Dead Cat Bounce: A Fanfiction Fanfiction

Chapter Two: Those Before Bros

I awoke to the sound of the continuous-use power generators they had built directly adjacent to the bunkhouse. The thumping noise meant a squirrel had gotten caught in one of the fan belts again.

It was seven o'clock. It was morning, or night, or whatever. We slept in shifts, and the compound was perpetually shrouded in the blue twilight of five hundred lumen energy efficient LEDs. They were just bright enough to let you read but somehow never bright enough to keep you from scraping your shoulders on the exposed pipes.

Hörspen was not a Stable, no matter how hard some of the ponies there wished it was. There weren’t any Stables built here because I guess they thought nopony worth saving would choose to live in Berlaska. There were two states in the discontinuous Equestrian Commonwealth of Sequestria, and the one worth saving was Shelberton, the Turtle State. Shelberton got four Stables. So Hörspen had been built thirty years ago when a bunch of ponies found out what the phrase “missed the boat” meant and started getting ideas.

If you were generous, you could say Hörspen was like a Stable except made out of trash and without all that skilled labor, management experience, technology, and infrastructure stuff. If that seemed kind of sketchy, just remember it sounded more reasonable if you pretended that most of the actual Stables had not turned out to be miserable nightmare death traps anyway.

If the Stable program was the quiet girl who kept to herself and mutilated small animals in her room, then Hörspen would be her less-attractive, less-intelligent cousin who had a weird, smelly infection nopony wanted to talk about.

One of the only things Hörspen had going for it was that it was as cold as Cocytus —see what I did there? Pay attention, it’ll be important later— out there and having an insulated self-contained megastructure did a decent job of trapping heat.  I mean heat’s not the only thing it trapped, but, like I said, nopony wanted to talk about the infection.

Berlaska only got nuked a little bit in the war, but it made up for it by being naturally cold and worthless. It was pretty much the ice capital of Equestria, and that’s all it really had going for it, more or less. Supposedly seventy-nine percent of Berlaska was just ice, and me and a handful of idiots lived in the warmer twenty-one percent. I’d been stuck there my whole life, so, in the absence of anything better to do, I just scraped away.

I made my way to the cafeteria, which, in the same vein of inspiration as the bunkhouse, sat on top of the waste processing center. Seven hundred and fifty calories of lukewarm mixed-starches gruel had my name on it. You have no idea how much lumpy, oily, salty gruel seven hundred and fifty calories constitutes. Aromatic hydrocarbons from downstairs added a unique kick.

I have to eat every day… for the rest of my life, I thought. Gross.

As I started to chow down, a hoof struck me at the nape of my neck.

“What up, gaywad?” Yam said as he leaned in hard on my shoulder.

The air was filled with the acrid tang of expired bodyspray. Letting Yam into Hörspen had been a mistake.

“Nah, I’m just messin’ with you, bro,” he said. “I know you don’t ride donkey sticks. But your walk is a little fruity, though, just sayin’.”

I looked up at him. Why him? I thought.

“I’m just sayin’.”

“Hey, Yam,” I said.

“Don’t fucking call me that, buttmunch!” he said. He hit me again.

“So… ‘bro.’” I said, “you’ve been for like a month now. Don’t you have someplace to be or something to do?”

“Nah, bro. Epsilon Delta is chill with me hangin’ here,” he said. He popped the collar on his E ∆ jacket and pointed at a table of mares who were doing their best to ignore him. “I mean, look at all this poon. How could they tell me to leave?”

He paused for second, looked back at the mares, and burst into laughter. “… something to do! Oh, I get it! You’re the best, bro!” he said.

“So what’s the deal with you and Epsilon Delta?” I said. It wasn’t the first time I’d asked this question, but his answers were usually hilarious.

“Epsilon Delta is the smartest, raddest, baddest brotherhood on the planet,” he said. “We collect and protect math. Like all kinds of math. We got all kinds of guns too, so nopony gets any ideas about stealing any math. And we learn it too, so it stays in our libraries and in our brains.

“And most importantly, ‘cause we’re not losers, we throw wicked ragers every night.”

“What, like math like an epsilon-delta proof?”

“Exactly, dude! Dude, when I do leave here, you should totally come with. You need to loosen up, but we’ll get you laid a couple times and you’d be a sweet Epsilon Delta brother.”

“I don’t know, bro. I’m a little weak on my proofs. Maybe you could teach me?”

“No prob, bro! The epsilon-delta proof says that for any polysyllabic function of x with the degree n, where n is greater than two, there must exist at least one value of x for which the function equals zero, but—”

“That’s the fundamental theorem of algebra,” I said. “And not even that, really.”

“Please don’t say things like that, it harshes my mellow, bro.”

Seriously, can that dude not say a sentence without using the word “bro”? I thought. Ugh, how annoying. Doesn’t he realize he sounds like an asshole?

_____

Once I’d fed the beast and ditched Yam, I started walking to the reactor. I scraped my shoulders on the pipes. Rounding the corner I ran into somepony face first.

Please don’t be Flanders. Please don’t be Flanders. Please don’t be Flanders.

Even without Yam living in Hörspen made you a tired and cranky pony, and being stuck with nine hundred other tired, cranky ponies is like compounding interest for misery. The only thing that could make life worse was having to live in Hörspen with Flanders. Flanders is a pegasus pony. She isn't a Dashite, so my guess is her parents probably just left her down here after they realized the enormity of their mistake, or maybe she was just too fat for clouds.

But I was in luck! It wasn’t Flanders. It was Romeo Bravo! We exchanged hoof-bumps.

“Sup, crah?” I said (Crah = crab + brah. Romeo and I formed the Crab Science Club, long story).

“Not much, crah. Zulu was able to get the centrifuges running early so I get an extra twenty minutes of free time. I thought I’d fill my canteen at the, uh, canteen. Reactor?”

“Yeah,” I sighed.

“I can get water later, I’ll walk with you.”

“So, Romeo, how’s the leg?”

“Incredibly painful to the point of disabling.”

“Damn, still?”

“Charlie, I tore my flexor tendon,” he said. “With diligent physical therapy the best I can hope for is a lifetime of joint instability and occasional pain. Just so you know, I’m never leaving the dome with you again. Ever.”

“I’m sorry, crah,” I said.

Awkward silence followed us as we walked through the aquaponics center. The ponies who tended the racks were scooping up fish and pond scum alike to be processed in the bioreactors into either the nitrogen or methane reagents for fertilizer and other chemical processes. The aquaponics center was the only place in Hörspen with sun lamps, and the bright light let me see Romeo’s furrowed face in glorious detail.

Finally he broke the silence. “Oh, by the way, I finally got in contact with Iris. We figured out why nopony’s heard about the Epsilon Delta gang.”

“Oh?”

“It’s because nopony actually calls them ‘Epsilon Delta’ outside of Epsilon Delta. They’re called the ‘Bronies’ by everypony else. Just don’t call Sweet Potato a Brony or he’ll probably kill you—they don’t like that.”

Next time I get the chance I am totally calling Yam a Brony, I thought.

“And the math thing?” I said.

“Nah, they’re just another gang with a gimmick, like the Daggers,” he said. “Their home turf is supposed to be a university’s math department, but Iris has only heard stories of them taking chems and shooting ponies. It’s all shibboleth.

“I still have no idea what Sweet Potato is doing all the way up here, though, crah.”

We made it to the reactor, and Romeo went off to do his centrifuge stuff.

“Later, crah,” I said.

_____

I did not like the reactor. I signed up for it because when I was a foal I thought I could use the reactor to make giant ants. Apparently it was actually Flux appropriation that handled doing that, but by the time I figured that out it was already too late.

Oh, what might have been.

The reactor was an old training reactor they salvaged from the chemistry department of Troy University. Back before the war it was meant to be a training aid that even ponies who went to Troy couldn’t screw up, so by design it was about as useless and impotent as a nuclear reactor could be. The only things it could do were be a reactor and heat water to room temperature, so we used it to keep our pipes from freezing. We did this in June. I don’t make the rules, I just press the buttons.

Some ponies freak out about reactors, but on the list of all the things that could kill you in the wasteland nuclear radiation ranks somewhere between getting hit by lightning and toxic brain mold. Taint? Magical radiation? Mutagenic ooze? Lasers? You're boned. Need to cross a room full of alpha-source contamination? Slap some paper bags on your hooves and go on through. Wear one on your head to complete the look. Just don't eat the bags when you're done and you'll be fine.

Well, okay, maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration, but if nuclear radiation exposure is on the top of your priority list you are having a good day, and my point is that working with reactor technology was neither dangerous nor exciting. It wasn't exactly involved work either. You sat next to the other operator and you had to watch three meters and every once in a while press one of six buttons on the console, so it left a lot of time for hobbies and getting annoyed with Flanders.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the other reactor operator was Flanders. There was one thing worse than living in Hörspen with Flanders, and that was working with Flanders. For the last two years of my life I've had to spend ten hours of nearly every single damn day sitting next to her in the control room of the reactor. The very fact that she was qualified for the same job that I have does horrible things to my self esteem.

As I donned my dosimetry I prepared myself for another soul-crushing day behind the console. But being the of sort who tries to make lemonade from urine, I reminded myself that I could work on revising the Actaeon code to distract myself from having to look at Flanders’s stupid hair.

But as I entered the control room I saw something amazing: Flanders wasn’t there!

Could this be a dream? I thought.

Then I saw the note. There was a memo taped to the multitrend. The badly-printed ditto sheet still reeked of solvent.

MANDATORY MEETING

20: 15    in top dome

punch &   cookies

—H.H.

_____