"Don't Sleep on the Job!"
A mustached, muscular nineteen year old lay sprawled on the lobby floor, sleeping.
With a series of clicks, the lobby door unlocked. A skinny young woman entered, letting the door shut and lock behind her.
"Excuse me," she said. "Excuse me!"
The sleeping athlete on the floor ignored her, until she poked him with the toe of her shoe.
"Um, hi," he said, snapping awake. "Sorry. Football practice this afternoon ran extra long, tired me out."
She scowled at him. "Hondo, is it?"
"Yes, that's me!" He sat up and stuck out his hand to shake. "Pleased to meet you."
"MEET me? I've been working in this lab all semester, just like you. And we need to talk."
He blinked. "About what?"
"About how you shouldn't be sleeping on the job!"
He held out his hands placatingly. "It's hardly even a real job, you know. It's just an excuse for the school to give me a small paycheck. My athletic scholarship pays for tuition and a dorm room and...the school meal plan, if you can call that stuff meals. But for everything else I need, like real food--"
"I don't CARE what you need, Mister Hondo--"
"Mister Banks. Hondo Banks." He smiled in a way that was at least a little charming. "I'm afraid I didn't catch your name, Miss..."
"Twilight. Twilight Veele. Soon to be DOCTOR Veele, thank you very much."
He grinned. "It's an honor, doctor. I'm hoping in a few years I might be a pro football player, but I know the odds are against me. Myself, four or five years from now, even if I graduate on time...I might just be selling cars, or something like that."
Twilight grimaced. "It seems a waste."
"Thank you. I like to think I might find an opportunity to make a little more of myself, but..." He shrugged.
"What I MEANT was, even though the university administration might not choose to ADMIT it, this facility needs real protection, not just some...nap master!"
Hondo chuckled. "'Nap master?' I guess at least I'm good at something."
"I'm not kidding. Let me show you something...so you'll understand how important it is to stay awake and really guard this place."
Twilight pressed her palm against a wall-mounted sensor panel next to another door, which opened. She walked through the doorway. "Well?" she said.
"I don't think I'm allowed through there, Miss Twilight."
Twilight scowled. "I'm allowed to bring guests. And you're cleared, anyway." She grabbed his wrist and held his palm up to the sensor panel, which glowed green. "See? You're fine."
"Miss Twilight? Are you sure..."
"And if you DON'T come with me, I'll report you for sleeping on the job while guarding a sensitive facility...every night I've seen you zoning out here since the start of the semester."
Hondo sighed, and shrugged his shoulders. "Yes, Miss Twilight. If you think the lobby will be safe without me for a bit." He followed her through the doorway and down the hall.
***
Twilight gestured at a circle painted in the center of the room, about twenty-five feet across. A platform in the center stood several feet above floor level. "Do you want the theory first, or the demonstration?"
Hondo smiled. "I do like to see things with my own eyes."
"Ok, then! The demonstration first." Twilight pointed at a square pointed on the floor, well outside the circle. "Stay inside that square, for your own safety and for my safety too. I'll be standing in the center of the room, with the subcritical level triggering device." She went to the room's center and climbed metal stairs onto the platform.
"First, the protective field." She flipped a green switch, and a glowing sphere of violet light appeared, surrounding her and her platform.
"What's that?" Hondo asked.
"It's just to protect you...and the rest of the world, I suppose. A containment field to suppress the effect and prevent it from spreading." Twilight put her hand next to a large red button. "Really, THIS is the interesting part. Now, whatever you do, DON'T panic. Things will go back to normal in well under five minutes."
"What if things DON'T go back to normal?"
"Then use your cellphone to call that emergency number painted on the wall." She pointed. "But that won't happen." She squinted at Hondo. "Are you ready? Can you keep from panicking?"
"I'm a very calm person, Miss Twilight. And I trust you. I don't care if you turn into a purple people eater...as long as you turn back when you're supposed to."
Twilight smiled. "I promise, if I turn into...something like that, I'll turn back on schedule. Probably sixty seconds or less." She pressed the red button for a moment, and inside the glowing violet bubble...the world changed.
"Miss Twilight?" Hondo asked. "Is it supposed to do that?"
The light gray creature standing on the (now somewhat smaller) platform reached up with one forehoof, to scratch her purple and white striped mane. "Do what?"
"Miss Twilight...you're...some kind of little animal, I think. With a horn on the front of your head."
The furry creature smiled. "We call them unicorns. At least, those of us who are in on the study do. Because of the horn...and certain other anatomical peculiarities."
"Did you MEAN to turn yourself into a...whatever this is?"
"A unicorn."
An instant later, the part of the world inside the violet bubble returned to normal. Twilight was human again, although radiant with pride. "What do you think?"
"It's amazing. But I don't know why you showed me."
"You've GOT to understand how important this is, Hondo."
"I don't understand anything at all. Did you show me some kind of special effects? Are you working on a movie, for Hollywood?"
Twilight shook her head. "It isn't special effects. It's real." She sighed, and flipped the green switch to turn off the containment field. "Let's talk about this in the lobby."
***
Twilight sat on a vinyl-covered chair, and gestured Hondo into another. "Have you ever heard of vacuum phase transitions?"
"I'm afraid I don't remember that part of my science class, Miss Twilight."
Twilight waved his objection away. "Your class didn't cover it. The point is, according to quantum field theory, our universe isn't in the only possible energy state, not by far. Given the right conditions, our universe could...change."
Hondo thought for a moment. "Are you talking about what you showed me a few minutes ago? When you looked like a cute little cartoon animal?"
Twilight snorted. "I didn't just LOOK LIKE. I WAS a different kind of creature than human. Because under different circumstances, if our universe followed slightly different rules, all of us could be like that, in a world to suit."
"Um...ok? But I still don't understand why you think it's so important for me to stay awake nights."
Twilight clenched her fists. "Because this kind of transition...without a proper containment field...which was that violet glowing bubble you saw around me...instead of going away after a little while, the effect would spread! It might never STOP spreading! The whole campus, our entire city...all of humanity, transformed into something else! Potentially our entire universe, changing at the speed of light."
"Even space aliens would be changed? On some other planet?"
Twilight gritted her teeth. "There probably aren't any aliens."
"But...all those other stars, trillions of other galaxies...and no one else?"
Twilight shook her head. "If we lived in a universe full of intelligent aliens, some of those creatures probably would have already discovered the same kind of transitions as I just showed you. And somewhere, on one of those other planets, someone would have screwed up. We wouldn't be humans anymore. Our Earth wouldn't be Earth anymore. It would be...someplace else. And no way to turn it back."
"What would our world be like?" Hondo wondered.
Twilight sighed, and pulled a book out of her purse.
"Diary?" Hondo asked.
"Photo album. I used limited-range virtual temporary quantum state imaging to get peeks into what some of those other potential universes would be like, if they existed. And let me tell you, most of them are not a pretty sight." Twilight opened the book.
Hondo squinted. "Is that a giant centipede eating another centipede?"
Twilight nodded. "If you look closely, you can see some more arthropods chewing each other in the background. I think...the bio-anthro team thinks their culture isn't very nice. You might call it inhuman, but in far worse than just the literal sense."
The two slowly flipped through more pages, as Twilight answered questions.
Hondo finally said, "So...just one mistake in a lab somewhere could turn our city into a kind of hell."
"Worse than that. Not just our city, but our whole planet. And not just OUR world...ALL the worlds, if there are any other inhabited worlds in the universe. The stakes are really that high. And THAT'S why you need to stay awake when you're working a shift as a security guard here. To protect us from any trespassers who might break into the lab and cause THAT. A world turned into a living nightmare."
Hondo took a deep breath. After a minute, he said, "But you were willing to turn yourself into a creature. The creature you called a unicorn. And on page fifty-nine...the photos of the unicorn world...that world didn't look so bad."
Twilight nodded. "That's the only one of those possible worlds that doesn't seem to be any worse than our own. Better, maybe. Certainly nicer. Turning into a unicorn for even part of a minute always cheers me up, makes me feel better all day." She sighed. "After some of the horrible scenarios I've been looking at lately...a unicorn break is the only way I can feel good enough to be able to sleep."
Hondo said, "But you don't want ME to be able to sleep."
Twilight shrugged. "You needed to know the stakes. So you'll do your job right."
"But...if our world got changed into one of THOSE, you could do some science and change it back, right?"
Twilight shook her head. "My equations tell me, the transition can only go one way. We could turn into any of those worlds, but we couldn't ever become human again. We could be 'centipedes gnawing centipedes' world forever, no way to escape."
Hondo gripped the arms of his chair. "No wonder you have trouble sleeping at night."
"Sorry."
After a minute, Hondo said, "I wonder if you could do one thing for me, though."
***
Hondo and Twilight stood side by side on the platform in the center of the room. Twilight flipped the green switch, surrounding them in a bubble of violet light.
"The purple bubble is even prettier from in here," Hondo said.
Twilight snorted. "I suppose it's good to appreciate the little things. But are you ready for the next step? It's still ok to change your mind."
"My mind is made up. I want to know what it's like. The only...vacuum phase universe, I guess you called it?...that isn't a lot worse than our own world."
Twilight smiled, and pressed the red button. Inside the violet bubble, everything changed.
"Wow," Hondo said. "I'm a...I'm a pony."
"Is that what you want to call it?" Twilight asked. "Because ponies are different from this."
"Ponies in OUR world, sure. But as a creature of THIS world, what the world COULD be...I'm pretty sure I call myself a pony. We're both ponies."
Twilight snorted. "Whatever you say, Hondo. But I'm happier to know I'm still a scientist. But is that scientist completely ME, I mean, the HUMAN me, still inside my head...or is that scientist partly what my unicorn self would be too? I mean, if I was a unicorn full time, not just for a tiny fraction of my day. Of my night. You know what I mean."
Hondo turned around, to directly face Twilight. "Miss Twilight? You said all the other possible worlds we might get were a lot worse than our human world, right?"
"So far as I can see, yes. All the quantum vacuum transitions lead in terrible directions. Except for this weird little 'pony' exception."
"And if you can discover this effect...someday, someone else will discover it too, right? Maybe someone who doesn't know what they're doing? Someone whose...purple bubble thing doesn't work properly?"
"I suppose. Someone could change the whole universe before they've figured out what they're doing. Probably into a hellworld they chose randomly by accident."
Hondo reached out for the green switch. "I think there's only one choice a moral person can make." He smiled. "Also, I think your pony self is the cutest thing I've ever seen. If I had to live in a world without 'ponies,' and maybe become a demonic torture centipede instead, I think I'd rather die." He put his hoof on the green containment field switch, to turn it off.
***
It took the two less than twenty-four hours to find out that, while they both thought ponies were adorable, lovable, and almost irresistably attractive, they themselves as a pair made one of the least compatible potential pony couples in the world.
But that was ok! Now they lived in a whole world of other ponies to choose from. One way or another, things would work out well enough.
As the years passed, even though they themselves had been directly involved in the Great Change, their memories of the human world faded, gradually replaced for the most part by memories that better fit what their world's past WOULD have been, had there never been a human world at all.
***
"And that," Twilight Velvet told her daughter, "is why you should always be very careful with any research that could lead to vacuum phase transitions. Because if you don't stop and think first, and explore the different options, you could make an enormous, world-changing mistake."
Twilight Sparkle sighed. "Mom? This was a cute bedtime story when I was a tiny foal...but now I know vacuum phase transitions aren't real. I checked the whole Canterlot Library, and the Palace Library too. Not even one mention. No such thing.'"
Velvet smiled impishly. "And in the library's Restricted Section?"
Twilight Sparkle's hoof struck her bed. "No such place. The Restricted Section is a silly story too, made up to scare foals. Also, dad says he's never met any such pony as this 'Hondo Banks,' or 'Hondo Flanks,' or whatever his name is supposed to be. Why do you keep embarrassing me like this, by telling such foalish stories?"
Velvet bent over her daughter, and kissed her cheek. "I'm sorry if I embarrass my brilliant daughter who knows better now. I love you."
Sparkle smiled. "Love you too. Good night."
"Good night, my little Sparkler."
As Velvet reached the doorway of Twilight's bedroom, Twilight's horn telekinetically turned out the lamp. "And mom...one more thing?"
"What is it, dear?"
"I don't really think your stories are all THAT embarrassing. Just...don't ever tell my friends from school about them, ok? They might think those old stories are silly, and laugh at us."
Velvet smiled. "Yes, dear. I wouldn't dream of it."
Author's Note
You want an author's note?
Ok! This story ends in a world where everycreature changed into MLP canon creatures years and years ago, and their memories have been converging on the MLP canon world we all know and love. So maybe in the end, this story isn't an AU at all...depending on your point of view.
But the minds of Twilight Velvet and Hondo Flanks have hung on to at least some scraps of memory of where that world came from, even if they don't usually talk about it to most ponies.
