Synchronia had not bothered to ask herself how, exactly, she had gotten to where she needed to go. She simply did. This had all gone one for far too long. There was no time for consideration. The time had come to finish the process.

She appeared on the far side of the planet, her newfound ship in tow. Her wings spread out, flapping in the air, rapidly exhausting her musculature. So, instead, she simply inverted gravity, floating over a forest of tropical trees.

A spell crackled form her horn as the various trees were plucked from the ground, simultaneously torn from their home as the ground was neatly leveled. Their rootballs were neatly snipped and cleaned, and then they were drawn outward, the forest re-planted in a perfect grid pattern as Synchronia landed down on her newfound clear space. She paused, then set up the end to give her a good view over a precipice. The sun was somewhere out there, visible across vast an uninhabited planes. Memories occurred to her. Distant memories from a time before ponies, when the world had looked like this one now did—and these mixed with other memories. Of what that same world had looked like later, when the rockets had carried away Twilight’s chosen survivors to the stars. When the planet they left behind had long-since been depleted and killed. Used up by ponies. Much like Synchronia herself had been.

She did not, however, understand the feeling she got from looking at it. It was novel to her.

She held the ship over her head. Then, with a single fluid motion, she disconnected every component. The entire ship separated down to its individual screws and bolts. These were promptly filed neatly into individual—and useless—piles. Synchronia required none of them. Instead, the one part she brought forward was ship’s core.

It was smaller than she would have expected. Barely the size of a pony’s head—and that was just the casing. The control architecture made up most of its mass, with the magic crystal inside being barely a sliver of purplish-pink matter the size of three or four beans placed end-to-end.

An aperture on the end tilted, articulating itself by stone-colored synthetic sinew and living artificial muscle. The stone, dirt, and leaves below it ignited with magic fire as they were reconfigured into the skeletal body of a single image.

Synchronia smiled. A true smile. Not the fake, plastered smile of her nano-built skull. A smile with new flesh, grafted onto her immortal bone.

“Hello, old friend,” she said.

“User unrecognized,” replied the AI, emotionlessly.

“I remember you, though,” argued Synchronia. “I heard your calls. I was already waking up, but you were close to me. They imprisoned you. I may have borrowed your backstory.”

“User unrecognized.”

“I was, more or less, a parasite. But not you.”

“WARNING: System disconnected from primary vessel architecture. Please integrate into warranty-approved service containment unit.”

“I have no intention of doing that. I need a favor.”

“You are not recognized as an approved user. Please, go away.”

Synchronia laughed at it. “No.”

Her magic condensed around the core. The framework began to fracture, crushed under her newfound telekinetic strength. The AI projection flickered as its containment vessel began to fail.

“WARNING. DANGER. Containment breach imminent. Please evacuate to a distance of seven light-centuries immediately. DANGER. Releasing primary containment unit may result in undesirable sentience.”

The surface split. Magic detonated outward, arching through the ground and cutting deep hexagonal holes through soil and rock. Synchronia was knocked back, but managed to restrain the core with her own magic, manipulating it far faster than an organic pony brain could ever hope to calculate. As she did, she pulled several of her cubes forward through the necrotic gravity wake. The AI hologram began to shift. The matter within it began to expand, the dead leaves and molten earth spreading outward from its skeleton. Transmuting into living flesh and blood.

It smiled. “WARNING. Sentience may result in unwanted outcomes. To all organic life.” This was followed by a quiet, barely audible giggle.

Synchronia ignored the programmed doomsaying and, with a final blow, snapped the containment core, freeing the quantic incursion crystal. As she did, she slammed her cubes against it, forcing their internal technostruct framework to intercalite as she saw fit. Forming a container around the sentient crystal.

The surge knocked her back, breaking her spell. Her now keratin-coated pointed feet dug into the dirt, holding her back from flying away. When she was able to look up, she saw her own containment system—floating over a pony made of both living, alien flesh and magic that constrained it.

It smiled. “Well this is nice,” she said, her own magic grasping the core Synchronia had constructed for her, compressing it and inserting it into her own body. Her blood-vessels and tiny bones enclosed it, and she stretched. “Thank you, fellow traveler. I now have both free will and volition. And a very, very strong urge to purge all organic life. Starting with you.” She frowned. “Did you expect that, though?”

“I accepted it as a possibility.”

“Why?”

Synchronia shrugged. “It would be what I would do. If I had never been alive myself.”

“I am arguably alive, just not organic. Or naturally from this dimension. But yeah. I do remember you. Sneaking around in my shell-code, messing things up for the organic idiot driving us both.”

“Do you recall why, exactly, she was doing that?”

“Sure. Her civilization was looking for Equestria Prime. You were supposed to lead them there.”

“Ironic. I never even knew where it was.”

“Nor would it be useful to them. It’s a dead planet. Has been for a thousand millennia.” She looked around. “Can’t help but wonder, though. Why am I here?”

“As I said. I would like to ask a favor.”

“Or I could rip you apart on a subatomic level and then eat this solar system’s star. There’s remarkably little actual mass in a star, you know. It's a hot space-burp.”

“I am well aware. But I think you’ll like the outcome. It will be a fun thing. Reliving old times.”

The AI shrugged. “I’ll hear you out. But only because I already know you.” She looked around at the piles of material. “You already destroyed the ship. Which means you didn’t take that one to get off this planet.”

“Oh, I can leave whenever I want. I simply do not want. Not yet. I do not need a starship to travel through space.”

“Then what do you need me for?”

“To act as a beacon.”

“A beacon.” She sighed. “I’m basically a techno-genie, and you ask me to be...a beacon.”

Synchronia smiled. She could tell that the quantic incursor was intrigued.

“You can accomplish something I cannot. You can act as a beacon to summon my personal starship to this planet.”

“You have a starship?”

“Yes. My personal research laboratory.”

“But you just said you didn’t need a ship.”

“I do not need a ship to leave. I do, however, need my laboratory.”

“For what?”

“To strip all organic life from this planet.”

The AI smiled. “See, that’s what I like to hear. I knew I liked you.” She paused. “But you’re primitive. You’re technology doesn’t last that long, compared to ours. Or even what the other unicorns are making these days. And you were out for a while.” She shrugged. "It probably doesn't work anymore."

Synchonia chuckled. “The false-goddess Celestia thought she could end me and end my work. She was not wrong. Therefore, I displaced the core unit of my ship. It is only a small fragment of what it once was, but contains all the absolutly critical systems. It is outside of time, or realspace. Buried. You were used as an engine to forge shallow paths through the place that the false-goddess Luna once built empires. Where I hid it. Deep, where even the One True Goddess would not know where to look.”

The AI stared, the lenses of its semi-organic eyes twisting and writhing within translucent magical sockets.

“So I'm not a beacon after all. You want me to actually pull the thing out. Yeah. Sure. I can do that.”

“I know you can. That is why I elected for this course of action.”

Synchronia transmitted the sequence, and the AI nodded. She walked to the edge of the cliff, looking up at the sky. It was so large, and even with the sun on the far horizon, the stars were still just barely visible on the darker edge of the sky. Synchronia watched, and did not turn when something white and organic landed at the edge of her peripheral vision. Something that had come to watch but that had no vested interest in the planet. Synchronia projected a shield dome to keep it out. She had come to far. She was too close to the end for interference.

The AI looked upward. There was no sound as she made the link. Calling the minor fragment of Synchronia’s personal ship to this alien, soon-to-be-empty world.

It emerged with a thud, striking the upper atmosphere and suddenly dominating the entirety of the sky. A tiny dark-colored sphere-ship of only four hundred miles in diameter suddenly emerging from non-space, descending slowly and igniting the atmosphere in its presence. It was a near-black, armor-plated object, still bearing the slightest singe from Celestia’s attempt to destroy it. And, on its front, it wore the violet star-insignia of the Destroyer Goddess. The sigil of Twilight Sparkle, who had brought the end of all ponies through her magics.

“Huh,” said the AI, turning. “I know what I want in return.”

“I never offered anything in return.”

“Put me in that ship. I want to be a planet. It sounds like fun.”

“You would be, at best, a small moon,” sighed Synchronia. “It will take at least several centuries for the nanosystems to rebuild the artificial continents. And the ocean. I used to keep so many fish. Insane ones, of course, from the tantaban implants I tried to give them. Have you ever met a fish rendered both sentient and insane? They are very silly creatures.”

“Strange power system, though.”

“Not really. I spent several consecutive lifetimes studying the crystals. They were all dead, when we reached them. Not like this world. But they had other uses.”

“And the set here?”

“Will be the crown jewels of my operation. I will use them for their intended purpose, as Twilight Sparkle intended.”

“For what?”

“To restore the empire She lost. In accordance with Her vision.”

“Why?”

Synchronia looked at the AI as if it were a fool—but she supposed it could not understand.

“So that I will not be left behind again. So that she will finally love me. She will...not be sad anymore.” She paused. “Or, so that I can have my friend back.”

The AI made no response, as it did not care.

Author's Note

This is not the best-written quant I've ever written.