The different lives I lead, my body lives on lead. The last two lines might read, incorrect until said.

***

My name is Muddy Waters. A small-town mare with a lot of potential, or at least that's what I’ve come to believe. After all, when there are five of you all working together to complete a task there's nothing you can’t accomplish! For example…

“Miss Waters, I believe you missed a spot.”

…cleaning dozens upon dozens of corpses from a Stable one floor at a time. The work was brutal and on more than a few occasions we struggled to hold down a fresh wave of vomit. Luckily, we weren’t born with food in our stomachs so we didn’t have to worry about wasting a meal. In fact we haven’t had a meal since the battle down here. Which was yesterday.

I growled at the hovering robot that worked alongside us as we mopped up buckets worth of blood and other fluids I dare not think about. “We’d work better if we had some food in our systems and a break every now and again, you flying squid.” The robot with its three metal arms just stared at me, unblinking, with his three metal eyes.

The Mister Handy fluttered over towards me with its bloodied buzzsaw pointing in my direction. It wiggled it at me menacingly before huffing. “You and I both know the only thing to eat here is what's in these bags. So do be a dear and hold a stiff upper lip when it comes to performing the tasks at hand. Especially since neither of us was made for such…unscrupulous work.”

I held no respect for the machine, but I did respect Helix for reactivating them once the threat to the Mister Handy units was gone. A century of deactivation did little to stop the machines from hacking the hostile clones to sizable chunks for proper transportation to the crematorium. None of the Muddy Water clones, nor the original herself, had even heard of a crematorium before. Same with the Mister Handy robots that hovered about gathering the corpses and chopped them up before depositing the bits within the trash bag pile. These were the first robots we’d ever seen active.

But there were only so many Handys, and as the work carried on into the night and onto the next morning, we wondered if the original was having as much luck as we were.

“Hey, Five! The blood on the upper floors is starting to dry out. We don’t have enough hooves for all this. Can’t we go make more clones to help?” Another of the Muddy Waters clones rounded the corner with a dark red mop dripping with watered down blood and viscera. At some point the other four clones had partnered up in pairs, leaving me, the fifth clone with nobody to call a bond mate. It did leave me in a position to give out orders as the rest fell in line seeking constant direction and guidance.

It left me wondering if I was always so ready to do as others commanded.

“I was wondering about that myself.” Helix hadn’t really told us much, only that where the cleaning supplies were and where to start. The Mister Handy robots just did all the heavy lifting, but we were stuck to mopping and dealing with the surviving Jellybean clones. “You know what, let's talk to Helix about that. There’s a lot of work to be done, let’s see about reducing it.” The Mister Handy scoffed at us for dropping our mops as his buzz saw whirled to life before cutting into the body of another Jellybean clone.

***

Summoning Helix Twist was the easy part. A simple button press and she was there above us with her glass dome encased brain looming over us as it slid from a hatch in the ceiling. Convincing her was another matter.

“I thought I explained to you already that the process needs the original. Without her here, your next batch of clones would be woefully out of date. The last time a clone was made was before the seizing of the Stable.” Her brain shook back and forth in a disapproving manner. “How would you feel standing in a lab one moment, then waking up in a bathtub days into the future? The mental strain on new clones only gets worse the further in time we get.”

It took me a moment to process that. It made sense. I was freaking out a bit when I realized I was no longer the original who had everything. “Okay, but it’s only been a day. I bet the new clones would be happy they get to skip all the hard parts. Plus, why can’t we get our memories cloned? We’re the same mare as the original, right?”

Again Helix shook her brain before lowering herself further to the point she was at eye level. “It is hard coded into the machine that transfers your memories. Those talismans and coded enchantments will not accept copied memories it’s responsible for. Dr. Doublit made sure his creation could not be misused regardless of whoever might have found themselves in ownership of the technology. We wouldn’t want some never-do-well creature using this as a form of quasi immortality, would we?”

As much as I didn’t want to give her credit, she was right. I could live forever if all I had to do was repeatedly clone myself. The work I had to do still took priority and we could still manage new clones, even if we had to coddle them to keep them from freaking out.

“Okay, we get that, but we still want more workers. Even if it’s not for the Stable, we still need ponies on the outside finding us some food. Otherwise we’re going to have to dig into the Jellybean rations.” Me and my sister looked at one another with a hint of worry. As much as we liked to joke and say things we didn’t mean, there was a real chance mom’s plan to feed the Jellybean clones working on the Stable’s more important systems might extend to us as well.

After all, those corpses in the lower levels were just another resource and the Jellybeans were already accustomed to self cannibalism. Why feed them real food when they’ve been eating each other for possibly decades? Gruesome, but no worse than the world above ground.

We sat in silence as the brain twitched and slid around its glass casing. Occasionally we could hear murmurs and hums coming from Helix’s speakers, but we let her do her hidden work in peace until finally she chirped. “Right! I’ll allow this breach in protocol if you can do one favor for me. I’ll need the rest of your sister’s help for this. Consider it a personal request, in good faith.”

“Anything.” Our voices aligned in a harmony only a pair of twins could maintain.

Within the hour the sisters came together as soon as they could. Navigating what could only be a metal village took time, but eventually all five of us had found ourselves on the second level down. The other three sisters were together, but two of them were clad in the blue jumpsuits that Stable dwellers wore with a big 98 on the back and flanks. I could only guess they’d found those and immediately took them for themselves.

“Where’d you guys find jumpsuits?” The clone travelling with me asked as she circled them with admiration clear on her face. “I want one!”

“We found them here actually.” One of the clones with the jumpsuits pointed down the hall to a large sign that read, ‘HABITATION’ on it. “This is where the Stable ponies' houses were. We took a look in one since all the doors are unlocked. We didn’t just camp in the infirmary like you guys did, we camped here.”

“They got the comfiest beds and hot water! We took showers and baths for hours in ‘em.” Hot water was an unheard of luxury back home. Water was a luxury, so cleaning oneself with it was not something you did often in the wasteland. Muddy Waters did it even less than the normal pony, and by bath we mean jumping in a stream and hoping the radiation wasn’t too bad.

“I’m aware of your overuse of water, Miss Waters. You and your sister spent three hours showering, each. I will have to teach you rationing once the more important matters are resolved. Speaking of which…” The lights went out, then came back on without warning. I did notice one hallway's lights refused to come back, but another hallway was bright and cheery further into the habitation area.

“Understood. Come on sisters, let’s move.” We didn’t need any Pipbucks to know when we needed to follow along. The only lights on it seemed were the ones leading us someplace, but to what we were uncertain.

“Hey!” One sister called out. “What’s our mission this time? It’s not to kill something is it?”

Helix responded over the loudspeaker this time since she hadn’t moved from the elevator entry area. I wasn’t sure why. “You are being led to find somepony very precious to me. I have no doubt this pony died over a hundred years ago, but I do not have the strength to do anything about their predicament myself. I…I will…you’ll see soon enough.”

Cryptic and unhelpful, but it was better than nothing. A corpse. Or perhaps a ghoul was lurking somewhere here. Either way, we were meant to do something about it. Bury it, cremate it, whatever. Helix commanded and we obeyed, so long as something came from all this at least.

The further we went on, the creepier it became. Each dwelling had some semblance of a front yard in front of it like you’d see in a book or movie from a pre-war projector. It was clear this entire level, which meant to house close to one thousand ponies, was abandoned. Like walking through the world’s cheeriest ghost town. Every clack or clatter of the machinery which kept this place running spooked us something fierce. Even with the lights on and the place devoid of blood or rust, it still felt like we were walking in the shadow of the dead. A generation long past and a place only they had interacted with some time a hundred years ago. I wasn’t sure when this place was left behind, or what happened to the dwellers, but it couldn’t have been good.

Halls were labeled like streets and every so often you’d find some kind of restaurant or place that provided a service like laundry or something. A small store built into the wall here, a massage parlor there. It was an exciting concept if it wasn’t one forced on ponies. Just being down here for a day was already making me wish to see the irradiated world above again.

“Hey, look!” Damnit! One sister in front had yelled so suddenly, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Up ahead was a single light illuminating a corner that held a lone door. Nothing impressive or notable about it, just a door. Probably some kind of broom closet. “Is this it?”

“Indeed.” Helix spoke up again through the speakers, but refused to show herself. Why? “Please…enter. It is but a small room for utilities. And…retrieve him.”

It was my turn. Carefully, my hoof pressed the button on the side of the wall to activate the door. As its mechanisms shifted and the door swooshed up into the frame beyond our sight, we saw something within the darkness. Something gruesome.

A lone pony skeleton covered in dust and cobwebs sat in a closet as I figured. The floor was covered in decades old matter I could only assume came from the now bone dry skeleton. From the looks of it the pony had come into this closet and never came out. Even as they died of starvation or something equally slow. “Helix…”

“I know. I should explain. It took me years, countless years of searching and watching of security footage, but I eventually found him. Dr. Doublit. My mentor…my best friend.” Another hatch in the ceiling opened. Finally Helix had joined us, but she seemed far more reserved and the lighting of her casing was dimmed, almost vacant. “We were the only ponies to stay behind during the evacuation. We forced everypony out so quickly once the feral clones began to breach the labs and make their way into engineering. I was already a brain by that point and…h-he refused to leave me behind. Not that it mattered, I can’t leave this place without a proper robotic body, something we just didn’t have.”

“He didn’t plan on leaving without you. So he just…didn’t leave.” A sister moved to enter the closet and get a good look inside.

“Is it safe to assume everypony evacuated because of Jellybean?”

“Yes.” Helix’s horn shone bright as she projected another image on the wall with magic. Slowly the image began to move. It looked like security camera footage, probably something from her long memory. “This Stable was made to protect ponies, but that was only a bonus objective at best. Not even a secondary objective. Its main mission was to judge the survivability of ponies in dangerous working conditions and the mental strain it would have on other occupants.”

Wait, was that what the others were talking about before? About the Stables being bad or something? “Explain…”

“Scientists from Stable-Tec were here, not just from our project, but from Stable-Tec’s own projects. Before Stable-Tec, me and Dr. Doublit devoted our lives to preserving Equestrians. The best way we could do that was to find a way to win the war without throwing ponies into meat grinders in no-pony land. Doublit was the brains behind most of the project, I was just there to help him since he…”

The sister from the closet emerged, albeit slowly and as gingerly as possible. “Hey there’s something on this guy's head. Looks like a crown or something.” When she emerged, she carried the skeleton out with her. She tried her best to slide the poor stallions' remains across the floor and avoid damaging them. On his head was a black crown-like device with a glass orb stuck within a socket on the crown. One noticeable feature beyond the strange device was the fact the skeleton had no horn.

“Since he wasn’t a unicorn. And now you see the problem, I can’t touch him with magic while he’s wearing that device. It’s a recollector. It's for non-unicorns to be able to store and view memories from memory orbs, like the one plugged into the device currently.”

The sister dragging the skeleton into the hall stopped once the doctor was within sight and fully exposed to the light. It felt like graverobbing, but it was a favor we agreed upon. “So what’s stopping you from picking him up with magic?” She asked.

Helix’s eye turned to the doctor's remains and stayed locked on to his form while answering. “If a unicorn’s magic touches a memory orb, it will activate and bring the pony in question into the orb. I would be forced to watch whatever is inside until the memory is complete every time I grab the skeletal remains.”

One of the jumpsuit clad sisters grabbed the device and removed it from his head as carefully as she could. Once off, she wiped it clean. “So rather than get butchered by the rampant clones, he hid in this closet and just…kept watching memories on repeat until he died.” The first sister who initially pulled him out went back in and brought a bag of orbs out with her. There must have been six or seven in the bag alone.

“What caused all this? What did Stable-Tec do down here? Don’t tell me they unleashed these clones on all those poor ponies.” Another sister spoke up “And how did Stable-Tec start making clones in the first place? We want answers and we won’t get brushed aside again. We’re not backing down this time.”

A chorus of agreements followed the sister’s words. I chimed in my support for her as well. We wanted to know just how wrong things had gotten before our arrival. For a moment or two, I thought Helix’s silence meant she had clammed up and wasn’t going to talk. Then she surprised by lowering herself to eye level and spoke in a low tone. “Fine. But let’s do this after we send his remains to rest. If not for me then please do it for him. Your true creator…” I found myself surprised yet again by just how much emotion a robotic mare’s voice could hold, but sorrow was palpable within the lone ceiling light’s embrace.

“Alright then. Let’s give him a proper funeral.”

***

When the tears began to swell in my eyes I checked to see if no one was watching before wiping them away. The atmosphere was like a typical funeral, only the music the many Mister Handy robots were playing was just making it that much sadder. Even Helix’s light remained dulled and her mono eye remained firmly planted on Doublit’s skeleton. Her horn glowed with magical aura as the doctor's remains were lifted from the bag we’d placed him in and gently onto the crematorium slab.

She did her best to arrange his bones in a way to give him a still pony appearance instead of a pile of bones. The amount of care and respect she placed in him was something else entirely. Even after the passing of lifetimes since his death, she still looked up to him like a pony would to Celestia or Luna. “I pray his soul is at peace. Forgive my failures, professor. I will not fail again…never again.”

With that said, she pulled the lever which began the process of rolling his slab into the furnace and closing the door before igniting the flames and burning what was left of him to ash. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

“Allow me to thank you all for accommodating my request,” Helix whispered. “You have no idea how long I waited to be able to finally grab a hold of him and bring his body to a proper rest. He deserved better than a broom closet for a tomb. You have my thanks…and my respect.” Helix’s voice warbled and shuddered as if she was trying to hold back the floodgates of sorrow. If any of us noticed it, which I’m sure we all did, we dared not say anything about it. We simply gave our quiet thanks and let her continue. “Now…ask your questions once more and I shall answer them all. You deserve that much.”

I mustered the resolve I’d been saving for sometime and began my request in earnest. “What happened down here. Start from the beginning, your beginning.”

Helix blinked and replied “Very well.”

She began to speak softly and slowly. “I was just a university student in Canterlot. What I wanted most was to understand the pony mind and body so I could heal ponies from the war. Some scars were on the outside, but many bore scars on the soul. It haunted them like a specter looming over them, washing their every emotion in despair. A broken hoof was easy, a broken mind was nearly impossible. That challenge was what I meant to conquer, but fate had other plans.”

A projection was cast over the dark metal walls of the crematorium, the same spell Helix used to display things or moments of importance. What we saw was the mirror image of a still breathing, still whole Helix Twist. Her messy orange mane and light blue coat were full of life I didn’t expect to see from a mare like her. When she smiled while holding up a graduate's doctorate I could see she still had braces in her teeth and hope in her eyes.

She didn’t say it was her, but I knew in my heart this was the still living, much younger version of the scientist. The old world was so alien I felt like the brain in the jar descending from the ceiling was more pony than the young, happy mare standing in front of intact structures in Canterlot.

“I wanted to work for the Ministry of Peace. I wanted to follow in ministry mare Fluttershy’s hoofsteps. She was everything I aspired to be and more, yet…” The light returned to Helix’s glass dome, this time with a familiar red tint to it as her brain matter shook. “...yet I was drafted. The ministry, Equestria, didn’t need doctors at home. They needed them out there, on the frontlines. All that effort to put myself through university, all that effort for a doctorate and yet I still get pushed to put my life in danger. It was not fair to me or all I had achieved!”

The image on the wall changed. This time it was Helix and a new pony, a middle aged stallion with some weight to him stood beside her. He had a greying white coat with a head covered with an amber mane tied back into a ponytail with the same color beard neatly cut. “Is that…” I was about to ask, but Helix answered right away leaving no room for specifics. She didn’t need them.

“Doublit. He was my professor who I studied under while working on the final stretch of my tenure at university. When he heard I was being drafted, he pulled some strings to get me a job at the Ministry of Arcane Science instead. I owed him my life and that's what I gave him. He told me he needed someone of my skills in mental health and pony biology for a project the M.A.S was working on, so I jumped at the chance to avoid the war. The Great War…” The image on the wall shifted. Now it was a picture of a small pond within some kind of cave. It glowed with a brilliant blue light which illuminated the cave, as well as Helix and Doublit.

I raised my hoof to interrupt. “He wasn’t just some professor, was he? Sounds like he was a scientist for Twilight Sparkle.”

Her mono eye rotated around her dome and when it had found me it made sure to stare into my soul. I remember the parts of Helix’s hatred for Twilight when the original spoke to Helix about the subject, but beyond that I didn’t care to remember the rest. “We both were, after that agreement. Project Mirror Mirror was to be our life's work. Everything revolved around that ancient pool of water called a mirror pool. From its waters you are born. And every other clone from our project for that matter.”

“Wait wait wait! Now hold on one second.” I turned to see one of the stable jumpsuit clad sisters raise her hoof. “You said you were working for the M.A.S, but all your lab stuff is sitting in the bottom of a Stable and you even said it was supposed to be hidden. So what happened to the M.A.S?”

“I’ll tell you what happened. Project Mirror Mirror failed.” Again the image on the wall changed as Helix twirled to face it and change it one more time. “We were tasked to use the mirror pool to create soldiers to fight in the place of actual ponies. A limitless supply of expendable manpower we could throw at the zebras all the while ponies born and raised in Equestria and beyond could stop wasting their lives on a stupid conflict with tribals.” Helix sighed, defeated. “You have no idea just how close we were to greatness.”

This time the image showed a red, earth pony stallion with a blonde mane. He was tall, burly, and the very definition of stoic. The very sight of him made me blush at just how strong he seemed. A real stallion. “W-who’s that?” I wasn’t sure who asked this time. My attention was fixed on the hunk’s photo.

“He is the brother of the ministry mare in charge of the Ministry of Wartime Technology. His name was Big Macintosh and he was supposed to be our perfect specimen. Perfect in every way we could have imagined.” Her eye turned from us to the image she was projecting before continuing. “We had a strict guideline on just who was to be cloned. He needed to be strong, physically fit, clear of any present or future disease, unwavering in the face of the enemy, capable of leadership, loyal to ponykind and Equestria, but most importantly he had to be mentally sound. Mares weren’t even considered to be genetic templates for the cloning process.”

There were a bit of mixed feelings in there, but the biggest was confusion. Big Mac seemed to be perfect for the role just by looking at him. “If you had him, then why did it fail?” I asked, but more like demanded. “How do you fail when everything is supposedly perfect?”

“Because of that bitch Twilight Sparkle!” Helix roared to life with a fury she’d never displayed before. “We had everything! Every goal met, every requirement fulfilled, every expectation for our project was satisfied. And yet, when we submitted our application for Mic Mac’s return from the front, we. Were. DENIED!”

The projection faded as Helix roared in a metal scream that felt like the howl of a wasteland horror. The voice box that helped her speak crackled and distorted her rage, but she remained focused on her hatred enough for us to see just how terrifying the remnants of a mare scorned could truly be.

“She never even gave us a reason. Every effort we made to use him as a template was met with a slap to the face! When we said he could save thousands of lives and win us the war, she didn’t give a damn about any of it.” Her mono eye twitched and shook with rage as it rotated back to the wall. Her magic formed another image over the wall, this time of the ministry mare herself, Twilight. “She ruined us. By the time she finally gave us the go ahead to request his transfer, he was dead. Died a fucking hero saving Princess Celestia’s life against an assassination attempt.”

My heart was starting to beat its way through my ribs as the adrenaline took hold. Helix held a hundred years worth of hate in her heart and she was letting it show. “B-but couldn’t you have found somepony else?”

“THERE WAS NOPONY ELSE!” She screamed. “Every miserable pony we cloned was either a coward, couldn’t handle the existential nightmare of being a copy, couldn’t stand themself, or failed one of the other requirements we had. We even expanded to mares just to try and lock down a candidate.” Her metallic voice huffed with a burning fury that finally showed signs of petering out.

Then she sighed, lifted herself above us and cut off her magic. Her emotions were spent and her hatred subsided. For now.

“The project was perfect. Our work was flawless. It was the template we couldn’t make perfect. When we failed to meet our deadlines, Twilight had the project mothballed and ordered the entire thing shelved. Our dreams were crushed before they even fully got off the ground.” Helix sighed again, this time with an air of depression circling her brain like a vulture.

I wish I could have hugged that brain in a jar. An ancient pony who met nothing but failure in every venture she pursued, now stuck as a brain encased in glass and strange fluids. “I…I’m sorry to hear that…you didn’t deserve that, or this.” I waved a hoof around the room. “You didn’t deserve to be trapped here because the world ended, but you haven’t explained how you came to be here. Or what ‘here’ even is yet…”

“You’re right.” Her dome lowered again as the Mister Handys moved to open the now extinguished furnace and remove the slab that once held Doublit’s bones. “We made our complaints known about the discontinuation of our project, but all we did was paint targets on our backs. What we managed to create, or rather manipulate, made us knowledgeable about just how to magically create bodies and how to fill them with pony memories.”

The magic on the wall shifted to show a site I’d seen a few times in my life as I scavenged through old buildings and houses long since abandoned after the great war. A picture of a poster featuring a pink pony creepily staring us down with some kind of message now unreadable. That was Pinkie Pie, the scariest pony we ever learned about back in the Wayward school. Of all the ministry mares in our history classes, she was the one who inspired fear in us more than any other figure in those old textbooks.

If I remembered some of those old pre-war posters I’d seen, I had a feeling that was probably the point.

“That knowledge made us dangerous in the eyes of the Ministry of Morale. The M.A.S agreed. So they decided the best course of action until the war ended was to store our memories alongside the project itself for safe keeping.” Again another change in the image Helix projected. This time it was another poster from the old world with a sneaky zebra about to pounce on an unsuspecting pony from behind. “Just in case zebras ever came for us, or worse, we decided to defect and take our research with us.”

The sisters alongside me all cringed at the thought of what might have happened. “But you didn’t get your memories taken, right? You worked on that project for so long it seems. They would have had to take years from you.” Or more, but I didn’t want to think about that.

Helix just nodded quietly and shut down her spell. “Memory is what makes ponies people. It is what defines us beyond our core personality traits. Had Doublit not used connections he’d gathered during his professor days, me and him both would have woken up entirely different ponies one day after a deleted visit to a M.O.M facility. And believe me, Pinkie would have gladly done that had Stable-Tec not gotten involved.”

Stable-Tec, the boogie man of the past that everypony I talked to about the matter seemed to have remarkably negative opinions of. “Tell us about Stable-Tec! Nopony ever gives us a straight answer about them and we’re tired of wondering.”

I watched as Helix Twist managed to roll her mono eye camera before looking back to us with contempt. How she managed to convey that emotion with only one eye and nothing else was a feat in and of itself. “They knew about Doublit and they knew how passionate he was. Old contacts combined with Stable-Tec having insiders into the ministries supposedly top secret projects meant those ponies knew what was about to happen to us. We only knew about it because they warned us in advance. And they offered a solution to our predicament.”

At this point I was sitting alongside my four fellow clones as we watched Helix’s slideshow continue. This next image was herself and Doctor Doublit sitting in chairs similar to the one I…or rather the original, sat in during her first arrival to this Stable. The helmet that copies memories like the one in the lower labs was covering both of their heads.

“Wait a second…n-no, you’re a clone too” one sister said. “You escaped using a clone,” another said.

Helix sighed again, seemingly exhausted. “I don’t know. I’ll never truly know for sure. The Ministry of Morale wanted memories, but if they saw the memory of us being cloned they’d know we were a copy and go after the real Helix and Doublit. So, we removed the memory of the entire process ourselves.” Her mono eye glowed a brilliant blue just like the water from the mirror pool picture.

So Helix and the doctor were cloned, but removed the memory so they wouldn’t know which is which. Clever. “It's like a bait and switch. Or something. You just gave those ministry goons a clone with altered memories and you escaped underground, right?”

The brain just sat in silence for a few seconds, then blinked. “It’s…hard to say. We wiped the memory from the clones so they’d think they were the originals, but in order for the entire plan to succeed we had to wipe the plan from our memory too. The process had to be seamless before the clones' memories were imprinted. Pinkie was…very thorough with suspects and their minds. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.”

“But you know of the plan! Doesn’t that make you the original?” My sister said, though which one I wasn’t sure. The rest echoed the sentiment.

Again, Helix just blinked. “I only know of the plan because I watched a memory orb. There is evidence to suggest I’m the clone and evidence to suggest I’m not. The unknowing nature of the situation is what helped the plan succeed. We could leave no room for errors when it came to the M.O.M. Then again, it was Stable-Tec who was the outside party helping us. If anyone had any true grasp on the situation, it would be them.”

“Woah, hold on again” I shouted. “Helix, don’t tell me Stable-Tec was the mastermind behind this.”

Her brain simply nodded.

“You’re kidding” every sister except me shouted. The feeling we had was mutual. Helix gave her dream to Stable-Tec.

“I’m not. Stable-Tec was the invisible hooves that guided us after the memory wipe and the one who gave our memories back. They never needed our equipment, research, or the bloody enchanted water. All they needed was us.” The next image to appear on the wall was Helix Twist clad in the same blue jumpsuit as my sisters. She was working in the same lab we were born in with all six glass tubes still intact and hanging neatly from the ceiling.

“So they give you everything you’ve ever needed to keep the project going, but why would Stable-Tec want cloning technology?” She said she was going to give us answers if we asked, so I was going to ask the tough questions.

Though, maybe I should have expected tough answers. Because when Helix’s eye turned to me with its blue robotic gaze I began to shrink back under its renewed intensity. “Because, Muddy, they wanted it to add to their already existing experiment going on here. We were just a bonus, but that wasn’t the reason they gave us when they gave us their sales pitch on why we should take their offer.”

“And that reason was?” I said.

“To preserve our life’s work. To preserve us. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse. When we saw Stable-Tec’s predictions come true, and what happened to our other selves, we graciously accepted. After that, we were down here well before the bombs ever dropped on Equestria. The records, like our duplicate’s minds, were wiped from Stable-Tec’s database and our lab here was the same.” A cold laugh echoed from her brain’s speakers as she lowered herself to reach eye level. Then she shot forward to stare me down, eye to eye.

In the sudden staring contest, I found myself the loser quite quickly. “We didn’t realize Stable-Tec had ulterior motives for us and our work. They integrated everything into a command room, the very lab you stumbled into after your births. From there we studied and perfected our work, all while Stable-Tec was using it to replace ponies they murdered!”

Her brain didn’t leave my side as her eye spun around on its rail and began to project another image on the wall. Only this time it moved. The video was of an earth pony like me in a blue jumpsuit, a Stable dweller. It wasn’t anything special, just some pony working on some pipes behind a removed section of wall paneling. At least it was until the piping suddenly exploded as the pony stuck their head into the wall with a flashlight. The poor pony didn’t stand a chance against that kind of blast. In a way I was thankful Helix suppressed the image of the now headless corpse slumped against the wall as two more stable dwellers came to investigate the sudden and tragic death.

“I…What…” I stuttered. Helix turned back to me. “Helix…W-what was that…?”

“That?” Her cold laugh bounced off the walls of the crematorium so harshly I wanted to cover my ears. “That was the experiment! Ha haaa! How would ponies react to the sudden, untimely deaths of their fellow dwellers and the sudden resurrection of the recently departed? Isn’t it fantastic?” Her laugh was so dry I could feel dehydration fast approaching. Or maybe it was the rapid drying of my mouth as the shock set in. Murder? Just like that?

“Don’t be surprised,” Helix continued. “Saving ponies was never the goal. Not for this Stable at least. The goal here was to perform a social experiment so cruel that it pushed pony’s minds to the breaking point.”

More footage played across the wall, this time four all at the same time. Each one was another pony going about their day before some accident would occur. A loose bolt shooting out into the neck of a nearby stallion, a door malfunctioning and slamming shut as a mare passed underneath, a steel beam falling from the ceiling and crushing a poor filly. The worst one was the sudden disabling of the combat prohibitor on a Mister Handy robot. The last words that the poor janitor heard was something about a zebra infiltrator before he was sawed to pieces. Shazan was right. Damn that zebra.

Stables were the stuff of nightmares. A personal hell for the unlucky survivors of the end of the world.

“You were a part of this? This cycle of murder and rebirth?” I asked. I already knew the answer, but I wanted to hear her say it, to admit it. Or maybe I wanted to be wrong.

From the sullen tone in her voice, I knew right away I was right. “W-we did not have a choice. They gave us everything we had ever asked for. They saved our lives! We didn’t expect the bombs to actually drop, nor did we expect the Stable-Tec scientists working with us were conducting their own experiments until it was too late.” Her brain shook in its casing as the memories forced the image she was projecting to change.

Green mushroom clouds rose over the horizon like titans dwarfing the poor souls down below, casting the light of death over Equestria. There were…just so many. “Armageddon” I whispered in a hoarse voice.

Her brain nodded again. “Our world ended, but my world wasn’t over just yet. As the Stable door closed our new lives began underground. Voluntary self exile became involuntary in the blink of an eye.” She blinked a few times, turning to each of us as she continued. “ After that, the real work started. The work we couldn’t say no to, otherwise we’d find ourselves on the receiving end of Stable-Tec’s booby trapped bunker.”

Helix took a short pause to take a deep breath before continuing. I wasn’t sure why she did that or made those noises. The poor mare doesn’t even have lungs or a mouth.

The projections ceased as Helix turned back to our group. “For decades we worked in silence. When Stable-Tec killed off some poor soul we brought them back, but only once. The limitations were known by the others, so they took their time and picked targets like reapers. Then they had us reintroduce them right back into society as if nothing had happened.”

I couldn’t imagine the horror of seeing somepony just die like that, only to reappear the next day like everything was normal. “I can see how that might leave some ponies a little fucked up.” Or a lot.

“It was agonizing for us and them,” Helix explained. “ I tried my best to give council to those who needed it. Those poor ponies were suffering enough from being trapped underground. Cabin fever was rampant, but things only got worse as ponies were forced to ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears as ponies they watched die suddenly walk among them again with no explanation.” The soft warble in her words returned, making her sound like she wanted to cry.

“Some passed it off as stress related delusions, as if they were going crazy.” Her eye turned away suddenly as if she couldn’t bear the sight of us. “Some of them did go crazy. Some killed themselves as the mental stress piled on. I could not save them then…Stable-Tec forbade it.”

I crossed my hooves and turned to the still hovering Mister Handys and smacked one against its pincer arm. When one of its eyes turned towards me I pointed to the door and tried to shoo them away. After what felt like an eternity of playing charades with a robot, the Mister Handy understood and motioned for the rest of the clean up crew to follow it out.

This was a moment the sisters and Helix needed alone. Slowly, I brushed my hoof against her glass casing. “I…don’t blame you for what happened here. There are some real monsters up there on the surface and I don’t mean the mutants. You’re not alone.” The metal mono eye turned to look up at me and I gave her the most sincere smile I could muster in return.

“Glad to see not much has changed in the two centuries I’ve been down here,” she muttered sarcastically.

The two sisters not wearing anything stood up and coughed quietly to get our attention. “So with that out of the way, what happened here? Where is everypony?”

Helix twist said nothing, did nothing, except for stare at the wall for almost an entire minute. As we waited, I contemplated shaking her dome or tapping on it. That is until her horn lit up without a word and began to play another bit of footage.

To my shock, this one was from Helix herself.

***

The world was tinted in a color resembling blue or some mix of blue and green. There were data displays along the corners of her vision showing her a constant stream of numbers and letters in jumbled sequences and moving too fast for me to read for more than a second. Of course her entire perspective was above the rest of the ponies as she hung from the ceiling.

“Doctor, the latest updates have been sent to us. You should be receiving them shortly. The recycler has syphoned enough power for a quick copy and paste job.” Helix said with an air of stability and emotion she didn’t display in the present. Her single eye focused on the chunky stallion she’d shown us earlier, Doublit, though his age had increased dramatically. What was a university professor barely into his forties was now a withered stallion who’s beard had grayed out entirely and body had shriveled with age I’d never seen before. He was like a ghoul, but still living. Still sane.

His tired milky eyes gazed up at the brain above him with a hard look that expressed nothing but exhaustion. “I already know who the next bastard is going to be. The reports can remain unread, unless you’d rather read them. They just make me angry now…” His voice trailed off as he set to work on the terminal in front of him. It was the same viewing area that was connected to the room full of glass pods. Each of his hooves, despite the age, moved with precision and well practiced skill as though he’d typed the commands hundreds of times.

Helix chirped again as new data crossed her vision in rapid order. “The mirror water distillation process has started, Doctor. The new clone is ready and waiting for memory transfer, sir. Vitals are stable. Subject is in stasis now and awaiting your word.”

Doublit rubbed his face with his hoof and sighed, the years of toying with hapless ponies at the beck and call of Stable-Tec had worn him down and it showed with every breath leaving his lungs. “He isn’t dead yet, but in a few minutes I have no doubt those lab coats will come in here demanding the replacement. Let’s go ahead and start the sequence and get ahead of the game so they don’t stick around like last time.”

They must have pony deaths on a damn schedule. So much so, that Doublit was preparing new clones in advance like a sick routine he could predict with how frequent it was. I could feel my blood boil at how casual it all was, or had become, for them. Death meant nothing to ponies like them. Like pre-war raiders. Like animals.

“Jellybean, how is he…going to go out, sir? It will take some editing to make this story align and I thought…” Helix asked, but Doublit raised a hoof and shook his head.

“We discussed this before” he stated, “you don’t have to get into these things like I do. It’s not healthy.”

Helix scoffed. “I’m a brain in a jar. Let’s worry about my mental health when the bio gel degrades. Until then, let me help you. I hate seeing you suffer alone after all these years.”

This couldn’t have been their first argument about this. Though, I had a feeling it would be their last. If Helix was showing this, it could only mean one thing. This was the doomsday for the Stable.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said as he rubbed his eyes with his hooves. “If they sent the update on the schedule it means they already got everything they need to proceed. We’ll just sedate him and let the doctors upstairs deal with the bedside bullshit.”

As Doublit typed away at the terminal and began reading the report for himself, Helix responded with a simple “Of course doctor,” before looking back through her own data scrolling through her vision. For a few moments of silence and tapping, there was peace and quiet. Everything seemed relatively boring.

Then the lights flickered before sputtering out entirely, casting a darkness over everything.

“Helix? Helix?! Are you okay?!” Doublit called out with terror in his voice. It was strange to think a little dark might cause a grown stallion to panic, but I remembered Helix was hooked up to the Stable like a jack-in-the-box toy. As the power died so too did Helix’s. Only a message scrolling across her vision was any indication Helix wasn’t currently dead.

‘Warning. Primary power grid failing. Brownout detected. Activating emergency power supply.’

“D-d-doc…doctor. I am…experiencing power fluctuations. Something is-is-is…wro-wrong. Wrong.” Helix sounded more like a protectron variant than a pony as her systems worked

through the emergency power start up process. “I’m…I’m reading…power failure on all levels. We have blackouts on levels one through five.”

Even if Helix was struggling with power, she was still well enough to use magic through her horn which she used to cast a gentle light spell. It quickly filled the immediate area with a white light which illuminated a worried Dublit. “As long as you’re still powered, that's all that matters.”

“No.” Helix responded quickly. “We’ve had a power failure during a memory installation process. There is no telling the damage dealt to our systems or what could be happening to the clone. We must…”

With a quick stomp of his hoof, Doublit silenced her. “We will wait for the backup generators to kick in, then we wait for security. There’s no telling how the clone might react if their memories are damaged. They could be unstable, dangerous even. We must be cautious.”

I had the good intuition to realize no amount of caution was going to prevent the future from happening. Helix, the ever cautious and faithful student, turned to the door separating the control room from the one filled with the six clone vats and used her magic to manually lock the door. “It would not be the first, sir” Helix spoke in a hushed voice. A dark story for another time if I remembered to ask about it.

“It is not,” he replied “But let’s pray it is the last.” Dim red lights filled the room as emergency power restored partial system access to the Stable. The gentle hum of local generators kicking in replaced the emergency lighting with the standard one as things seemingly returned to normal.

Kerthump

It was crazy just how short normal lasted. The familiar sound of a body hitting wet tile sounded from the other side of the thankfully locked door. The two pre-war ponies may not have known what was coming, but I did. My suspicions were confirmed when a familiar stallion's voice echoed through the room in a confused, angry roar.

“Hrrrrng. J…Jellybean. Je…JELLY.” The metal door rang out as one kick slammed against its metal bulwark, then another. And another.

“Helix! Talk to me, what’s the status of the subject?”

Fresh data was racing across Helix’s vision as she struggled to understand exactly what was happening. “Doublit, this doesn’t make any sense. The release sequence was started, completed, and now the system is reinitializing for a second cloning process…are you issuing these orders?” Error codes lit up the corners of her vision as she stored one error away just to be bombarded by two more.

Even as the good doctor typed furiously away at his terminal, the errors came in even greater force than before along with strings of corrupted code. “The system is stuck on the last command sequence we gave and is rebooting itself endlessly. It’s draining the Stable’s power grid and forcing brownout warnings on every sub system we have down here. I…”

Crash. Crash.

Again and again Jellybean bucked away at the metal door. Each time he struck made Helix’s vision shake. “I’ve read Jellybean's file. When he calms down, and he will, that stallion is going to find a way to unlock the door and break free.”

“Helix…I…I’m sorry.” Whether he’d given up or simply ran out of options, Doublit ceased his attempts at trying to fix the situation through the terminal and moved to dawn the coat he’d worn in the university photo. “We have only a moment before the system begins the next process and cycles an entire batch of faulty clones. I can’t stop it without shutting it down first. So, first things first. Can you access the security cameras in the power plant? That’s where Stable-Tec’s next accident was going to take place.”

The jar bound mare nodded, or as much as her brain could, and swapped the streams of code and numbers for a window looking into another room entirely. Helix must have complete access to everything in this Stable from her perch in the ceiling. The power plant the doctor wanted to view was a mess as expected, but something was immediately clear when Helix gazed through the cameras and focused on the blacked corpse of what I could only assume was the original Jellybean.

Bolts of lighting streaked from two charged pylons atop a pair of large generators and into the crispy corpse over and over, but sometimes those bolts would jump from Jellybean’s body to a control panel in the wall. Sparks would fly as the terminal was repeatedly overcharged and attacked by the power surge that ran out of control. “It’s bad, sir. Very bad.” Helix said. “Total loss of control over the grid and the main control panel is being damaged with no way to safely access it before the next blackout. Not without joining Jellybean.”

Defeated and weary from what would have to come next, Doublit sat against the wall and stared up at the ceiling. “Contact the Overmare. Inform her of the situation and let her know the Stable will be compromised soon. We have no choice but to evacuate.”

“But sir, I…” Helix wanted to suggest ways they could save the Stable, stop the machine, anything, but she didn’t get the chance as the system began the cloning procedure. As it did so, alarms sounded.

“Spell matrix coming online. Memory transfer in progress. Copy data initializing. All systems are functional. Vital signs are normal. Mirror Pool binary engram activated. Please stand by. Warning, power grid daily allotment has been exceeded. Brownouts imminent. Please stand by.” The automated system blared its warning as Helix’s vision swam once the power to her brain container began to wane.

“Do-do-doctor! I am so s–s-sorrrrrrry.”

“Helix!!!” That was the last word Helix Twist ever heard from Doctor Doublit before unconsciousness took hold of her. Her systems just couldn’t take the strain as the Stable’s power grid was being consumed so greedily by Stable-Tec’s own version of Project Mirror Mirror.

The rest was history. The few scraps of footage from Helix’s point of view were of her brief bouts of consciousness between power failures from each new wave of Jellybean clones being created. Sometimes she’d wake up to find Stable security fighting off waves of much younger Jellybean clones, other times she’d wake up to find security guards dead and Jellybean opening up panels in the wall to start hotwiring doors to escape further into the Stable. Alarms blared as automated voices demanded any who could listen to evacuate.

“This is an emergency alarm, code red. All essential and non-essential personnel evacuate. Evacuate. Rally point destinations have been updated on Pipbuck maps. Please follow all evacuation procedures at this time.” The robotic voice repeated again, but only got about half way before Helix passed out yet again as power failed.

It was a waking nightmare for the ponies down here, but maybe it was better than sticking around this deathtrap of a Stable. The world above was a cruel one, but a tortured existence could be avoided if you strived to build a better future. Down here, torture was all that was left.

What I failed to notice was Helix’s fake breathing becoming more strained as the memories she was projecting continued. She could have used her mono eye to project things like she did before, but the glow of her horn meant she was using magic this entire time. Now she was either at her limit with the magic usage, or the memories were opening old wounds. I suspected both to be the case.

“That’s enough, Helix,” I said loudly so she could hear me. “We’ve seen enough. We…I don’t want to see anymore.”

A hoof gripped my shoulder suddenly as a sister came up from behind me. “Did the Stable ponies escape? Please, I want to know. Please tell us they escaped!”

For Helix’s involvement in all this, I was surprised to see her brain nod in its casing as her eye turned towards us. Despite everything that had happened there was some light in this dark tunnel at the end. “Doublit made sure there were rally points for the dwellers to follow once they made it to the surface. High ground was key, so some old overpasses, bridges, and natural landmarks were mapped on their Pipbucks. You’d be surprised, or maybe not, to find the population of the Stable was quite high despite the fifty years of isolation. Some were instructed to head to one waypoint while others were instructed to go further north.”

“If that is the case, then that means…”

“That is correct. It’s very likely you are the product of Stable-Tec’s successful protection of a small population of ponies. Or perhaps, it’s failure to destroy them.” Helix seemed so pleased with herself at this revelation. To further show us just how likely her theory was, she displayed one last image. A Pipbuck styled map appeared on the wall with locations and personal waypoints marked. Point Wayward Trading Post was one such location that overlapped with one of Doublit’s waypoints.

Another was someplace called ‘The Moore’. A location north along the river that we hadn’t discovered yet. Or even heard of. If we did, we’d since forgotten.

A sister called out to Helix, “Hey what’s that spot on the river called? Never heard of a place called that.” A chorus of agreements sounded from the rest of the sisters as Helix coughed in her usual pretend way.

“I’ve been keeping tabs on the original Muddy Waters since she left through her Pipbuck. She's heading to this location now, but for whatever reason, I can’t say.” Helix spoke matter of factly, but I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling growing in my gut as a marker showing Muddy’s location popped up in the middle of the river far more north than the Stable was.

Whatever she was doing, it wasn’t returning to her new home or family.

Plus, I had this sneaky suspicion that Helix twist wasn’t being entirely honest, but I didn’t have any reason to doubt her. So why did I suddenly not want to believe her? Something wasn’t adding up.

“She’s gotta be on a boat. Do you think she got caught by trappers again?”

“What if she’s being carried away by a ‘lurk?!”

“Enough. All of you.” Helix stepped in before general worry turned to panic as the unknown was left unexplained. “I can only assume she’s completing the tasks I’ve set out for her and that is to bring this Stable back into operational capacity. While she does that, let’s see about getting the next generation of Muddy Waters up and running.”

Before she returned to the ceiling, her emotions corrected and her drive restored, she grabbed the ashes of the late Doctor Doublit and floated them gently into a prepared urn which she took with her as her glass dome and the urn entered the ceiling hatch and vanished. Now our job was to reach the lower level and await our new sister's creations.

As we rode the elevator back down my thoughts were on our original self and her venture north. Eventually she’d run into the place called The Moore and meet whoever lived there. I prayed when she got there she’d find civilized ponies and avoid trappers. If Muddy died, so would our dreams of a new future.

Because if I was being honest, my stomach hurt so bad that I would eat just about anything right now. I hope she comes back with food.

***

Level up: level 6

Perk added: None

-You’ve postponed choosing a perk as you’d rather the original Muddy Waters chose for you instead. Not that you even could without a Pipbuck.

Author's Note

The holidays break is over and we return to our regularly scheduled program. I can't help but wonder just how many characters one can make out of a single oc. Time may tell.

I just wanted to make a lore dump chapter without just dumping heaps of lore for no reason or make walls of text. Plus I didn't want to just leave behind all those clones.

Also fanart! Art by @mamaskally on twitter (currently X)