Starlight, Starbright, the Brightest Star I See Tonight

The three of them slipped into the hallways around the computer core, pillowcases tied around the hooves of the two living unicorns to dull the sound of their movements.

Everypony else had fled with the evacuation warning, flowing into the smaller habitation domes which could detach from Equestria and float nearby while life support was restored. They’d passed herds of well-organized ponies who insisted they also evacuate. It had only been Starlight’s status as a Programmer which allowed her to justify heading into danger.

After all, there was a chance she could fix it.

But as they approached the doorway, they could hear him talking.

“Why are so many of my duplicates mares? I suppose you’d have an educated guess on the matter, Starlight? You don’t have to keep sneaking, you know. I can hear your hearts beat. Come on, stop wasting time, I want to move on.”

They walked around the corner and through the doorway, and found him sitting in the middle of Starlight’s work space, fanning his wings out in a display of hubris and power, grinning.

Starlight noticed her coffee machine first, broken on the floor next to her shattered cup. Even though she felt like all of her world was falling apart, that felt personal to her. But Starlight knew that she had a duty to fulfill as a Programmer.

“Why did you damage them?” Starlight asked, pointing to the computer cores.

“What, the giant machines designed to stop beings like me?” he laughed, looking back at Celestia’s core. “In every universe, they’re my opposition. So, it serves me and my curiosity to disable them early on. I have questions too, though, Starlight.”

His horn lit, and before Starlight could move, she was teleported closer, almost nose to nose with him.

She saw so much of her own feelings in his expression. She could tell that he wasn’t happy, in the same way that she could tell that he was extremely powerful. While she had her horn deep in the code of her own god-computers, she was tightly controlled and careful. This strange mirror of her seemed not to have any of those constraints, yet she thought he looked calm and confident in a way that she craved deep down.

She had to wonder, then, if that was the thing she was craving and yearning for, the missing aspect of her life.

“Why aren’t you in charge?” he asked.

Starlight couldn’t imagine that he actually cared about her, or her well being. She thought that he might be asking the question to get a measure of her.

Numbly, she realized that he was seeking data. Just like her.

“I am, just not in a way you recognize,” Starlight blurted.

He laughed, and sat up a bit taller.

“Fine, I’ll entertain it. Explain how you’re in charge when these machines control everything.”

“She programs them,” Sunburst piped up. “How did you get so many cutie marks?”

“Dont–” Bright whispered, before everything stopped.

Starlight couldn’t breathe. She was stuck in place by a magical field so powerful that she might as well have been cast into concrete.

He stood and walked closer to Sunburst, smiling cruelly as Bright’s image flickered and twitched, unable to move even though she had no physical form. Sunburst looked around with wide eyes and stepped backward.

“I took them, Sunburst,” he purred, whispering gently as he loomed over her. “I became the Brightest Star of them all. I took them from my little cult, freeing them from the responsibility. Then I took them from the Elements of Harmony, freeing them from the burden. Then I took them from every single pony that existed in my world. Except for you. Except for my lovely Sunburst. Because she deserved to understand finally what a price her ascension took from me.”

Sunburst was shaking, and Starlight wanted to make him stop. Make him step away from her.

To make him stop, she knew that she had to understand what was happening.

Starlight knew the basic functions of magic and telekinesis specifically, although she wasn’t as good of a mage as Sunburst.

Telekinesis, or TK, is usually a point-function magic which forms a manipulative field from a single visible spot. The unicorn has to see the spot, and if it leaves their line of sight it takes an advanced mage to continue the TK even if the status of the point changes.

Starlight looked down at her hooves and tried to raise one, watching how the magical field flexed around her.

Typically, TK would not be able to hold another living creature for very long, and that grip would be weakened as they struggled. But instead of seeing a single point that his TK was spreading from, Starlight saw hundreds or thousands of points, with a web between them.

She could conclude, based on these observations, that he’d constructed his TK as a field effect using an algorithmic web, new points of control appearing whenever she tried to move.

Starlight realized that this wasn’t a magic problem, it was a programming problem. Despite barely being able to breathe, she marveled for a moment that all three versions of herself that she’d observed seemed to think more like programs than like ponies.

She lit her horn, despite her lungs burning and her vision going blurry. She didn’t try to push at the web, but instead she formed her magic into a cube at the tip of her horn. Then she intersected another cube with it, quadrupling the number of faces it contained. Then she made it larger, and repeated the process.

The magical field grappling with her body tried to adhere to the outside of the magical aura, but the more complex the shape became, the more energy was pulled into an arrangement of tiny points until Starlight pressed it away from herself.

With the electrical snap of crackling energy, the field collapsed into the complex shape and then fizzled out.

Starlight immediately teleported away just as a blast of magic hit where she’d been standing and the Brightest Star roared.

She didn’t go far, just into Celestia’s core. Because she realized two things.

Firstly, cutie marks in her world were digital simulations of cutie marks, and though they held a lot of power, they were not just magical. They were secured physically to their bodies, and if the Brightest Star tried to take a cutie mark here, he’d probably either fail or kill the subject.

Secondly, because cutie marks were created in her world, they had the ability to manipulate them. They used a magically imbued device to determine the mark the pony should have, and then they created that mark and made it physical. If she reversed the process, she could rip the cutie marks from the Brightest Star’s body.

As long as she didn’t die first.

Bright appeared next to her.

“Okay, so he is going to find you. You know that, right?”

“Obviously,” Starlight growled as she carefully unplugged the Mark Detection Array from Celestia and then teleported again.

This time, she was just outside of Cadance’s computer core, in a completely different part of the ship.

Cadence’s core was armored and protected in ways the other two were not, and immediately a hologram of a white unicorn stallion appeared in front of the door.

“Programmer Starlight,” he said calmly. “An alternative version of yourself is attempting to destroy the ship, and another alternative version of yourself is currently being run on Cadance’s hardware. Please explain why we should trust you.”

“You shouldn’t,” Starlight panted, setting the array down. “But you can take this, plug it into Cadance, and if I’m right she’ll be able to take the cutie marks from him. Weaken him so we can stop him.”

“You really don’t understand ponies, do you?” Shining Armor shook his head, frowning as he set down his spear and walked closer. “You don’t even try to defend yourself, or to convince me. You just give up. As though you don’t have the ability to convey your intention. Starlight, just try. Try convincing me your intentions are pure.”

Starlight felt a headache coming on.

Friendship and hobbies. It seemed to her like this was just another situation where she could make everything work, if others would stop trying to waste her time by making her act the way they wanted her to.

Starlight closed her eyes, as she wondered if this message that life kept bludgeoning her with was more than just a refrain. Bright had a smile that Starlight couldn’t even imagine, a comfort with her own life that Starlight had never been able to touch.

She thought rebellion, maybe, was what pushed her against the idea of “friendship and hobbies” so much. It felt like everyone pushed it on her because it had worked for them, and she didn’t believe that she was like everyone else.

So then, Starlight wondered if what she really wanted was what Brightest Star had gained, the confidence and ease that came from being terrifyingly powerful.

“I have a plan to defeat him,” she finally said as she opened her eyes. “I have a plan, and I don’t want him to hurt anyone else. Heck, I don’t want Celestia to be offline. Just that is enough to feel... wrong, broken. Please, let me help.”

Shining Armor nodded and stepped aside. The armored blast door groaned open, letting Starlight slipped through, plugging in the array and quickly configuring it to perform extractions. As she worked, Bright appeared next to her again.

“He’s hurting Sunburst,” she whispered.

Starlight didn’t stop, even as tears clouded her vision. She believed that this had to work, it was the only path she could see.

“I can’t use this device.”

She paused, looking for the source of the voice she’d never heard before.

“C… Cadence?”

“Yes. I cannot use this device. It goes against my morals to directly manipulate the destinies of living ponies as Celestia and Luna do. It’s a conflict of interest for the security of ponies to be tangled up in their freedom. Starbright, you’ll have to control it.”

Starlight and Starbright shared a fearful look, silence stretching between them. It seemed to both of them that they would have to work together to defeat a dark version of themselves. In Starlight’s opinion, it was somewhat poetic.

“I’m going to insert a program into your mind,” Starlight whispered, going back to the programming.

“Okay.”

Then it was done, and Bright appeared to be holding a staff with two points.

She chuckled sadly.

“Ah… yes, this I’m familiar with. Let’s do this.”