The Manehattan Anomaly

A knock. I looked to the door, and the pattern of scrawled mouthwriting followed where I looked, etched into my retinas. I was suddenly aware of my whole body: my dry mouth, my hunched back, my neck bent down nearly to my knees, and my rump, which hadn’t moved off this damn chair for… two hours? Three?

Oh, good. I couldn’t even remember how long I’d been grading papers for.

With a groan, I did my best to straighten myself out as I headed for the door. There was another knock, and I managed to croak, “Yeah, yeah, I got it”, before opening up.

Two burly stallions with earthy coats stood in the hall. One held a clipboard, the other stood by a hoof-cart hooked under a large wooden crate. The one with the clipboard said, “Package,” simply, as if that explained it. Then he gestured the clipboard in my direction, indicating a receipt of delivery, and an empty line awaiting signature.

I didn’t appreciate having this dumped on me, but I couldn’t think of any way out of it - and they looked impatient besides. The one with the cart wheeled it in after I signed, just barely squeezing it through the door, and they both left promptly. The crate was now a fixture of my living room.

A glance back to my desk reminded me that I wasn’t missing much, so I just sighed, grabbed a prybar, and got to work.

A meter wide, the crate was huge. There were scuffs and scratches on its outer faces, but it was otherwise in good condition. As carefully as I could, I cracked the lid open, catching any loose nails with a telekinetic field. The crate was full to the brim with coir: an exotic, waterproof fiber. A cubic meter of this was valuable in its own right. But here, it was only a packing material, a means to protect the crate’s real contents. I next pried off one of the walls of the crate, then another, and a good amount of the coir spilled out onto my floor, kicking up a cloud of awful dust - I should have worn a mask - but also revealing the framework within the crate. A rough-milled claw clutched a spherical basket no larger than a pony’s skull

The basket was tied down with a coarse twine. With some gentle, gradual application of telekinesis, I was able to undo the knot, and lift the basket out of the support structure - but as I did I noticed a crumple of paper under it. The paper had conformed to the shape of the sphere. As I removed it, I saw that it was actually an envelope. The name ‘Cobalt Spark’ was written on one side.

My curiosity piqued, I opened it and began reading.

Cobalt Spark

University of Manehattan - Dept. of Applied Sorcery

23 Springleaf Ave.

Manehattan, MNH, 20035

Equestria

Dr. Spark,

It’s been a while, prof!

Sorry I havent kept more in touch. Maybe if I had, it would make these ridiculous requests a little less awkward. Or maybe not. Sorry.

The Zaphzia expedition struck big in the northwest, near the contested territory. Maybe you read about that whole mess in the news. Tragic. Now the front line is moving back, so we have to abandon the largest neospeciic era burial site ever found. ~~On that subject, would it be outrageous to suggest that the people who’ve lived in the region for the last four eras have a right to continue living here? If so,~~

I digress. We’ve spent the last week emptying shelves, shipping out whatever can be carried to whoever can identify it before the looters and soldiers ~~(not that there’s much difference)~~ get here, and, well, you do crystals. So here’s a weird ass crystal, en route to your office.

Again, sorry. But it was you or the barbarians. Field notes are enclosed. Have fun with it. And, hey, if it’s something cool, let me know!

-LS

Reading the old letter, looking at the new crate on my living-room floor, I ground my teeth. Then I found the humour in it and chuckled. Lodestar hadn’t been my student for the better part of a decade and she was still giving me heartburn.

She had probably - I hoped - intended for this to go to my office at the university, but instead it landed here, at my home. By the look of the packaging, this thing was delicate, so I decided I wouldn’t risk any more damage by having it moved all that way for examination. I swept the student papers off my desk, grabbed the most cylindrical thing I could find - a cardboard tube - and set the specimen down on top of it.

It was still wrapped in a reed basket over a layer of leaves. I spent some time finding a good spot to begin unweaving the basket, and gently, gradually, peeled it away. The leaves beneath fell away readily, without anything holding them on, and I could finally start to see it.

I ignored Lodestar’s field notes for now. It was often useful to go into an examination blind, without any assumptions, either mine or somepony else’s.

It was a black sphere roughly twenty-five centimeters across, giving the impression of opaque volcanic glass, or polished black metal impressed by a faint swirling texture. I knew from the effort of lifting it onto the desk that it weighed approximately ten kilograms, and with a strip of wood that had once been the basket, I was unable to scratch the surface. I tried next with the dry nib of a quill, leaving no mark, and nothing again with a steel nib. I probably could have just cut the basket away with scissors, if I had known how hard its surface was.

With these observations, I had come to some conclusions, and I could confirm or deny them with spells of measurement. My estimations of the mass and size were roughly correct, though not impressively accurate, but the most interesting and important question was what the sphere was made of, and a spell told me: silicon. Out of curiosity, I cast a fine-analysis spell, and found no grain boundaries.

I was… stunned. The least interesting answer to what this thing was, now, was the world’s largest continuous silicon crystal. At least, I was certain it was continuous on the outside - our standard spells could not penetrate very far, by design.

But, considering its diameter, if it was silicon all the way through it should have been more like twenty kilograms. Perhaps it was hollow, or cored with another material? I couldn’t be sure without more invasive measurements. That seemed like a good opportunity to open the initial findings.

Lodestar’s scrawling, uneven notes were hard to parse, but I caught the gist:

Found in fossil crater at gravesite 6, disturbed two graves on north side

Some initial observ.s in time I had access:

• Si mono??? -certain to 5cm depth

• 25cm ball. Φ ≈ .999… ?

• ~12kg, unexpected low mass -hollow? diff. material within?

• polished smooth surface, no scuff/scratch/stain etc., appears untouched

• exothermic? -stays ~2° + ambient temp, no chem. reaction obsrv.

There was more, but I stopped reading there. It all seemed a bit… off.

The independent confirmation that this was monocrystalline silicon was a good sign, and the sphericity value seemed right. But she had listed the mass as twelve kilograms, not ten. As much as she pained me, as a student and as a professional, she just wasn’t a mare who would make mistakes like that. Additionally, the note stated the specimen appeared “untouched”, without scuffs or scratches, but I could see a few hairline cracks around the circumference of the sphere. With similar reasoning, I did not think these would have been overlooked.

Had it been damaged during shipping? That would explain the cracks, but not the difference in mass. Something wasn’t adding up.

That brought me to the “exothermic” observation. If this had gone to my office, I might have had a thermometer handy, but here I did not, nor was I prepared for any temperature-sensing spells.

I… supposed it had already endured much rougher handling.

I gingerly set a hoof on the specimen.

It was, indeed, warm. Certainly more than two degrees above ambient temperature. But, besides that, it… thrummed?

I threw my hoof off the specimen when I realized it was changing where I’d touched it. A ripple of reddish light, faint, or deep within the specimen, radiated out from the point where I’d handled it, highlighting the hairline cracks in striking clarity. The light converged on the opposite side, then came back around, and faded away before it could converge again.

The specimen’s surface was as deep a black as it had been before, but the cracks still glowed, particularly a ring of cracks near the top which surrounded the crown of the sphere.

I was curious, despite my better judgement. The low mass; the exothermy; the moving light; the thrumming. There must have been an explanation for it all. Invasive scanning spells were not a common practice, due to their tendency to transmute particles around the point of entry, but I didn’t need an invasive scan if there was already an opening.

I began forming a telekinetic field around the ring of cracks. Telekinetic spells were actually dual-purpose: the spell gave me topographical insight within the field, with the insight’s fidelity reduced as force was increased. With sufficient force to lift the specimen, it would ‘feel’ like a perfect sphere, but with such reduced force that the field was barely held together against its own gravity, the field would sink into even the smallest pits and cracks. I maintained a weak, thin field over the cracks until I ‘felt’ it climb down, beneath the surface.

A centimeter, then two, then five, then-

At a depth of seven centimeters, my field reached the underside of an inner wall, marking an open space. I added slightly more force to the field so that it would stop falling - I did not want to disturb the interior more than I absolutely had to. With this added force and rigidity, the field snapped into place all around a distinct piece of the sphere, and it shifted. Fully detached.

This was the critical moment, now. With care I added enough directional force to the telekinetic field, in an upward direction, that it could be slid out of the sphere. The inner edges were completely smooth, and it came out with no difficulty. Only a hole was left in its place, glowing with that same dark reddish light that had propagated when I touched it.

I had to act fast. There was no time to grab a mask, so I just held my breath, as I turned the specimen so the hole faced towards me, stood up, and peered down.

The smooth, glassy edges of the hole were marked with dull red lines, steadily marching up and out from the center of the sphere, and fading before they reached the outer edge. Something related to the exothermy, perhaps, or the thrumming. Deeper in, I saw the inner edge, a checkerboard of light and dark, shifting as the waves propagated and collapsed. Then, with nothing seeming to connect it to the rest of the specimen, I saw…

The core of it. The germ.

Then something changed. I let go of my breath, ignored the shifting patterns within the germ’s casing, and reached for my pry bar. There was work to do.