A Last Warmth at the End of Time
-> Observation Log begins.
Ron gasped, thinking what the HELL?! Then he took a few breaths, and calmed down. He’d felt like he was dying for a moment, like the air was just…gone, and his head was going to explode. Then it had stopped.
He opened eyes which had instinctively shut, and found…blackness. He looked down at no floor, up at no ceiling, side to side at no walls. Am I…dead? He looked at himself, and blinked. He was still wearing the same generic office-drone clothing, but the cloth and his skin looked oddly two-dimensional, with little color gradation. He touched his skin, his clothing, but they felt basically the same. Is this what ‘the afterlife’ is like? Do not want.
The last thing he remembered, before the airless bit, was being in his office cubicle, typing up a report of the past week’s coding. …It was Friday…there was going to be beer soon. Had he had a stroke, or a heart attack or something? The new nanomeds were supposed to stop that sort of thing! He wrapped his arms around himself, and shivered, staring into the cold darkness.
Then a feminine voice spoke up, directly behind him. “Um…excuse me?”
“HEY!” He shouted, surprising himself with his relief at not being alone, “uh…hello! What the heck is going on, here?!?” Ron wanted answers.
“Mmm…um…I guess I was going to ask you the same thing. Where are we?”
Ron was trying to turn his head, but could only get quick flashes of grey, yellow, and brown, from almost directly behind. He found he couldn’t make himself spin around because of the lack of any floor or handhold. “Uh…can you move? I can’t even turn to you without something to hold onto.”
“Sure! I’ll fly around you…” Ron heard swooshing noises. “…um…maybe. This is really hard. I don’t understand!”
He stared as, slowly, a grey-coated, four-legged, cartoony-looking animal with blond hair and a stuffed brown satchel came into view. It—she, Ron reminded himself—was valiantly ‘flying’ around him, but the action looked more like swimming through pudding, as each wing flap only moved it a few degrees, and barely caused any ‘coasting’.
She stopped, panting a bit. “Is that enough?” She looked at him with her golden, oversized, anime-style eyes. He noticed that, when her left eye was focused right on him, the right one wandered somewhere over his head.
Ohmygodsocute. “Ahhsure, sure, that’s fine. At least I can see you now.”
“Good. What’s your name?” She smiled earnestly at him, and he felt a bit warmer.
“Ron. Ron Wilcox. …and you?” He tried to smile back, despite his shivering.
“Oh, my name’s Derpy Hooves!”
Ron blinked. “Okay. Um…and would you mind telling me what you are?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Why, I’m the Ponyville mailmare!” Derpy proudly gestured at the satchel floating beside her.
“Ehh…” Ron processed this for a moment. “Okay, that’s your…your job. But what are you, specifically? Like, your…species?”
Derpy’s face took on a very confused frown. “Well I’m a Pegasus Pony of course!”
Ron stared at the pony. Wait, pony, ponies, ponies… Something in the dusty parts of his brain tried to itch its way to the surface, some old memory that this cartoon-like pony mare was nudging, but he shook his head and gave up on it after a few moments.
He instead focused on how she had spoken. She appeared to think he should have already known what her species was. “Wait, so do you know what I am?”
The bright smile returned. “Yeah, you’re a human!”
“Hmm…and, uh, have you met many humans?”
“Oh sure, a lot.” Derpy looked thoughtful. “More and more since we formed The Alliance!”
Ron tried to understand, but shivered again, and gave up. He withdrew into his misery for a few moments.
Derpy looked at him, a little worried. “Are you cold? It is a bit chilly here.”
He looked up at the mare, his eyes wide. “I’m freezing. Can’t seem to warm myself up.”
“Hmmmm…” She frowned, and then swam closer to him. When she got close enough, she pulled herself to him with her forelegs. She proceeded to wrap her legs and wings around him. “Does that help?”
Ron—not one for close contact with strange people, ponies or not—was initially disturbed by her actions. Then he felt the soft heat her feather and hair-covered body was radiating, and melted into the pony’s embrace, curling against her, burying his head into her shoulder, and loosely wrapping his arms around her. “Th……thanks, Derpy. You’re really warm.”
“No problem! You looked miserable!” He could hear her smile in her voice. “So…what do you think happened?”
Ron sighed, and thought for a moment, looking off into the black nothingness. “I…I’m not sure. I mean, this blackness, this weightlessness. This almost seems like outer space. Except, somehow, we’re breathing…and there are no stars at all.”
“Yeah, I’d noticed that. How could even the stars disappear?” Derpy sounded worried.
“Well…” He tried to draw on what little he remembered from popular physics readings, his thoughts flowing a bit more freely now that he was warming up. “…I think I remember that some scientists think the universe will go on forever, but…that eventually all the stars will burn out. That’s one way this could happen, but it would mean we’ve somehow traveled so far into the future…I can’t even conceive of how far.” He frowned, and then shook his head. “But I’ve never heard anyone say that time travel could actually work. I think most scientists say it’s impossible!”
The pony rubbed her head against his shoulder, chewing on what he’d said. He was wondering if she’d followed it all, when she said, “time travel? I heard Twilight Sparkle traveled through time, once! Not very far, though…”
Ron blinked at the name, then assumed it must be another pony. “Hmm…well, if it is time travel, that might explain the other thing. I’ve never seen a…a person like you, a pony I mean, but you’ve seen plenty of humans. So…maybe I come from sometime in your past? Before this Alliance thing?”
Derpy was silent for a moment, then pulled back slightly, looking at him. “I don’t understand. Why did this happen? What can we do? Where should we go?”
Ron sighed, and glanced around. “Well, if I’m right, there…there isn’t anywhere to go to. Nothing that could help us.”
Tears began to form in the mare’s eyes, and she pulled him close again. She spoke, her breath close on his neck, “why? Why are we here?” She sounded very afraid.
He sighed again, and—compelled to try to comfort the distressed pony—gently rubbed her back, while thinking. For a while, the only sound was of their breathing, and the occasional sniffle. He realized he couldn’t even gauge the passage of time with nothing at all around them.
Derpy cried quietly for a while, her tears either floating away, or soaking into his shirt collar. Eventually, she stopped, and was silent for a while more. “Th…there has to be a reason, right?” She was trying to sound confident.
Determined not to drag her down, Ron let whatever optimism he had left say its piece. “I think so. This is…so strange, so deliberate-seeming. I don’t think the universe is crazy enough for things like this to happen for no reason.” He looked up, into the dark, and then back down into Derpy’s eyes. “I think something brought us here…though why you and me, I’ve no clue. Maybe that part was random.”
She looked at him for a while, and then shuffled her limbs a bit, moving a few inches down his body. Ron was about to protest the loss of her warm wings behind his neck, but then she turned her head and rested it against his chest, eyes tightly shut. He just held her close, stroking her back. They were quiet for a long time, and he began to think she’d fallen asleep.
“Ron?” She whispered.
“…Yeah?”
“Do you think…if something brought us here…then eventually, something will happen?”
“I…” He swallowed, and paused. “I hope so, Derpy.” He held her tight, staring off into the endless black, but trying to focus on their shared warmth. “I hope so.”
-> Observation Log ends.
No further significant input from paradigm subjects before semi-intelligent field collapse 37 minutes later.
Final universe dissolution via ‘Big Rip’ effects predicted in 14.42 hours.
Log forwarded with autotags: Priority Oversight, Lifeforms, Rescue, Preservation, Unknown Source, Failure, Dynamic Paradigm Usage
A Last Warmth at the End of Time
Agent Commentary, Endnotes
Tags: XK Priority
Commentary from Oversight Agent 42028
This is an interesting case. The Redoubt hardware woke up far too late, due to a design flaw in this iteration that we've only recently discovered. Things were so late, the source coordinates were basically gone. I’m actually surprised it was even able to locate old Earth. Several of the dynamic paradigms it generated turned out to have quite varied and interesting results (though no other viable lifeforms), but this one is my favorite.
The half-dead, idiot hardware copied a simple, ancient, base-gene human right out of his damned office cubicle on Earth, and woke him up in the middle of an empty, dying universe. Ouch. Thankfully, the dest-end intellifields were fine, realized the mistake before the poor guy took too much damage, and sent a request for an example of something it could modify him into in order to keep his life active.
Here’s where it got interesting. The paradigm’s wormhole generator was so far gone into insanity at this point (less than 0.25 attoseconds before complete thermodynamic failure), that it basically flailed around randomly. The universe’s sub-Planck lexicon had already decayed so much that its flailing appears to have churned things up enough to copy something over from another universe entirely. That’s where Subject #2 came in.
Based on some poking around in the deep archives, Subject #2 appears to come from one of our very old parent universes. I’m not sure how old, but we’re talking near-origin. (!) As far as I can tell, this thing is a ‘pegasus pony’—a high-altitude flyer—from a place called ‘Equestria’. Other details are elusive, what with how weird the archives get that close to the Wars, but this "Pony’s" basic operating gestalt is centered around an animated cartoon series, and thus it fit (both pseudo-real and somewhat in-universe) the requirements of no-O2 and cold-hardy. Not so sure about physical adept for this Subject in particular, but hey, 2/3 ain’t bad for a system so far gone.
The copy made it through just before paradigm loss. The intellifields did their job, and reformatted the human with some cartoon characteristics, allowing his survival in the vacuum.
Post-reactivation observation log is a bit depressing, but subjects kept each other in reasonable spirits, considering.
I’m…going to recommend we pull them out before final dissolution, though I know resources are tight right now. Despite the reformatting snafu, they’re both 100% alive and well. Subject #1 would probably make a decent Agent or Op (though he’s a bit old for a high-level retrain), and Subject #2…well…she’s just so cute…
Marked and Sealed, Oversight Agent 42028
End of Report. Test universe is cleared, temporal links dropped, dissolution complete via ‘Big Rip’ effects, no cross-universe interference detected. Further paradigm research underway, but for now this file is considered closed.
…
…
…
…
Director’s addendum: recommendation taken. Subjects pulled ~4 hours before final dissolution. Subject #2 munitions-class cuteness confirmed.
A Last Warmth at the End of Time
Report: Redoubt Project, Iteration 732, Test Universe 41
Contains all available logged, post-interpreted data for emergency paradigm #17/49, plus executive commentary from assigned Oversight Agent.
-> Technical Log begins.
Wormhole generator activated 8.32*7^5 ticks before final system coherence loss.
Fetching primary paradigm instance.
Source target #1 spatio-temporal focus drill-down (old colloquial nomenclatures): Local Group, Milky Way, Sol System, Planet Earth, North American Continent, Federation of American States, Nova Scotia, Dartmouth, 91 Alderney Drive, Suite 2, Cubicle 7; 14:27:38.8274 20 July 20XX. Displacement volume: 2 cubic meters. Heuristic biomatching active.
Refined results: 1 x biological lifeform, old-Earth human male, 27 years old, plus items on person.
——Attached log from wormhole-destination semi-intelligent fields: Subject received. Subject activated. Detect imminent biofunction failure due to high-vacuum environment. Error. Error. Subject paused. Destination inhospitable. Request formed for possible survival-reformatting base instance; requirements: { no-O2, cold-hardy, physical adept }. Sending request.——
Destination request received. 4.09*7^3 ticks before final system coherence loss. Expedite Mode activated. Request requirements insufficiently exact. Performing wide-range search for suitable base instance. Error. Error. Error. Instance located. Fetching instance.
Source target #2 spatio-temporal focus drill-down unavailable. Nomenclature refinement system failure. Source region unknown. Substrate taint detected: possible cross-contamination due to endgame sub-Planck lexical diffusion. Time unknown. Displacement volume: 2 cubic meters. Weak heuristic biomatching active.
Refined results: 1 x bio-questionable lifeform (outside additional data classifies as “Equestrian pegasus-pony”), 32 years old, plus items on person.
——Continued log from dest-end fields: Subject #2 received. Suitable reformat base instance…confirmed. Subject #1 reformatting…successful. Subjects activated.——
Wormhole generator general systems failure. Decoherence detected, safe shutdown protocols initiated.
-> Technical Log ends.
