Cheese Sandwich woke up to pain. Neurons screaming, rot and dread and wrongness pulsating out from every cell in his body. Lungs burning, with no oxygen to fill them.
The pathways carved deep into the mind of anything that could call itself Cheese Sandwich kicked him into a reorientation protocol. Meditating, he ascended the jhanashvas, allowing the signals from his physical body to recede from his attention, a self emerging from that pit of panic and pain and hypoxia. Those things were still there, gnawing away at the ever-shrinking usable part of his mind, but at least for the next few minutes, he could think.
He opened his eyes to a featureless darkness, save for a single faint source of light. His sight... Yes, it had been growing weak in recent years, but this was not age. The viscous material of his eyes were formed wrong now. His perception adjusted around a lens that would not focus, stitching together the absurd image of a birthday cake. The source of the faint light, a candle flame. Below it, a familiar face. The first one he saw every morning.
Identity integrity protocol. Now. Introspecting, he ascended the steps of his mnemonic castle– and tripped on the third stair. So he wasn’t himself, not really. He suppressed a surging instinct to reach for the nearest chaos-deity-dissolving-contingency. Instead, he verbalized his thoughts so that his husband could parse them as words.
Where are we, Discord? A pocket dimension? A simulation?
A familiar voice pushed into his head.
No, it’s the same universe you remember, Cheesy. Just later. A lot later. Long enough for all matter to scatter apart into incoherent nothingness. Who knew that maximum entropy would be so boring?
The pain screaming into his sensorium sure didn't feel like nothingness.
But we’re here, aren't we?
A sorrowful look.
Yes, we are. Because once in a billion years, a particle emerges from that nothingness. Once in a billion squared, two of them collide. After untold billions, enough entangle in just the right way to form a mind. One with memories it never truly experienced. Memories of being a pony on an Equestria long, long gone.
Cheese Sandwich looked down at his gnarled and rotting body, faintly illuminated by the candle's glow.
It’s funny. I don’t remember looking like this.
That's the kicker! All you need is the mind, to wake up in a mind that thinks it's you. The body that mind is in? There are only a few ways for that to come out right, out of so many.
The Discord-candle stretched its wax-arms wide in a theatrical flourish.
This was always the ultimate fate of all creatures. Of all possible creatures. To be reborn and die painfully again and again in a cold and dark void, forever. But I didn’t think that through, when I put my thumb on the cosmic scale of probabilities, so that whenever entropy got low enough to spontaneously form a mind, it would always form us.
With a waxen claw, the Discord-candle gestured down at himself, and the cake that he was planted in.
You died one day before your seventieth birthday, all too young. You never got to see the surprise I had for you. I was very upset. So very much like me to overreact, isn’t it?
If Cheese Sandwich had the physical ability, he would have laughed. He would have smiled. But all he could do was think.
You saved them, Discord. All creatures, all possible creatures, from this fate. If we’re here, they’re not.
But I didn’t save you.
Cheese Sandwich thought nothing, only focusing on the sight of the stump that was his hoof. Blackened, as if none of the blood ever truly washed off, and just dried there in layers over the years.
Control always told me that everything I'd done was necessary for creating the Equestria I retired to. That she could think of nocreature else who deserved that peaceful life more than I did. Watching my godson grow up. Quiet evenings spent with you. No one around me any the wiser about who I really was, not even the Princess.
How could they be? “Wandering party planner”, what perfect cover! The most delightful of deceptions: a true one!
The thought-impression of a familiar sigh.
She was right, you know, and not even by that "greater good" nonsense those smoothhooves are always on about. Trust me, Cheesy, you've more than paid off whatever ethical debt you had by now. Oh, this is just like us, isn’t it? Even in this afterlife, we keep going back to these same conversations...
Not much time left now. Cheese Sandwich willed, and dead muscle burned, propelling forward that blackened stump that could not feel even if it had the nerve endings to do so. The Discord-candle’s claw stretched out in turn. In the void that could no longer be called “interstellar”, the inches between them may as well have been the distance between the long-gone stars.
The hypoxia had shrunk the usable portion of Cheese Sandwich’s mind to a sliver now, barely able to form a final thought to be read.
Maybe next time, I’ll be able to touch you, to breathe a lungful of air, to do anything other than just die like this. Maybe that'll be worth it, even if it takes millions of me to get there.
Discord’s own thought was weak in Cheese Sandwich's mind, the Doppler effect of a departing pulsar, diminishing to a whisper.
Millions? No, I'm afraid that's not nearly enough to get there.
Not billions.
Not trillions.
This was the last thing the mass of particles that thought it was Cheese Sandwich would ever contemplate, as his illusion finally met its end. The one that thought it was Discord followed soon after.
Then, just like it already had not billions or trillions or quadrillions of times, the light of sapience disappeared from the universe once more. For a very, very, very long time.
But not forever.
