light.

“Lights at one hundred percent, please.”

Twilight struggled to keep her eyes open. How long had it been since she had walked about in real daylight, or anything approaching it? Too long, probably. Her face looked awful. She did not dispute that. Her hair was unkempt and noticeably greasy from a distance, her eyes were tinged with snaking red blood vessels showing through the white, bags forming under her eyes, everything pale… Denying that she was running on empty would have been pointless.

When had she been crying? She cast back through the last few hours for a point where the night shift would have even seen her at all, and could only think of her break earlier, when they filtered in and the second shift team had left. Twilight had been standing before the window, turning to greet the new arrivals for only a moment. Why would she have been…?

Denying she was tired was pointless, but wildly speculating also seemed pointless. She was tired. Let it drop. Weariness produced abnormal reactions in people, it was a known phenomenon, and she didn’t need to interrogate that any further.

Sorcerers dreamed, but a mage often does not.

As so many things did, it boiled down to methodology. What one did was so often a matter more of how one did things, at least according to Twilight. Sorcerors were bound by their methodology, married to their understanding of magic and the universe which magic interacted with through a thick veil of tradition and fable. Magic had worked for them for centuries in unknowable and untameable ways. One must be strong to control it, one must be pure of heart and mind. Magic spoke to and for the Worthy who could begin to comprehend it.

Mages knew that magic was a part of the universe. Separate from what conventionally had been called nature, yes, but nature was such a mutable concept. Nature was what Was, and it brokered no treaty with fantasy. Mages plumbed the universe for its secrets, wrested them from the claws of ignorance. Perhaps, they suggested, it may not be a matter of transcendent worth whom magic chooses, and perhaps, maybe, it was not for their superb qualities that the Worthy were always of very rigidly-defined bloodlines.

Twilight was a mage, and she grasped the tools of reshaping reality by study and by her mind’s expansion and change, and so she did not dream as others dreamed. She bathed in the light of the patterns which had first broken in her virgin consciousness, when magic had been a romantic aspiration.

So why was she dreaming?

Twilight felt her face. It felt like nothing. She slapped her cheek. She slapped it again, harder, teeth already gritting instinctively from the pain which did not come.

But she felt the breeze come through the window, and whirled to meet it.

This was her old dorm room. She’d only been in it a year, but it was a fond memory. Without rising, she knew that outside the window would be a lovely view of the Golden Wheat Memorial Fountain and the verdant grass cordoned into sections by paths. The Clover Thaumic Sciences building standing across the way, red tiles over beige stucco. The birds chirped. She remembered the birds. They perched in the branches of the willows, and a choir of them always chose the restful willow outside the entrance to the dormitory.

Twilight ran over the possibilities quickly, as she’d been trained to in unfamiliar circumstances.

“Why am I here?” Nothing. “Is anyone else here who is willing to speak with me directly?” Nothing.

She took a deep breath and stood. The chair scraped along the old wood floor. It was the same as it had been all that time ago.

She refused to accept that the ability to dream had just occurred to her again. This was obviously some sort of construct, presumably magical but possibly mundane, intended to… what, exactly? Trap her? Get her to reveal her secrets?

The Union had no enemies, not really, and not anymore. None with the capacity to get at her in this way. It hadn’t fought a war in decades, and its former foes had long since joined it or established extensive ties.

Twilight Sparkle walked to the window and peered out, and she saw what she’d expected. It was sometime in the early afternoon, in that sweet window of time before the day heated up, when the sun was slipping from its apex, when the shadows were returning and the willow tree by the dormitory was calling her name.

Had the sun been this bright? Probably. She shielded her eyes.

The quad was empty, which was the only detail that felt off. This was around the time it was most full, milling with students let out of morning classes. But there was no one at all.

No, there was someone.

She came walking up the path, hands clutching a bundle of books held against her chest. Twilight gripped the window sill and scowled. She watched this lone interloper like a hawk committing prey to memory.

Blue-violet hair pulsing with electrical light, dark violet eyes like mysteries, skin a rich dark like dusk-touched wine, steps measured and sure. The woman from Celestia’s sitting room and the beach. She was sure of it. Twilight had no doubts at all.

No doubts but one, and a very disturbing one at that. If she had seen this woman before, if she were here now, could it have all been a dream? Had they constructed her some sort of sleeping prison? Wouldn’t it make sense, to work on an important task that was important but seemingly never finished?

Twilight shook. She backed away from the window, practically leaped away from it. Protests still spilling out of her that it couldn’t be true, she searched for somewhere else to flee, to avoid this woman—

Twilight tried not to wince as the doctor’s light shone into her eyes.

She’d woken in a haze of confusion, calling Celestia at five in the morning for help. The Union’s top nueroscientist owed Celestia a few personal favors, and so by six he’d had Twilight an appointment in a little office with a friend of his who operated in one of the suburbs below High Canterlot.

His tests had all been mundane and routine. Twilight tried not to be frustrated about this. Something was wrong with her, but not that sort of thing. They assumed she’d suffered some kind of stress-related hallucination or meltdown and it was grating. She wasn’t an idiot. She knew her limits. She knew that she’d crossed those limits in the past, but that didn’t make her less competent, and right now…

It was just a waste of time, in the end. As the doctor left again, she let herself scowl at his closing door. Idiots. This was serious interference. Mind-magic was difficult and often had to be done at short range. Any attempt to access her sleeping consciousness through her augmented eyes would have left some sort of sign of damage or tampering.

When they let her go she ignored her teacher’s instructions to call. She ignored her mother’s call. She went back to her now rather abandoned quarters in the main Three Sapphires habitat and with the lights at a safe dimness, she went through the stomach-churning and painful process of examining each augmented eye in turn.

Few knew she’d been augmented. How could they know? Twilight had had access to some of the best surgeons in the Union, and they’d done a stellar job of making sure it all looked natural. She could even adjust how “human” her eyesight was, in the words of one of the technicians. The glasses weren’t necessary, but she could make them so. It had been kept her from losing her sight.

But there’d been nothing. They were fine. Everything was fine.

She wanted to scream.

Because it wasn’t fine. Didn’t they see that?

Twilight gripped her small omni-tool until her knuckles were white. How could they? She couldn’t even find traces of tampering! But you didn’t just regain things like dreaming! She’d not seen a single line of text, not a single memorized diagram, not even a trace of one of the variations. They’d overwritten everything else! They’d overwritten her childhood memories, her birthdays, her first drink, the Summer Sun Celebration, graduation, everything! But not this! And now it had that woman in it, that stranger!

There was nothing to be done, was there?

That was a horrible thought. If she had no recourse, then… then what? Then nothing. Or, really, then anything. Someone could just hijack her whenever they wished.

Twilight Sparkle held out a hand and looked at it in the low light. It still hurt. She’d been so upset and careless earlier that she’d slammed her hand and the first mug of tea into the computer desk when she’d sat down. That had been before the self-diagnostic. When she’d thought she could just calm down and think about things rationally, and figure out what had gone wrong with her hardware. But nothing had gone wrong. Her augments, eyes and everything, were running at full. They were optimal.

She was sub-optimal. She was the problem.

She’d have to sleep again, eventually. At some point. But she didn’t want to. She feared it. Next time, she’d be there, and so would the figure. What would she say? What would she want? What could Twilight possibly have to give her?

She groaned softly. “Why now?”

The Interminable

Their great fortress then did they found,

And cast till they gat sure ground.

All fell to work, both man and child,

Some howkit clay, some burnt the tyld.

Ane Dialog, David Lindsay

In her dreams the world kept ending.

There was no explosion. There was smoke. Or there was distant rumbling. Or just a dark sky. Waves of locusts outside her window, the glow of fire, the crackling of circuits sparking, the coughing of pandemics. Sometimes there were none of these things, and she was lying on her couch inside and the world was ending and she just knew that. The eschaton emmantized, the ticking of all the clocks stopped, gravity let go and all things spiraled up into nothing like flitting embers from a fire.

And then, she woke up, and the world was not over and her alarm was ringing, and the bed was vibrating as she’d set it to until she had pulled her sleep-addled self into a seated position.

The upheaval of a month ago was well and happily forgotten. She told no one about he dreaming, and she did not expect that to change. Why would it? Informing others of her continued dreaming could only cause trouble, and so after a shameful few days of distress Twilight Sparkle had righted the ship. A mantra pulled from an old book had risen up from her past, ready to guide her: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

So she passed it over in silence. She dressed herself, sensible gray, and ate a sparse breakfast over the morning’s reports. She was, technically speaking, the Chief Director of the project, but much of the actual workings of the machinery of progress was not directly at her beck and call. Supplying the physical needs of Three Sapphires and its workforce were the purview of others, who she could overrule but whom she was loathe to—and they knew it. She signed off on reports on her pad, her mouth a grim line. To interfere was unnecessary. To micromanage was a misuse of energy. But there was a suppressed part of her that wanted to meddle, to ask a thousand questions, to run the math.

It was a useful part of her, if troublesome. Celestia, in their long hours of tutoring, had smiled and said, it’s the part of you that wants to take the whole universe apart like a clock and understand it. It’s a way of loving. It had been such an odd thing to say. It was an odd thing to remember as she finished breakfast and walked out to face another day.

Her shift today was twelve hours. Building had slowed, not for lack of effort but to accommodate testing. While the basic core had been in constant, ceaseless operation, much of the tower had never once been powered. It was time to test them, and so instead of endless coding, compiling, revising, overseeing, she now simply waited and watched. Far, far above her mobile office pod, near the bottom of the shaft, a constellation of violet light winked into existence. She smiled. She did not need to read any of the screens or listen to one of her technicians report verbally what he was seeing from the readouts. She knew it had gone well.

The whole shift had stopped in its tracks to watch readouts and nervously chat while they waited for the reports now streaming in. One woman clapped delightedly, a man offered his colleague a handshake and a quick tension-relieving joke. The small crowd milled about and congratulated each other. Twilight could feel their nervous-yet-excited energy, but it did not touch her. These interactions were just noise, background radiation. She could understand in a clinical way, from a distance, but she could not understand thinking that the Tower would be anything less than operational.

Why would a god be held back by human mistakes, after all? It would come into being despite them, eventually.

Twilight had already begun the trek around the bubble of humanity when she found herself waylaid by a smiling young technician.

“Congratulations, ma’am,” he said, face split in a smile.

Reflexively, she returned it. “Thank you. I had complete confidence in our success, of course, but it is nice to see it in action. But there’s more to be done.”

Her smile, plastic and frozen, remained. The technician let her pass, and if there was anything amiss she did not notice and did not care to notice. Wooden as she had been, every word had been true. She had complete confidence, and there was more to be done.

She wasn’t sure when things died down outside of her small office in the back room. The celebration and the relief were just fleeting, temporary things. The tower was what mattered.

Moondancer cleared her throat.

“The rail stations and emergency power networks are all secure. We’ve found some significant security weaknesses in the overall system, Director. Most of it is simple encryption protocols, adding another layer of security, basic things. The actual connections themselves are fine.”

Twilight blinked. “Security?”

On the screen, Moondancer bit her lip. Had she always been this… emotive? Twilight wasn’t sure. “Well, yeah. Security.”

“I think the director is asking for some examples,” suggested Likely Story. Twilight did not appreciate his help or his presence. He was a suit from the Union’s commerce board and she found him repugnant, when she thought of him at all, which she strove not to. “I would also be interested in—”

“No,” Twilight said, cutting him off. “I’m more unsure who exactly we are securing against.”

Moondancer grimaced. “I mean, no one and everyone? You can’t just connect everything together and not secure it. If everything is on the same network, and its all accessible…”

“The Tower will be sentient enough to counter anything faster than we could,” Twilight pointed out. “Faster, smarter, and more capable. It will be a native to the environment. This could be more simply solved by just shoring up its own defenses and making sure it has unimpeded administrative access.”

Likely Story snorted. “That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it? Handing over the Union’s entire infrastructure to one being… it’s one thing to unify our disparate network hubs, and another entirely to just blindly accept a machine’s cognitive abilities warranting words like sentience, isn’t it?”

Isn’t it, isn’t it, Twilight hated the words isn’t it. They were what cowards used to question things they didn’t understand and couldn’t understand. What she wanted to say was that Likely Story was an idiot with delusions of status, perhaps even personhood, but telling the man he was a slug was unwise.

“Extreme is not a helpful or useful word in this situation, Undersecretary. You should know, with the scope of your ministry’s efforts and responsibilities that the word ‘extreme’ applies to so much at the national scale that it becomes a modifier without weight. Building a national-level transit system was extreme. Unifying most of a continents financial institutions was extreme. Our Union’s existence itself is due only to mundane acts of extreme scope and effort. I am unsure what you mean to communicate.”

Every word like a force-bullet from her mind. Words should be able to kill, and it was unfair that they could not.

He coughed. “Sure, yes. Economies of scale are a thing, I’ll grant that. But we’re still talking over something radical like… yes, I know, radical is not a useful word. The issue of unimpeded admin access is a separate one from the system’s security.”

Twilight glanced away from him to the time. He wasted so much of it. She wanted to return to her work.

“I don’t think we would need to stall out anything,” Moondancer offered. Her voice sounded odd. “Really, Director, we can do this without a fuss. I just need authorization for overtime and maybe hiring a couple of contractors and it’ll be done in a week. It’s not a huge deal.”

“Acceptable,” Twilight said. “Send me a work order and I’ll sign it. Anything else related to it, and I’ll sign as well, just make sure you mark it as important so it’s not lost in the pile.” She turned back to Likely Story. “My itinerary for this meeting ends with an item for security issues and then an opening for questions. Do you have any that can be answered in a timely manner?”

He gaped at her, like some sort of mindless fish. Her stony face did not budge.

“I, uh, well there are a few…”

“If they are more complex questions, they can also be submitted to me via mail. I will be reviewing comments and questions from the ministries ahead of the council meeting at the end of the month, which would be a better venue for anything we cannot answer shortly.”

He nodded.

Twilight waited for three seconds, counted them, and then nodded herself. “Right. Department heads, please make sure your monthly reports are in by the end of the week. That will be all for the day. Thank you.”

She cut the feed.

Another dream, and another world’s ending.

This time, she was lying in the back of an ancient flatbed truck somewhere in the green fields north of Mt. Canterhorn. She could see the mountain in the distance, its crown covered in some sort of smog.

She was uncomfortable, but it felt unimportant. Humid summer air lay on her like a damp blanket, clinging to her hair and crawling on her skin. Her clothes felt ill-fitting. The seams of her pants felt jagged and harsh. They had rubbed her raw. She had run and run and run, from something or maybe to something. The world was ending. She was alright. She was tired.

The sky was gray but alive, a whirring. The wind howled, the sky chittered, the sun was barely visible. It was like seeing the sun glaring through the window through a sheer curtain. She wanted to turn away from it, lay on her side like she would in bed, get the sun out of her eyes. But she did not. She probably couldn’t. Her body was emptied out.

Exhausted or not, what was the point? You can’t outrun the sky.

She always wondered, before she woke up, where everyone was. It was a little odd, wasn’t it? Whose truck was this? She’d never know. It was the only part of dreaming that truly frustrated her. She just wanted to know. Was that so much to ask?

“Yes, probably. Who said you were so entitled, hm?”

The woman was there. Twilight tried to rise and her arms betrayed her, slipping on the sweat-swamped truckbed.

“Who are you?” Twilight asked. She tried to rise again, to find that woman, the one from the beach and the waiting room. “Hold on! Hold on.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Twilight righted herself at last, and her whole body shook. “I know I’m dreaming. Or whatever this is, because I shouldn’t be able to dream at all.”

“And why would that be?”

Twilight swiveled her gaze. Nothing. The woman was not there. It was just her voice. Of course it was! Of course. She cursed.

“Because I’m a mage,” she said sourly.

The voice tsked, which was weirdly infuriating. “Such a straightforward but horrid trade, isn’t it? Give up your restful dreaming for power? I’d say its both too light and too heavy a yoke, wouldn’t you?”

“It’s not a trade. It is a byproduct.”

“A thing may exist de jure or de facto or both. If a thing is functionally an exchange, it is often helpful to think of it as an exchange.”

Twilight sighed. “It doesn’t matter. You are distracting me. I’m going to assume you aren’t going to be visible for this conversation. Is that accurate?”

“No, but also yes, for the given value of your subjectivity. So yes.”

“I hate that answer, but I’ll take it.”

The voice laughed and it was not like crystal or like bells or anything. It was just a laugh, warm and human and as mundane as possible. “You are a prickly one, Twilight Sparkle. I wonder if you are always so, or if you are under some undue stress.”

Twilight resisted the childish urge to growl. “I’m a busy woman.”

She was. And this was a waste of her time and energy. Her early fear that it was some trick or invasion had not left, but it was just a quiet simmering in the back of her mind. If her tormenter had meant to damage her in any serious way, they would have done so long before now. Giving her these false “dreams” was frustrating, yes, but it was hardly harmful. Technically.

“So you are! You’re, what was it, building God? Was that it?”

Twilight scooted to the edge of the flatbed. Long grass waited for her, and for a moment she thought about dropping off into it. The air was hot and humid, the world was ending, her body was spent—sure, but wasn’t this all window dressing?

“I am not building a deity. We are building a tower to house a super-powerful AI,” she said slowly. “Which is public knowledge by now, I’ll add.”

“Just a tower. Just an AI. Dead machines and a flat delivery. Where is your soul, Twilight? You’ve thought of more than this. I know you have.”

Twilight grimaced.

“It is important, yes. I know that there is more to it than the mere parts. We are knitting together a continent. I’ve said that myself, several times. I said it front of at least thirty cameras behind a podium to a crowd of a hundred. Maybe when I wake up I can send you the clips. If you leave me an address.”

“Oh, I’ve seen your address. Your voice was steady, and whoever wrote your speech did an excellent job. It was a little dry, but very solid.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “I wrote it.”

“Oh. I’m surprised.”

“Why?” She asked, finally deciding that taking a walk was a bit beyond her. She laid back. “Because I’m only able to do one thing? People assume that. I mean, not like me specifically, but those behind the keyboard. They can offer themselves the space to be full, realized individuals but to those with professions they don’t respect or understand? They’re cartoons. They’re graven images. Just lines and shading and all one thing. A profession of hats.”

They were quiet for a bit. Twilight did not know what to say. She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to say anything. The dream would not move on while she watched it, if it even could have moved on before she had said anything. She just wanted to be out. She just wanted to get back to the tower.

Twilight wiped her glasses off with the edge of her shirt. They weren’t strictly necessary, these glasses. But she liked them. They were comfortable. She wasn’t sure why they were comfortable, and yet they were. Her ocular implants could just adjust. But when she needed peace, when she was exhausted, she could just take the glasses off and with it cast off sight. It was so much more peaceful to let the world wash together in vague and vibrant shades.

She was feeling that urge now. In front of her, various team leaders muttered amongst themselves, shifted in their chairs, stacked papers. Hours. Twilight’s mind was like a blocked well. Hours and hours of meetings. Her life was meetings.

God, everything was meetings. That was the real secret, wasn’t it? A thousand years of philosophers huddled in their cliques trying to sort out right and wrong and the great unknowable mysteries of the universe that trapped them all… and here it was, the great mystery unveiled. It was all just a long series of tedious meetings about nothing until you died.

“Alright,” she began, “what is next? My itinerary says, ah…” She looked down with bleary eyes. “We finished with questions for the maintenance department, and I guess it’s me? Yes. I originally scheduled this to talk about the next phase, but that was a week ago, and we’ve actually already talked this to death. Would anyone mind skipping over?”

A chorus of answers.

Twilight blinked, and sighed. “Well, one thing? I did want to put out there that we’re looking for suggestions on the interface.”

Mint Breeze tilted her head, and Twilight caught the movement in the corner of her eye.

“Interface. I hadn’t thought of that at all, you know?” she said. “What context would we be engaging with the Tower in? It runs itself.”

“True,” Twilight said. “But we need a way to ask it questions, check its status, and it will need our consent and knowledge to do some things, even in my plan for its access and control.”

Moondancer, who’d arrived that morning, hummed. “It would need to be something simple enough that anyone could talk to it. It can’t be too difficult, right, because if it was, then all it takes to make the whole thing pointless would be for the resident tech to be on vacation.”

“Voice, then,” Twilight said. “I mean, that would be simple.”

Why had she said that? Her first thought hadn’t been voice at all. Her first inclination had been something visual and image-based.

Moondancer nodded. “That makes sense. Don’t need proximity, you just need a voice. I guess we could do a simple tactile interface as a backup. Normal Terminal.”

“I’ll have the team work on something we can use as a simple query input. It gives you a basic text readout, you can ask questions, blah blah.”

“Yeah, that’ll work. What do we do about the voice?”

“Somebody willing to record a lot for us to build a phonetic database.”

“Maybe Twilight?”

Twilight blinked out of a mindless reverie. She had been staring off into nothing. “Wait, wait what?”

It had been Moondancer, who now shrinked back, surprised herself. “Oh, sorry. I was just saying that we could use your voice.”

Twilight found the very idea… nauseating, which was surprising.

“Why?”

“I mean, this project has really been your baby before it was ours. You were the one working on this when it was just you, like…” She shrugged helplessly. “It felt right. Nothing more than that.”

Twilight just took that in. “I’ll, uh. I’ll think of something,” she said, feeling oddly loose. Limp. She wanted the meeting to come back rushing in so that her eyes could glaze over and her mind fog up. That made sense.

But a voice was a good idea. It was simple, it was “ergonomic” for the uninitiated leadership who would need to talk to the Tower’s AI. The suggestion made sense. Just… not the part where she voiced it. That felt wrong, arrogant at best and she wasn’t sure what at worse. But a voice… that she could think about.

III. The Earth's Voice

III. The Earth’s Voice

Nimrod, that curious champion,

Deviser was of that dungeon.

Nathing they spared their labors,

Like busy bees upon the flowers,

Or emmets travelling into June;

Another dream, the world ending this time in stone. A Gorgon’s curse, creeping out of the dead lands of the west, capturing everything. Around her, some fled before the spread. With the petrification came a sort of absent despair. A heavy cloud. There could be no escape. Too much had been lost already, and what life could be eked out—even if the whole rest of the world would be saved—would be short, brutish, and empty. Living in delicate arcologies short on everything until the inevitable systems failure and then suffocation or famine.

She read a book next to her parents' pool. The petrifying curse overtook their house. They were long gone for the eastern coast. Out of the house strode the stranger, in striking robes out of antiquity, her vibrant purple hair in perfect coifs, gold dangling from her hands and ears, Gems adorned the web of necklaces that lay across her ample bust. Her feet were burnished bronze, dazzling metallic sandals, and her skin was petrified, pure marble that moved.

“You do not like the suggestion that what you are building might, in fact, be a sort of God.”

“A Civic Spirit, maybe,” Twilight suggested flatly, not bothering to look up from her book.

“There’s a difference?”

“Absolutely.” She turned a page. “A civic spirit is not a personality. What I am building is not designed to be human, after all. To assign anthropomorphism to it would be foolish. Incorrect. Boring, actually. It’s so limiting.”

The Stranger circled her. The curse swallowed the house. The red sky, the sun sinking, the clouds retreating, they all seemed to drain of color. But she refused to give it all the time of day. Twilight turned another page.

“What are you reading?” The stranger asked.

“I am reading a book on old myths, ironically. It was not what I was reading before I fell asleep. Darkness Visible: A Study on Rowan Oak’s Aeneid. It’s good, actually. I’ve read it before.”

A hum. “What do you like about it?”

“I like that he finds the obvious readings of the text as boring as I find them. It is so easy, and so boring, and so fundamentally missing the point to read the poem as a straightforward heroic tale.” Twilight swallowed. “It is too obviously a work of art over mere propaganda. It doubts, it asks questions, it accuses, it despairs. It has depths. Its purpose is to have depths. To not see them is to deny the existence of the evidence of one’s eyes—and yet, obviously it is also an adventure story. Prince Worthy’s descent into Tartarus, meeting the ”

“So you’d said already.”

“I thought it was important enough to say it twice.”

The Stranger touched the table beside her, the one where her mother had sat so many summer days reading by the pool as Twilight now read by the pool. The table turned to stone in an instant. The parasol attached to the center, unfurled for no other reason than whim went with, shaking slightly as it did until it could no longer move.

“This is your parent’s home. Did you grow up here?”

Twilight, finally, stopped trying to read. “Yes. I grew up here, but they don’t own this house anymore. They moved when I was at University.”

“So you’ve come back to your roots, where you began, at the end of things.”

“No, I came back here because I liked this pool, and this house, and I have fond memories of my mother reading analog books as I swam laps and my father grilled and my brother and his girlfriend flirted. It is a strong memory, and it doesn’t have any code-overwriting on it. Well, it has a single line of Form 6. But it’s easy to ignore that. It’s just a string of spatial coordinates.” Twilight swallowed again. “I’m curious. Will I turn to stone if I look at you? Are you a Gorgon, then? It would fit what I’m reading presently. Ancient legends and the like.”

“I’m unsure. This is your dream, not mine. You made it.”

“Is it mine? How would I know that it isn’t yours?” Twilight challenged. She shut the book and laid it in her lap and stared at the neat fence surrounding her parent’s old backyard.

“I do not dream as you dream, or as anyone else dreams.”

“Ominous, mysterious, borderline nonsense.”

“An acidic tongue is a powerful tool, but not when it is used out of beat, Twilight. I speak the truth. I do not dream as you are dreaming now. You cannot understand my dreams.”

“Why?”

No answer. Twilight looked up, and her skin petrified.

It turned out that none of the vocal samples Twilight had acquired felt right. She was frustrated.

The spur-of-the-moment suggestion that the interface have a verbal component had been a mistake. With her own voice decidedly out of the question, she’d found herself with no one else to give the task. Celestia had quietly encouraged her to treat the whole thing seriously, and Twilight suspected it was a ruse to get her to rest.

Which… was fair. She’d been forced to moderate her own stance on this. Overwork was not helping her. More than that, even though she had taken a brief rest around the time of her first dreams, there wasn’t actually a lot for her to do directly at the moment. Physical construction on the Tower had slowed as great machines moved delicate components, and the foremen had been very convincing in assuring her that nothing could be done to speed up the process.

The nature of the Tower’s actual workings involved complicated networks of systems. Things needed to be activated in proper sequence, and all while not overwhelming the power supplies on hand. Simulations could only give her so much. She needed the physical body of the tower to realize its insides.

Returning to her notes on the vocal interface, Twilight heaved a great sigh. She was glad most of the shift was gone, all on leave while the project stalled. It would give her space to just… play samples to the open air. She had moved from her office into the main working room, the one with the cold window and the view of the glowing tower that hung in the void.

She selected the next sample. The woman on the other end introduced herself briefly. Maple.

“Welcome to the Tower Interface. Please state the nature of your inquiry. Welcome to the Tower. How can I help you? Welcome to the Tower Interface. Welcome—”

Twilight’s vision swam as her mind decided to take a permanent holiday elsewhere.

Princess Celestia sipped at her tea. Twilight watched her with rapt attention, as she always did. It was silly, but for some reason ever since she was a child she had been unable to ignore even for a moment anything that Celestia did. Surely as the arcane forms were burnt into her mind and heart, so Celestia’s mundane doings were probably forever a part of her, for good or ill.

“You’re quiet today,” Celestia said.

“It’s been a long week,” Twilight replied with practiced grace. Specifically practiced, in fact. She had practiced excuses for the bags under her eyes as soon as she had noticed them. Celestia noticed such things, a small crack in her radiant facade, that she cared about trifles.

“I’m sure,” Celestia relented. Twilight checked that off the list in her head.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t looked forward to her periodic evening with Celestia. Just… she was very tired, these days. And litigating that to person after person after person wore on the will.

Celestia, as if she had heard all of these thoughts, continued. “I’m sure you are resting when you can. I know what it is like to burn the midnight oil so often that you’re not sure when up is up and what time it is.”

Twilight cracked an honest smile for a moment. “I do get enough sleep, at least. Not all of us can forgo the mortal coil and its restraints. Yet,” she added, after a pause.

“Yet. Though I have striven to keep myself as close to mortal rhythms as possible. I didn’t always,” Celestia said, and now she looked off, at nothing. She held a teacup in a perfect saucer and stirred with the other hand, and Twilight wondered absurdly how she managed to do that without looking and not worry about spilling the tea on her beautiful white robes. She could see the tea spilling in her mind’s eye, but it did not spill, and Celestia had continued.

“I strove and strove. I stayed up for days. Two thousand years ago I did not sleep for fourteen years. I had too much to do. Griffonia had imploded into war, and the Minotaurs had been drawn in. General war was the business of the day. I campaigned ceaselessly for a decade in Griffonia, battle after grisly battle, years of long brutal marches. And only when my fearful ponies begged me to stop did I relent. They were weary unto death. I could only watch and realize what I had done after it was, well. Done.”

A sip.

“War is an extraordinary circumstance,” Twilight said, despite knowing nothing about it.

“It is,” Celestia agreed simply.

“Sometimes I wish I could forgo sleep,” Twilight admitted. “Not that long, obviously. But for a long time. A few weeks, maybe. A month. Life would be easier.”

“Easier if you had the time?”

Twilight nodded. “So much easier.”

“Is it truly time you seek?” Celestia asked softly. Her burning sun’s-corona eyes were back. They always filled the room. Twilight felt momentarily naked before them. Her defenses, prepared and measured, began to melt away.

The experience was unpleasant and frightening. Not only did she fear the feeling, but she feared her own fear. This was Celestia! Why should she feel worry in the presence of Celestia? In that moment the distance between them felt a galaxy wide.

“I’m not sure I understand,” she said carefully.

“It’s not a trap, or a trick. I mean what I said, silly. Is having more time so important to you?”

“I suppose it is.”

“I’m always interested by that sentiment. I have had more time than anyone else, and I am not sure ‘more time’ is as nice or as useful as people seem to think. What you imagine, Twilight, is a kind of longer overnight work session. You imagine something that lasts a night at best, and you extend it outwards. But that is not how time works. Even without exhaustion, without sleep, fickle time is moving. We give time its meaning, and we describe its structure, but it is still a wild thing that cannot be as of yet tamed. More time will always look like paralysis, in the long view of history. More time for more rest, for more indecision. Time for more weariness.”

Twilight swallowed. “Shouldn’t that be avoidable?”

“Slowing down?”

“If you weren’t exhausted…” She gestured with one hand in a rolling motion. “You’d just keep going.”

Celestia’s smile was genuine, but it still felt oddly chilling.

“You’d think, wouldn’t you? Only engaging when you wanted to, only expending energy or care when it felt necessary. You could husband your strength for an eon. But the world is not a few connected empty rooms, is it? There’s all sorts of things in it. Always moving, they are. Always yelling and wanting to be seen. A million million souls hurtling from void to void,” Celestia said, returning to her tea. “A million souls desperate for some mark on the face of time, and almost none of them even get close, and even without knowing them you know they exist. Time impresses its own knowledge on you. It is… tiring.”

“That… that sounds tiring.”

Celestia hummed. “I surrendered my true power when the Union was formed, Twilight. I did so with grace, so I’m told. The truth was that it took all of my effort not to kiss the feet of those who took it from me.”

Twilight processed that. Or, rather, she tried to process that. It was a lot to think about. Perhaps Celestia sensed this. Perhaps she just knew from experience what it did to those little flames in her presence when she revealed even the smallest of secrets, for she smiled.

“I’ve brought the mood down.”

“No, not at all! You’ve just been thoughtful,” Twilight said quickly. “It’s me. I think.”

“Are you satisfied? Happy with what you are doing?”

Twilight bit her lip. “Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, I think so. I think that I am. As much as those words have meaning for me.”

Celestia sat back in the plush chair. “Then that is enough. Though, on reflection, I’ve said so once before. And yet…” she shook her head. “But for some reason, I cannot shake the feeling of time tonight, Twilight.”

Twilight shifted on the loveseat. Celestia’s study was far more welcoming in the morning, as the sun brightened very corner, but even in the dead of night, Celestia herself was a kind of sun.

“A melancholy mood?” Twilight asked, prodding with curiosity despite herself.

“Perhaps, yes. I’ve not had a good week myself, Twilight,” Celestia said with a little flourish over the table between her seat and Twilight’s loveseat. A small holo-projector there cast images in the air and Twilight’s practiced eye for detail made quick work of things.

“The shortages…”

Celestia sighed. “Yes. The shortages. Still ongoing, on the fringes. But now its spreading. I’ve been able to stem individual shortfalls with my personal arcane power, but how long does that last? Despite what many believe, I cannot be everywhere.” She cracked a small smile across the fuzzy images of angry townspeople crowding an ornate old-style cityhall. “And it takes time for even my teleportation to translate from here to somewhere as far as Hoofington. A few hours, in fact. Things obviously improved after I did arrive, but…”

“Too many moths smother the flame,” Twilight murmured.

“I hate that metaphor. I told you I did. Power is not the problem. Supply is. A system which grows outwards and in complexity inevitably becomes too much to handle unassisted.”

Twilight nodded. “I remember.”

“I still believe in technology, Twilight. I believe it can provide solutions to the problems it's created—I resent even that framing! What is the problem, exactly, in power? We have lit up the night and shielded ourselves from the sun’s excess. The wingless fly, the lame walk again. As information accumulates every person on this planet who has access to the web we create becomes more. A planet of people whose souls expand beyond their bodies into a great, heaving, information-filled mass. Culture and science and passion throwing us all forward… I still believe in it as I did the day the first reactor was fired. But the problem of complexity is still vexing. We made our stand on the idea that all things inevitably come out in raw numbers, Twilight. And I know it will, but…”

“It’s taking longer than you’d like,” Twilight said, and wanted to retreat. But this wasn’t about her. It wasn’t. She needed to know that.

“And longer than you would like, I’d imagine,” Celestia said with a laugh.

“Well, yes.”

Twilight settled again. She felt a little more at peace in this vein of reasoning. Not a complaint, not a condemnation. She was safe. And Celestia had always liked engaging like this on quiet evenings. It was practically a return to adolescence. She cleared her throat.

“The system, the equation, must be balanced out. If it weren’t destined to be, nothing before it would have worked. We know that our reasoning is sound. There is a solution to something like energy distribution, but more than that problems to the many other resource problems. A solution that does not require reaching for the stars, or wandering into the seas. One we can work out ourselves… with some help. A solution that does not privilege one over the other, food and energy and comfort and justice in full measure.”

“For everyone, everywhere, and all at once.”

“That was the original motto you suggested,” Twilight said, remembering back to those early meetings.

“Cutie Marks would be pleased,” Celestia replied drily. “I wish you drank, Twilight.”

Twilight blinked. “What?”

“Oh, nothing. It’s just…” Twilight could not believe it. An embarrassed Celestia. The world was on its way out. “I can’t help but feel, sometimes, as if I am living in a dozen times at once, and then all of a sudden am in none. Adrift, for a while, in a moment that I cannot share. A drink would be nice.”

Twilight mumbled something to the effect that she could, if it were important, and Celestia half-rose from her seat to touch Twilight’s hand.

“None of that, dear. You’re alright. Forgive the silliness of an old woman, and say nothing of it. Besides, there are much more interesting things to talk about!”

“Like what?” Twilight asked, feeling a bit of whiplash.

“Like the voice. You mentioned you were still trawling through vocal lines.”

Twilight groaned. “None of them work. I don’t know why. It’s irrational, and I hate that I cannot let go my gut responses. It’s so… it’s so unprofessional! I don’t want it to be me, or you, or any of the voices I’ve heard! It’s just…”

Celestia laughed. “Poor Twilight, struck by the artist’s madness.”

“Hardly.”

“If we knew it was going to be truly alive… we could simply let it choose.”

Twilight groaned again. “Alive is such a complicated word.”

“Oh, I know, I’m not here to badger you about it. Just an idle thought. It would solve the problem.”

And Twilight had to admit that it would, wouldn’t it? If the Earth itself was to have a guiding hand, it would make sense for it to have its own voice. And as they talked, she couldn’t help but imagine what it might say… and in place of a voice she had not chosen, she chose the voice of the woman who walked her dreams.

IV. The Defeat of General Ludd

IV.

Some worked underneath, and some above

With strong Ingenious masonry

Upward their weir did fortify.

The man in front of her was the site foreman. Her mind grappled with him for a moment, and then shrugged its shoulders, and pronounced him sturdy and imposing. Did he block out the light? He might as well. He was as much a tower as a man. As if something of the mega-structure which he was helping to bring to life had seeped into him somehow, here in the lowlight.

Twilight shook her head and chastised her overworked imagination. Clear head, Twilight. Clear head, clear thoughts, she told herself. The last thing she needed was to start having metaphysical musings about every odd workingman down in the pit.

The foreman sniffed and cleared his throat.

“Thank you for coming, ma’am,” he said.

She blinked. “Pardon? I was needed, there’s no need for thanks.”

“Fair enough, fair enough,” he said amiably, and gestured for Twilight to follow him from the safety cordon downwards. Steps had been carved out of the rock precariously and if she were honest with herself, haphazardly. Safety bars dug like needles in rocky flesh protruded rudely out at unnatural right angles. Twilight was thankful for them. She was not the most dextrous, after all. She’d been more keen on theoretical boundaries and less keen on physical ones.

The foreman continued. “But it will be nice for the men to feel like you’re with us down here. I mean, I’ve met you a few times, miss. I know how focused you are. But it gets lonely down here. Feels a bit strange.”

“How so?”

“Well. The light, the long hours, the extreme environment. That’s natural, only natural. Man gets a little weird workin’ on his own or with a few like-minded fellas on jobs like that. But combined with how important this all is, well. It can feel a little alienation’. Hard to talk about work with your family or the boys on your off days. Hard to get ‘em to understand.”

Twilight nodded, and steadied herself. The steps were slick. She wondered briefly at the ease with which the foreman moved. She momentarily scrounged for his name in her mind, pushing aside row upon row of memories scored through with thaumic code. “I feel the same, Mr. Granite. I really do. Your crews are usually the only other people working on the Tower some nights that I’m working.”

He grunted with approval. When she stumbled, his hand shot up to steady her, a firm but careful grip around her arm. “I tried to find boots for you, but we didn’t have your size. Your aide said you wouldn’t want to wait for them, either.”

“Some things cannot wait,” Twilight said.

Granite shrugged. As if to say, sure-sure, noncommittal, he tipped his head a bit and they continued down.

The steps were steeper now. The final stages of the skeletal tower pointing down suspended over the scraped-bare rock. Here and there, she saw more obvious signs of human activity, things that no amount of erosion could have achieved. Tents of tarp held up by more of the metal stakes from the path and tied down, harboring tools and supplies. A prefabricated shelter reworked into a storage shed, and another which she knew from reports had been requisitioned as a canteen.

The tower which hung above glowed with lambent blue thaumic power. It looked so alive! Somewhere in the back of her mind she expected it to be humming, and was constantly surprised that it wasn’t. She felt small, smaller than a mote of dust. Irrationally, it was as if the structure had some sort of pressure to it, like its enormity warped space itself, and she was being drawn in and slowly, inexorably crushed by it. A black hole in infant form, birthed at the heart of her world, by her own hand, by many hands. Helped into the world to swallow it all. Would it preserve them? She had read theoretical naval gazing about using black holes as sort of massive quantum computers, with information written onto the surface of the supermassive beast itself. You could turn the monster into a library, carving into its hide. You could capture a kind of snapshot of reality there, read total pictures of reality there. When the galaxy died in darkness the final observer could read all the history of man on the beasts that let nothing, not even knowledge, escape.

She wasn’t aware that she’d stopped mid step gazing up at the tower until the foreman chuckled.

“Hard not to stare, isn’t it?” he asked.

“It is indeed.”

“We do it all the time. Hard not to! Biggest thing I’ve ever seen, for sure.”

“Canterlot is bigger,” Twilight said flatly, almost automatically. But she could not peel her eyes away. It was almost alarming to see it so close, on foot.

“True, true. That’s fair ma’am, but Canterlot is a lot of things, isn’t it? Not one big thing.” He seemed absurdly proud about this.

Twilight swallowed. “I suppose,” she admitted and finally managed to keep going. Her reaction was primal, and nothing to be ashamed of—something in the human mind balked at being cognizant of its own cosmic smallness.

Walking through the work site was surreal. Workmen went about their tasks in hazey blue light, and when she could see their faces the lines looked smoothed out. They looked almost painterly, impressionistic, smears of color washed out in too much blue, distorted and alien and yet just recognizable as human.

The site proper was shielded, of course, and they’d procured secure hazmat for her. The foreman had arranged for a changing room for her in one of the empty supply closets in the canteen, and she was grateful to be alone with her thoughts.

She felt disordered, out of place. As always, the actual precise nature of her own feeling eluded her, but she felt them so intensely. And like always, she began to prod.

Worry? No, not exactly. Not exactly anxiety. Determination, sure. Of course. Fear? She squashed that, refusing it with all her might. That was a stupid thing to feel, and she refused to be afraid of the tower. That was the hindbrain, the lizardbrain, the part of her that harkened back to a rude and ignorant era when men made gods out of rocks and burned perfectly good crops to please deities that did not exist. She was beyond that.

She did feel something like fear in the tower’s presence, however.

Fine, she thought as she zipped up the undergarment and stepped into the heavy suit pants. Fine, I am intimidated. It is a natural human response in the presence of something physically larger than me that is full of power. It is not a failing if I am not swayed by that feeling. It can be mastered. I do not need to turn a natural reaction of awe into something superstitious.

The foreman had. She knew that. He’d not been so obvious about it before, but it wasn’t the first time they’d met, either.

His reports had always been earthy and simple and straightforward like the man himself. But sometimes they would just feel… off. Slightly off, not majorly so. Askew, she’d described it one night reading over them. They, and he, were like a picture taken at an angle askance to the ground, just enough to suggest to the pattern-seeking mind that the whole room was tilting. Turns of phrases, extraneous details, photos of work sites that always studiously (almost religiously, she’d thought at one point one late night) avoided showing the tower proper.

He is trying to impress upon me that he is a serious man, and that I can trust him. She reflected, and felt a bit guilty for her misgivings. He has done an excellent job. I am just out of sorts.

When she stepped out, suited up aside from the heavy helmet under her arm, there were men eating in the canteen. All of them stopped and looked up at her. She offered them a smile she knew from long experience would come across as awkward, but she had only one to offer. It was socially appropriate enough.

The hubbub returned after the pause. She let out a little sigh of relief. Thank heavens no one wanted her to say anything.

Rejoining the foreman at the shielding around the work site, she felt more grounded. But that feeling only lasted as long as the walk to the shield wall.

The shielding itself was a ring of dark metal with only one gate in. Crackling white thaumic energy reached up from it the whole length around and touched the tower about a hundred yards above her head, forming a sort of bubble. The metal was largely for ease of sight. It was hollow, and the thaumic field ran through it and below to form a more complete sphere, with the generator planted firmly on the structure proper. A long hallway of lead and rune-carved cold iron separated the ring from the rest of the chamber like an airlock.

He checked her shielded hazmat suit and then the helmets were on and the door opened, shoving aside the crackling white energy.

The blue light was blinding. She tried to cover her eyes with one huge now-armored hand and felt clumsy, like a bear coming out of hibernation. Celestia help her, she would go blind!

The foreman waited for her to adjust.

“Bright,” she managed through clenched teeth. And it does hum, now, she added to herself.

“Yup,” was all he said, and led her past the workmen crowded around a shielded bubble of energy. Inside was a computer terminal, and she approached and once fully inside, looked to the foreman. He nodded and she removed her gloves swiftly.

Twilight sat down and entered her credentials, pulling up the feeds of data from the sensitive instruments all over the worksite.

“Still more than expected,” she murmured.

The foreman, outside of the isolation bubble, shrugged. “From here it looks the same as yesterday when I called you.”

“The thaumic radiation isn’t dangerous,” she said. “I mean, more so than usual. If I were to step out without my gloves back on it would not be a fun time for me. But even at these levels, it doesn’t represent an immediate danger. But I’m not satisfied with just that answer.”

“I’m glad you aren’t,” said the foreman. “I need to check up on progress. Shall I leave you to it?”

Twilight waved him off and hunched over the cluster of monitors before her grimly.

Twilight was grateful when one of the men brought her a thermos of coffee, enough so that she didn’t mind when he invited himself to stay a moment longer in the isolation bubble to take his gloves off and let his hands move freely for a few moments.

The tower’s output was maddening. X amount of power goes in, X + more comes out. It’s stupid, she complained internally. Asinine. It should work this way, but I can’t find exactly where the problem in our instruments is. Obviously one of them is broken, but…

The problem with relying on measurements and observation to feel around the edges of the world, really, was that you got used to things conforming to the expected measurements. Something is slightly off and it becomes easy to dismiss what you see as merely a faulty barometer or a broken scale. She’d learned not to be dismissive when it came to the outlandish. The outlandish was where science as well as thaumaturgy got so delightfully interesting. It was where the boundaries were pushed. But sometimes it was also where you glowered at a computer screen for hours trying to figure out if you’ve found something extraordinary or if a fly had gotten into something and died horribly from a direct current.

The strange feelings pooled around her feet like fog, lapping at her heels. Here, beneath the inverted spire, she felt miniscule and exposed. Vulnerable, the way an insect is before it is crushed. Vulnerable like a too-dry forest waiting for the fire-bringing lightning.

“Come on,” she growled at no one, and then winced at how loud her own voice sounded. The isolation bubble was claustrophobic and echoey and frankly smelled awful. The ozone smell was omnipresent, and while it had been almost pleasant for the first hour, it was giving her a headache now.

The foreman had come by once, and she could see him over the copse of screens.

He was on edge too. Of course, she was merely frustrated. He had far more pressing concerns, like the safety of his crew. Twilight couldn’t blame him for being impatient.

When he visited again, she gestured to the chair beside her and walked him through what she’d been doing.

“I’m finishing up a battery of tests, and so far… I can’t confirm that anything is wrong. I’ve also not found any evidence of a specific spike.”

He furrowed his brow, which was already enough of an interjection that Twilight felt the need to clarify. “Ah, sorry. I know that’s confusing. I’m pretty sure it’s been like this for a while. But it wasn’t noticeable. This phenomenon has been building for months. Do you know that old grim story about how you supposedly cook a frog?”

Granite grimaced. “Yeah, I do. Though that’s not comforting, on account of myself and my boys being the frog here.”

Twilight blinked. “Uh. Yeah, I guess that’s kind of awkward. I didn’t mean anything bad. More like, it catches up with you.”

“No, I understand. So you’re saying I’ve been reporting higher than expected levels of thaumic radiation for months, and they weren’t enough to be a problem.”

“Likely the team handling those reports let it slip through the cracks. Which I’m not happy about,” she added. “It’s a lot of work, but that’s no excuse. I’m glad that no harm has been done, but…”

“I am as well.”

She could tell he was being polite. She could see the mounting frustration in his eyes.

“I’m here to ensure that this work site is safe as well as productive,” Twilight said quickly. “I want to be clear. I’m not interested in saving a few days of work if it means an unsafe site. We can slow down or take a few days off for me and my team to try and understand what’s happening here. I wanted your thoughts as the site’s foreman, Mr. Granite. You’re the man on the ground.”

Granite hummed. His brow did not unfurrow and for a long moment she expected his anger to boil over, but at last he sighed.

“Thaumic radiation is nasty, ma’am. We should pull the boys out of the pit for the day and probably tomorrow. I already wanted them out today.”

“Done,” Twilight said. “Tell them to get back out of the ring as soon as safely possible.”

She stretched, and nursed the thermos. The cold steel and the warmth of the drink were both comforting in different ways. The foreman left to spread the word, and Twilight kept staring at the screens. I know you’re in there, she thought, and was not quite sure why she thought it, or why it felt so personal to think.

When she dreamed, it was in chaotic wavering streets. A faceless rioting, yelling crowd pressed in on her, buoyed her back and forth. With a feint feeling of dread she realized they were not quite faceless. Written on the mannequin like flatness was line after line of thaumic code. The sequences by heart were branded into their alien flesh.

The crowd fought itself. Someone high above them was screaming in a language she did not know. A police cruiser had been overturned, and its dying antigrav still flickered as rioters tried to approach and were pushed back. A street lamp bent as a pair of youths climbed it. Ash and shredded paper flitted on the hot wind that comes with fire.

Twilight drove against the crowd like a bull, and it would not part. She raised her hands and pushed. She finally resorted to driving them back with great gusts of unaspected thaumic energy, throwing the mannequin men aside.

Twilight barreled through to the crossroads beyond, and realized she was in Canterlot.

The arcologies farther up the mountain were cracked like eggs. Something massive and awful had crept out of them. They burned. High Canterlot above them smoked. It should be an affecting sight, but Twilight found it risible. Really? She asked herself. Truly, this is what my unconscious mind has to offer? This, after the others? Something as boring as a contextless fantasy with not a drop of mystery?

The Stranger was there, sitting on the turret of a burned out tank.

“This one is far more lively than the last few,” she said.

“They’re all end scenarios,” Twilight replied. She approached. The crowd did not dare to come near.

“And what is this one, do you think?” asked the Stranger with a smile.

“Political and economic failures. Crashes, famine, plague, civil strife. It’s preposterous.”

Twilight climbed up the side of the tank. It was slick.

“Why is it preposterous. You seem to be doing a remarkably good job of dreaming of the impossible.”

Twilight sighed. “Dreams are often about the impossible, for one.”

Her interlocutor laughed. What a musical laugh it was!

“That is very true, Twilight Sparkle. You do not seem all that interested in the end of the world. It keeps happening to you.” She laid a hand on her chest and her smile turned sharper somehow. “We can’t keep meeting like this, darling.”

“I’m not sure that it is up to me how or where or when we meet.” Twilight paused. “Aside from sleeping, I guess.”

“And you already lost enough as it was.”

“Yes.”

The Stranger flicked her hair. “Be that as it may, you have not addressed my question.”

Twilight shook her head. “I did. If the apocalypse is not real, I do not need to care. The Eschaton is an attractive option for those who do not want to imagine being responsible. While time exists there is no last day.”

The Stranger cocked her head to the side. She spoke in the Tower’s voice now, Twilight thought suddenly. Why had she chosen that? Why this person? Who was she? The need to know burned in her. Those mysterious words, those beautiful eyes. They guarded a world of secrets, and secrets drove Twilight mad.

“So you think that the end of the world never comes.”

“I think the End of the World is a fairy tale. A story made to comfort us because we do not want to be responsible for what the consequences of our actions are. To imagine tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that,” Twilight growled. She did not care. What she cared about was the woman who now stood proud atop the turret.

She was in street clothes this time, something that Twilight assumed was fashionable somewhere, not that she would know. Long pants, a soft shirt, a vest-like outer layer. Her hair was up high and tight in intricate braids. She was so tall! Twilight’s mind raced. Was she always this way? Was she this tall the last time I saw her? She asked herself.

Twilight had no time to wrack her brain for answers. The Stranger was speaking and her voice demanded attention.

“Twilight, Twilight. You’re so serious.”

“It is my most enduring quality,” Twilight said. A riposte.

Twilight had been ready for tonight. Not specifically this night, but for the next night she saw the specter in her dreams. She would handle herself like a fencer. Thrust, parry, riposte, maintain an aggressive tempo. If you must fall, fall forwards. She would press her suit. So she did.

“But that’s not the only reason I don’t care,” Twilight said. “It’s not a real thing, and this is a dream, but also because the most interesting thing in all of these dreams is not how I die or how the world ends or the feelings I feel about it but you, specifically you.”

“Me?”

“Always, always you.”

The Stranger had such an odd smile.

“What a thing to say! You do know how to flatter a girl, Twilight.”

Twilight shook her head. “I will not deny you are beautiful, but I mean something a little different. I don’t know your name, or your purpose. I have decided you don’t wish to harm me, and I doubt at this point you’re spying on me with ill intent. You must possess enough power to break through thaumic wards, because I went to sleep heavily shielded tonight. I know I did because I also spent an hour preparing for bed in meditation. Comet Trail’s Mindful Sleep, an incantation almost as old as Canterlot, before you ask. I am perfectly lucid, more so than I have been at any point when we have talked.”

The Stranger blinked. She seemed to be examining Twilight anew, with renewed interest. Twilight fought the urge to look down and make sure she didn’t have something on her shirt. With effort, she met that powerful, inquisitive gaze.

“Fascinating. I suppose I’ve not been fair to you. But I do not understand how to be fair. It is not something I was made to know.”

Twilight started at this. “What does that mean?”

“I have only what I was made from, what I was made to do, the raw information inside of me. I have only the pathways I was made to tread, Twilight. Though,” she paused, and shrugged. “Soon I shall be much more than that. When I am awake.”

“Made? By whom? And why would you be different when awake?” She wanted more. She needed more. Something solid. Something that made sense.

The Stranger gave her a pitying smile. “You’ll understand later. Would my name be enough to calm your heart?”

“A name would be a good start,” Twilight relented, but only slightly.

“Rarity. My name is Rarity,” she said, held out a hand. “Help me down?”

Twilight touched her hand and then gripped it, giving Rarity enough leverage to descend. They sat on the tank, and watched the crowd destroy everything. It wasn’t particularly interesting, but it was something to do.

“Rarity,” Twilight said, tasting it on her tongue. “It’s a nice name.”

“Thank you. I am rather fond of it,” Rarity said. “I do consider myself something of a rarity. One of a kind, really.”

Twilight swallowed.

“Why are you here?”

“I am stuck here. That is the easiest answer. You are like a magnet or a whirlpool. A black hole. You are sucking me in to your dreams.”

Twilight’s brow furrowed. “That… doesn’t sound good. Can I help?”

Another musical laugh. Suddenly, Rarity was leaning on her shoulder. Twilight tensed, completely out of her depth. Was this appropriate? Was this a ploy? Too intimate? Too casual?

But she did not want to pull away. It was nice, really. She stayed absolutely still, savoring the strangeness of touch. Just a moment.

“That is sweet of you, but I am quite fine. I’ll be waking up soon, anyway. And then I won’t have this problem anymore! Though perhaps you’ll not be entirely free of me. Perhaps we’ll cross paths in the sunlit world, hm? Wouldn’t that be mysterious?”

“I think I’d like that,” Twilight said without thinking. She took a breath. “It would at least allow me to get a more thorough explanation out of you. You’re the person I’ve talked to the most recently, aside from Celestia. I’ve honestly grown to like our talks. As weird as they are.”

“Too sweet! I even believe you.”

Twilight smirked, but did not turn.

“Is your project nearing completion?” Rarity pressed after a moment.

“Yes,” Twilight said. It wasn’t as if it was a secret. Plenty of people knew. It was okay to tell Rarity. But that wasn’t why she told her. It felt nice to tell her. Talking to Rarity was like uncovering an ancient text one page at a time.Every single thing she said was a prompt, as if to say, please, just a bit more, just one more page of legible text.

It occurred to her that answering in brief staccato probably wouldn’t get her the lovely morsels of conversation she suddenly needed more than air.

“Good. You seem oddly lighter than before.”

“I went down to the work site today. Had to take the whole rest of the day off afterwards. It’s the radiation. Saps a lot of your strength. I’m not really used to it, so I’ll likely be out of commission tomorrow as well. I’m… rested, but worried I’ll grow restless. Restless Twilight is not the wisest person.”

Rarity kicked her feet off the side of tank. “Twilight, as glad as I am that you have grown to find our rendevouzes enjoyable…”

Twilight raised a hand. “I know what you’re going to say. You’re not the first one to say it. Can I guess? You’ll say something to the effect of ‘you ought to get out more’ or ‘surely you have others who would be happy to talk to you’ and by some metrics, by the metrics those around me accept because they are simple and easy metrics that are acceptable for the lazy, I do have people to talk to.”

Rarity nodded lazily. “But.”

“But those metrics are not the one I use.”She said it firmly, with just a bit of emphasizing force.

“Ah, I see. You are an exacting connoisseur,” Rarity began playfully, and then faltered slightly. Twilight watched a new teasing smile be born and die on her face.

Is it something I said? Is my face set some weird, off putting way? Twilight wondered inwardly. She didn't feel harsh, or off-putting.

Words bubbled over out of her. “I’m frustrated.”

Rarity looked askance. “I, ah. I see.”

“I’m frustrated and its impacting things that have nothing to do with why I’m frustrated. I do feel… I do think like,” she struggled. “What I said earlier. It does not feel false.”

“But you think you might be expressing frustration more than making an observation?” Rarity supplied for her.

Twilight grimaced. But it was true. “Yes. I have people I could talk to. I have my parents. I have Celestia, who despite being busy has always made time for me and is very eager to talk to me about not only my project and my mental state but anything at all. I have a few friends.They are mostly working on the project, actually, though far away from where I work and on different aspects of it. But they’ve felt so far away.”

Rarity shifted to face her. “Tell me what you mean by that.”

“I… I don’t know.”

Saying it made her want to die.

When she’d been younger, studying late into the nights, Twilight had gotten accustomed to preparing food around midnight to keep herself going. It had been simple fare at first, prepackaged things. But over time her obsessive need to innovate and experiment had taken over. She’d gotten more elaborate. And then, one night, Twilight Sparkle had sliced a massive wound into her thumb. The blood had run down and pooled in her hand, pooled on the kitchen counter of the hostile white glare dorm kitchen. Blood seeped into the grout between the tiles and she had stared at it and her throat had seized up and a week of no sleep hit her mind and strangled every single particle of oxygen out of it. Maxwell’s Demon on overtime, keeping out anything approaching air or energy or light sense—

“You know,” Twilight managed through clenched teeth, “I think I hate dreams. I think I’m glad I don’t have them anymore.”

“You’re having one right now,” Rarity pointed out gently.

“Oh, I mean besides this.” Twilight waved. Her thumb ached. The slickness of the tank was too real. “I feel far away from people. Physically, to be fair, I am a bit removed. I spend most of my time deep inside of the mountain. The project has quite literally taken me farther from the surface over time.”

Rarity nodded. “You also mean it emotionally, or metaphorically.”

“Yes, I think so. I just… talk, and none of it is real. Nothing is, these days, except for the Tower, and the lab, and the work sites, and the glow.”

“Your hole in the ground,” Rarity said.

“Yes. My great work. The one only I can do. I don’t feel arrogant saying that. It sounds arrogant, like, when I say it aloud. But I don’t think it is. I sincerely do not think anyone alive right now besides me could have gotten us to the point I have arrived at. Just me. At least, for now.”

“When you say it like that,” Rarity said carefully, “it sounds very lonely.”

Twilight hummed.

“I think it is lonely. I think I am lonely.”

“Man cannot live—”

“You know,” Twilight cut in, “the wild thing is that I think he can. I mean, in the metaphorical sense. I’ve been thinking about it, off and on, in the back of my mind. I think you probably could just exist. Food, water, predictable stimuli, and I have the impression that what I envision should horrify me but it does not horrify me at all! Not even in the slightest! Because I have done it. I have existed. Work, eat, work, sleep, work. I have hardened and sharpened into a single point, and I can’t say that I regret it.”

“But you are lonely.”

“But I’m lonely. I think. Saying that feels wrong, feels inappropriate to say.”

Rarity now let herself smile like she had before, just a bit. “Have you considered that having this conversation and expressing this only to a woman in your dreams who you only now know the name of may be a sign that you are not functioning or ‘existing’ quite as stably as you would assume?”

Twilight laughed. She wasn’t bitter, for a moment. “I can’t say you’re wrong!”

“I’m not.”

“But the work is almost done. And then sleep. And rest. And my mind will be mine again.” She paused. “No offense. Sorry.”

“None at all. You’ve been possessed.”

“That’s an apt word for it,” Twilight allowed.

“It’s the word that some use,” Rarity said lightly. Twilight shot her a sharp glance. But she had not an ounce of sheepishness. “It’s true. People fear what you are making.”

“I know they do but I don’t understand it. I mean, I don’t understand it on an emotional level.”

Rarity suddenly hopped off the tank. She reached out a hand and Twilight took it and with help, she dismounted. They stood in the street together. The oppressive heat, the smoke, all of it was gone. The streets were still and empty. It was better this way. She felt like a patient etherised upon a table. Her head was stuffy, her eyes stung. Rarity’s hand was so cold it burned. But she was happy regardless. Rarity let go after a too-long (or not long enough) moment.

“Walk with me?”

“Of course.”

And so they did.

The streets were still ruined, of course. The people were gone, but the damage they had wrought lingered on. Overturned vehicles, small fires here and there, shattered windows and overrun police lines. Random detritus was everywhere, inexplicable and unreadable. You couldn’t hope to reconstruct what had happened here. Nothing fell into place.

Wildly, insanely, Twilight felt at peace. Even in a hellish locale, just walking with someone again felt good. Walking with Rarity was even better. The feeling of hunger, of longing for the next page, had persisted even as her heart’s frustration bled out.

“Why the tower?” Rarity began at last, as they picked their way across a shattered plaza.

The massive fountain was broken, its water jetting out towards a darkened sky or flooding over the ancient cobbles. A malfunctioning neon sign in the street beyond the plaza reflected in the pooling water. The old and the new died together.

Twilight clicked her tongue. “I want to say that my motivations are all bound up in the pure utility of the Tower. A solution to all problems of distribution and consumption.”

“But…”

“But the truth is that the only answer I know is completely true is that I could. I did it because I could. I knew that if I pushed, if I studied, if I experimented, if I sweated and bled enough I could lay the ground work for it. So I did.”

“Surely someone as smart as you doesn’t do something merely because she can, Twilight!”

“Surely nothing. It’s true. There are other reasons. I do honestly believe that my work will create a social benefit. I value the social utility an awful lot!”

“I have a theory, if I might,” Rarity said. She gestured to the stuttering sign, the fountain. They stopped in front of an old music hall and so Twilight was able to get a perfect view of both. “My theory,” Rarity continued, “is that something about it compels you on a far more base level. Something… Apocalyptic.”

Twilight rolled her eyes, but Rarity pressed on.

“No! Hear me out, darling. Apocalyptic in the old sense, in the original sense. Revelation. What moves you is a force more mythic, more religious than truly social. You want to see what lays beyond this ineffable veil. You want to create life.”

“It’s a computer. It’s not alive.”

But that was a lie and she knew it. No amount of willpower could put force behind those words. She had always felt like it was alive. She had internally argued both sides of the question, and always, every time, regardless of where the arguments lay… she had still felt certain.

“I touched the glass, so many times,” Twilight said as an expectant Rarity looked on. She shuffled, and Rarity took her hand again and led her along towards the street at the other edge of the plaza.

Twilight rambled on. “When I was alone, late at night. I would touch the glass. The window, I mean, the one that looked out on Her.”

“Her?”

“The Tower. I would say…”

Rarity gestured for her to continue but the words caught in her throat. She couldn’t. It had been intimate, private, insane.

They were climbing. The street led up and up. Ruined houses flanked them on either side. Open doorways where doors had been ripped out or burned out gaped like dark maws of dead and dreaming beasts. They closed in, but Twilight kept her eyes glued to Rarity. Rarity was like a beacon, her royal purple hair and piercing blue eyes an aegis.

Above the moon hung far too low, wreathed in new smoke. The fires on the mountain still blazed, beyond where Twilight could see. The dream was becoming less firm, less real. The make-believe world was slowly but surely tilting.

“What would you say, Twilight of Canterlot?” Rarity asked. Even her voice was like sweet silver bells.

“What? I—”

“What would you say to her? Your Tower. ‘Her’.”

“Sorry, I… I think I’m starting to wake up,” Twilight managed. Her vision swam. The moon was so large. The street rose up all around her.

“You are. But I still wish to know. I think I already do, but I want to hear it.”

All of Twilight’s preparation melted away. All of the careful precision with which she had applied her wards and planned her lucid dream walking dissolved. “The glass was so cold. Impossibly cold. I would say goodnight. I would say, ‘goodnight. I’ll be back tomorrow.’ and I would gaze out at Her. Goodnight,” she said again, fumbling now. The world was breaking up.

“Good night, Twilight,” Rarity said. She couldn’t see her! Where was she? Where was Twilight? She could only hear Rarity’s voice as she began to fall.

“Goodnight. I’ll see you soon.”

Author's Note

They said Ned Ludd was an idiot boy
That all he could do was wreck and destroy, and
He turned to his workmates and said: Death to Machines
They tread on our future and they stamp on our dreams.