Chapter 13: Exactly as Advertised
It took a few moments for Gus to pick his jaw back up. “Alright,” he said slowly, “I think I’d like to see that.”
“Follow me, then,” said Meridiem.
She led the other two up out of the basement, out of the church altogether, and across to the building that looked like a greenhouse.
“As you’ve seen, some of us are lucky enough to have abilities granted by our marks that are within the realm of possibility,” she told Gus. “The rest of us have had to deal with the nagging feeling that our true potential will never be realized. Only the priesthood knows that this feeling is not an illusion, that our counterparts can literally do pretty much anything their mark gives them.
“There have been legends, disregarded by unbelievers but embraced by Markists, of moments when one’s mark is fully realized. To us today, these stories often resemble superhero origin stories—and there are many who believe that that’s exactly where those comic book stories originated from. Someone struck by lightning, or falling into a raging fire, and instead of dying they somehow convert this fatal dose of energy into power.” Meridiem’s eyes lit up. “And suddenly you have Markists who have super strength, super speed, able to fly—that’s the most common one—if only for a few moments, long enough to save the life of a loved one.”
“They usually died immediately afterwards of their wounds,” added Gnosi. “They don’t put that in the comic books.”
“Father Delver collected these stories,” continued Meridiem. “He meticulously collated them, trying to distinguish truth from fiction. His experiments with plaques revealed the mechanism: the same substance, in our bones, a sink for near infinite amounts of energy, and after absorbing enough of it, able to release it in a way that somehow warps the very laws of physics, without itself being fatal.”
“Warping the laws of physics? No, that’s not what’s probably happening,” said Gus.
“You have an explanation?” asked Gnosi.
“Well it comes back to quantum physics,” he explained. “The world of quantum physics is made up of nothing but probabilities. Put a pot of water on the stove, and the energy you add to the system in the form of the burner increases the range of possible outcomes. Without the heat, the water could sit in a room-temperature room for a million years, evaporating until reaching equilibrium, and then never changing again. But with heat, you not only get the overwhelming probability that the water will boil, but also an infinitesimal chance that the energy will shove the water molecules together in just such a way that it will spontaneously freeze instead. Now I’m talking about a tiny, tiny chance here—you’d have to boil one pot for every atom in the universe and check them all once a second for every second the universe has existed to get about three of them to freeze for one second each.
“But imagine applying one thousand times the amount of heat in a stove burner. A million times, a billion times. That much energy breaks the standard equations, like traveling near the speed of light breaks the Newtonian laws of motion. With that kind of energy in your pots of water you could have the water in one of them spontaneously turning into lime green Jell-O. Another couple orders of magnitude and a pot might turn into a kitten! I mean, we already have virtual particles out there in the void, so why not?!” He noticed the two students looking at him oddly, less for what he had said than for the manic way he had said it, and he took a moment to calm down. “But continue your story.”
“Right,” said Meridiem with a smile. “Father Delver realized that there was one form of energy that all Markists could handle with no ill effects: sunlight.” She gestured up to the sun, looking right at it.
“Wait, so you’re saying that Markists can’t get sunburn? And…and you’re not affected by bright light?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” answered Gnosi. “The specific blend of frequencies in natural sunlight filtered through Earth’s atmosphere—yes, we are completely immune to harm from that. But we can be blinded by artificial light that is sufficiently different from sunlight in its frequency distribution.”
“This realization was the origin of the Solarium: the one place on Earth where a Markist…can truly be free.” She opened the door with a key, and beckoned the physicist in.
The room inside was searingly white to an insane degree, but Gus found that his vision adjusting nearly instantly. “Wait a moment,” he said in realization. “That ‘orange smoothie’ you gave me last night—did that have dissolved plaque in it?”
“Yes,” said Meridiem. “In a small way, you’re one of us now. Don’t expect a cutie mark, though.”
Meridiem excused herself to step into a closet-sized room with even more solar lamps on top shining in.
“She’s charging up,” Gnosi explained to Gus. “Soaking up enough sunlight through every square inch of her skin for what she wants to show you.”
“Wait, so you mean she’s taking off her clothes in there?” Gus asked.
“Yes, but let me ruin whatever mental image you might have by telling you from my own experience that right now she looks like Peter Boyle did in that one scene in Young Frankenstein when he was being hit by lightning.”
“You mean that scene when you could see his skull glowing through his face?” Gus asked with a grimace.
“Yeah. Now imagine that with every bone in your body. She’ll know she’s full up when she stops looking like the ‘visible woman’ model.”
Gus took a moment to think of another subject—any other subject. “You can project your mind outside your body without using the Solarium—what can you do when you’re…charged?”
“I can enter into other people’s minds,” Gnosi answered. “But I can only do it with their permission,” he added quickly in response to Gus’ look of utter horror. “I used it on Meridiem, to help her work through her abuse. It’s the reason she’s as stable as she is. It’s why I wish to go into therapy after I graduate. Even if I’m never allowed into the Solarium again, I’ve learned so much about how the human mind works from visiting others that I think the experience will be invaluable for use in traditional psychotherapy.”
“And no one you’ve—I’m sorry, I can’t think of a better name for it—invaded ever had a problem with it?”
“No,” said Gnosi simply. “Because we’re Markists.
“Markists don’t really believe in privacy—or at the very least, Markist priests don’t. Ponies and Markists alike exist to carry out the Goddess’ plan: to spread harmony throughout the universe. We have no firm evidence, but given how the Goddess has always been able to figure out whatever humanity is up to when she contacts us through a Celestia, we are led to believe that She can read minds, to see how well her subjects are carrying out her directive. If Her own people have no such thing as privacy, why should we?”
“Well if you’re asking for a personal reason,” Gus responded, “it’s because I don’t believe that anyone—even a Goddess—would be able to resist exploiting that knowledge for their own personal gain, to judge us for our thoughts instead of our actions. And that is my definition of ‘hell on earth’.”
“Fine, I’ll leave all your precious secrets to yourself,” Gnosi joked. “Speaking of which: the Solarium is the one secret everybody keeps from Celestia, OK?”
Gus imagined a glowing Celestia with a hangover stopping the rotation of the Earth so she could sleep in for a few hours, and readily agreed.
Gus took the time to look around him. Inside the tall room he spotted a young man juggling small spheres constructed entirely of fire. A woman was pulling a strand of water out of a pool and tying it in knots like it was made of rope. A couple were laying their hands on a small bush—Gus didn’t see anything obvious happening, but perhaps this particular trick was slower than the others. Somebody was engaging in what looked like a standard warm-up routine with a punching bag—except the bag was made of concrete. And three people were flying in the air above his head.
While he was doing this, Gnosi had gone over to one of a set of footlockers set against a wall to remove some equipment. Meridiem emerged from the charging chamber (fully dressed) and joined him, then gestured to Gus. From this spot, they were mostly out of view of the other students.
“Alright, are you ready for this?” Meridiem asked Gus. “I gotta tell you, I haven’t quite got the business of stopping time completely worked out, but I expect you’ll be able to give me pointers.”
“Are you kidding?” asked Gus. “Sure, I’ve worked with theories of reverse time, but I never considered how to stop time, because I never thought I’d come close to having the means to do it!”
“Yeah, but you can imagine it, right?” countered Meridiem. “Look, let me show you what I’ve got so far.” She manhandled the professor so he was facing away from her. Gnosi then positioned himself in front of Gus and held up a wall clock half a meter across, the kind that advanced the second hand with an audible “thock!” every second. “I’ve got to be touching your skin for you to be included in the effect,” she explained, “and I’ll be glowing like a strobe light, so that’s why I’m behind you.”
“Okay, go ahead.”
Meridiem grabbed onto one of Gus’ bare arms with each hand and moment later the ambient light in the room shifted to red. The second hand of the clock lurched forward with a deafening “THUMP!”, then hung for nearly a minute before racing halfway around the clock face with a set of audibly fading ticks as the light went back to normal. At the same time, Gus felt his heart pounding in his chest and an overwhelming feeling like the walls of the room were bending inward to crush him. And finally, he did catch a wild multi-colored light show in the corner of his eye, coming from behind him.
Meridiem released Gus and sat down on an ornamental rock, catching her breath. “I’m usually able to hold it for a lot longer than that,” she said by way of apology.
“Well you definitely did something,” Gus said, turning to face her. “But I’m not exactly sure I can tell you how to get better at it. I mean, what are you doing: reciting some Latin incantation in your head? Waving your fingers…er, toes…in some complex pattern?”
“I’m just imagining everything stopping,” Meridiem said. “I’m calling upon the memory of the moment I understood my mark, the moment when my life was falling apart and the one thing I wanted more than anything was for everything around me to stop long enough for me to collect myself.”
Gus gave her a sympathetic look—thanks to that conversation in his hotel room, he knew far more about the moment Meridiem was referring to than he felt comfortable with. Turning away, he started pacing. “So it’s a mental construct. But you’re not only imagining an effect, but also drawing on an emotional experience. Are both aspects necessary?”
“I don’t need memories for mine,” said Gnosi. “I just picture what I want to do, whether it’s projecting my spirit or joining my thoughts to Meridiem’s.”
Gus led the other two back to the common area. “Let’s get a few more data points. Excuse me, fliers? Could I have a moment of your time?”
The two women and one man descended from the sky. Two of them hovered in the air just above the ground, while the third one landed.
“I’m wondering what precisely you think about when you want to fly?”
“I imagine that I have invisible wings,” the hovering woman said. Gus noticed that she did not remain motionless in the sky, but bobbed first up and then down, like a hovering bird with a wide wingspan. Her stance was leaning over a bit, again as if she was being supported by invisible wings attached to her shoulder blades.
“Ditto,” said the hovering man, who appeared to be her brother. His bobs were smaller than his sister’s, but more rapid, suggesting a hummingbird’s wings instead of a buzzard’s.
“And I just imagine directing anti-gravity waves in whatever direction I wish to go,” said the last woman, a bit nerdier-looking that the other two. Unlike them, she was absolutely motionless, and also sitting in an imaginary chair, at least for now.
Gus thanked them and let them get back to their play. “Alright, so it looked like it doesn’t matter what you imagine, just so long as it’s convincing. And that means you don’t really know what it means to stop time.”
“You’re right,” admitted Meridiem. “I can work it out intellectually: time quantized like energy and atomic orbits, and living in the infinite moments between ticks of the atomic clock, but I can’t know what it feels like.”
“A pity,” said Gus. “My particular ‘superpower’, if you want to call it that, consists of the ability to perfectly imagine anything I can write an equation for. But of course I lack the ability to actually bring my imagination to life through the power of thought alone. While you can do it, but can’t imagine it.”
Gus looked over to Gnosi, and then back to Meridiem. And then he looked again. “No,” he said. “It can’t be that easy.”
“What?” asked Gnosi and Meridiem in unison.
“Meridiem, could you imagine a space compartmentalized from the rest of your mind, a space that no stray thoughts could ever get into?”
Meridiem looked over at Gnosi for a moment. “I’ve constructed a safe place, for times when my nightmares threaten to overwhelm me.”
“Then we can do this safely. Gnosi, if you can go into Meridiem’s mind, might it not be possible that you can take me with you?”
Gnosi’s eyes went wide. “I never even considered the possibility. I’d essentially be pulling you into my mind, and then taking you with me into Meridiem’s mind. Mary, what do you think?”
“Yeah, I think I can hold you at arm’s length, mentally.”
“But I thought the idea of someone entering your mind repulsed you?” Gnosi asked Gus.
“In the abstract, yes,” answered Gus. “But first, I trust you. And second, the temptation to mess with the laws of nature, even if second-hand, is just too overwhelming to resist. I am going to regret this, I know, so let’s do this quick before I get cold feet.”
“I promise you that neither of us will see any thoughts that you don’t want us to see,” Gnosi vowed.
& & &
The three of them sat down in a circle, their legs crossed. They joined arms, and each leaned forward until their heads were touching.
Gus closed his eyes and waited. The sounds around him abruptly disappeared, to be replaced by the distant sound of a music box playing a tune which he was unfamiliar with.
“You can open your eyes, Professor Guiseman.”
Gus opened his eyes to see that he was now in a small room, only a couple meters to a side. The walls were covered with wallpaper whose pattern consisted of faded patchwork. The ceiling was covered by sky blue muslin dotted with green stars, and the floor was varnished oak. Meridiem and Gus floated in the air before him. Like the traditional images of ghosts, they sort of faded away between their waists and their knees. Gus looked down to see that he was in a similar state, but he rather stubbornly summoned his legs back into existence so he could stand instead of float. He smiled on realizing how easily he was able to manipulate his surroundings by force of will.
“Alright to start with, you can’t just freeze the entire universe, because it’s too big and the energy requirements are too much.”
“I already thought of that,” said Meridiem. “I freeze a sphere about ten meters across. The effect is actively using energy, so it can never extend beyond the walls of the Solarium.”
“Now the next difficulty is how we are able to breathe in this confined space, and beyond that, every other biological need while time is stopped. So instead imagine that we are something like this—beings of pure thought, but nevertheless able to manipulate objects through telekinesis. By merely imagining that we’re solid, that sort of takes care of all of the senses.”
“OK, I can see all of that,” said Meridiem. “But how do you actually stop time, and how to do you start it back up again?”
“So imagine the world at the atomic level,” Gus said, and with a thought, the room around them expanded until the air molecules were visible around them, shooting around, colliding with each other and, for one particular molecule of O2 merely floating in front of them in the form of two overlapping transparent gray spheres, vibrating in place.
“Imagine you can see entropy,” Gus instructed them. The world of careening molecules picked up an orange sheen. The orange was leaking out of the center of each atom, and pooling in complex ways between the various molecules.
“The increase of net entropy is time, on the molecular level. Now this is the hard part: imagine having hands unconstrained by the three dimensions of space. You’re wrapping your hands around this molecule to push the entropy back in, but you’re also doing the same to every molecule at once, and also a giant set of hands forming the sphere that defines the boundary of your time stoppage. And then you squeeze.” The squeezing could be felt more than seen, using an entropy sense that no living thing actually possessed. The orange was squeezed into the molecules and into the outer sphere. It solidified into a shell ten meters out (an infinite distance at this scale) and spread it out until the gaseous entropy became light, the red light of stopped time. Every molecule stopped right where it was, and their 10-meter radius universe waited.
“That’s what I think stopping time would feel like,” Gus concluded.
Meridiem looked around her, nodding. “I can see it,” she said. “And you’d reverse it like this…” And she gently pushed the red light back into orange clouds and disintegrated the distant barrier into a million shards of space-time that instantly dissolved into nothingness.
Gus took them back to macroscopic scale, and watched as Meridiem practiced stopping and starting time in this imaginary environment. Meridiem set herself the goal of being able to perform the abstractions mentally, to set up all the effects and then release them at once, stopping and starting time on a dime. When she was satisfied that she completely understood what she was doing, she signaled Gnosi to put his and Gus’ minds back into their respective heads.
& & &
Gus leaned back, away from the circle. He mentally inspected himself to be absolutely sure he was in the correct body before rejoining the huddle.
“Do you need to get charged again?” Gnosi asked.
“No,” said Meridiem. “I was being very wasteful of energy before. I mean, it’s not like I’ll ever be able to do this outside the Solarium, but I think it should be a lot easier, assuming this method works as well as it did in my imagination.” She once again joined arms with the two men, and then closed her eyes to concentrate.
The world shifted to red. Gus looked around, to see that the three fliers who were still in the air were now suspended. The nearby water fountain was still.
“Go ahead and look around,” Meridiem instructed, standing up. “We only need to be touching when I stop or start time. Otherwise, you can go anywhere within a ten meter radius of me. I don’t even need to concentrate to maintain the effect.”
Gus raised a finger in the air. “Question: What would happen if you forgot to touch me when you started time back up again?”
Meridiem thought for a bit. “Well I guess that would mean that you would be trapped in the same instant for the rest of eternity?”
“Might I make it a rule that you take very careful roll calls when manipulating time?” a rather nervous Gus asked.
“Yes, that sounds like a good idea. Now go and satisfy your curiosity. I promise I won’t forget you.”
Gus got up and stared at her for a bit, before finally walking over to the pool for some experimentation. He found he could push his hands into the water, but it had the consistency of mercury. Logically, it should be completely solid, but if that were true, then there would be trouble pushing through the very air, so he had no problem with the current arrangement. He pulled a blob of water out, leaving a scoop visible in the surface of the pool. As he walked with the blob, he felt a resistance to moving it, and noticed that the blob soon heated up. He reasoned that the blob had picked up a considerable amount of momentum from his actions, and that if time were to restart, it would go flying off in the direction that he was pulling it at tremendous speed. He wrapped his other hand around the blob in the direction of its momentum and pushed gently causing the blob to cool back down. Now he felt that if time were to restart, the blob would just drop straight down. Leaving the blob hovering in mid-air, he walked over to a partially-open janitor’s closet, grabbed a large sponge, and positioned it under the blob. Then with a second thought he used his hands on both sponge and door to arrest their momentum, so they couldn’t go flying the moment time returned to normal.
Gnosi meanwhile had made his way across the Solarium until he reached the edge of time-stopped space. He rapped on the red shell a few times with his knuckles then tried to peer through it, but found that it was completely opaque. He then turned around and reported these findings to Gus.
“So how long do you think you could keep this up?” Gus asked Meridiem, who had spent the time merely sitting on the edge of the pool and looking around her.
“Indefinitely, I think,” she said. “I don’t feel the slightest bit tired.”
Gnosi took a trowel from the janitorial closet and stuck it into the back pocket of the fire-bender. “Alright, I think that’s enough for now.”
The three of them walked back to the place where they had sat down earlier. Gus could dimly see three shadows sitting, their arms linked. They sat down and replaced those shadows, and time started once again.
There was a splash as the blob of water fell onto the sponge.
“Thank you,” Meridiem said to Gus, grasping his hand with both of hers. “I’m finally able to realize my destiny.”
“You’re welcome,” replied Gus. “Thanks to Gnosi, I think you may well be the first of my students to completely understand my teachings on the first try.” He looked over at the happy fliers. “I just wish you were able to practice your abilities outside of this one location.”
“Are you kidding?” asked Gnosi. “The day Archbishop Shepherd saw what was going on here, he nearly had a stroke. You’re the first person who wasn’t a third year seminary student who has even been allowed to know this place exists! Although I hate to admit it, but he has a point.”
“Everyone else sees you as merely weird,” said Gus. “And what some of you can do with your marks can be dismissed as exaggeration. But if this got out, that would make you the superior race in the eyes of the fearful. A superior race that would have to be wiped out before you did the same to us.”
“And this is the world we are tasked with reforming!” Meridiem whispered, tears running down her cheeks. “Why does it have to be so hard? Why is it that creatures as weak as us, with hearts as easily broken as us, have to have the job of bringing friendship to them?” She pointed at the exit. “They’re all so horrible! They kill, and they destroy beauty everywhere they go! In Equestria, every conflict, whether between individuals or nations, can be solved with kindness and understanding, while on Earth, the only language that anyone ever understands is violence!”
Gus placed a hand on Meridiem’s shoulder, and another on Gnosi’s, who was watching her outburst with sad understanding. “Children, listen to me. You’re human too, just as human as all of them outside. The potential for hate and distrust is in you, same as them. Your youth gives you the naiveté to think you can make a difference, while the majority of the world has given up on ideals and turned to the goal of ‘every man for himself’. But the important thing is that young idealists can make a difference and they have, again and again. You know your history, you know that the world was once much worse than it is now, particularly if you weren’t born a king or a lord. Dream the impossible, and even outside the Solarium, you will be able to make it come true. Look at my generation—do you think that Richard I before his conversion would have hesitated for one moment to use atomic weapons to conquer the Holy Land if he had access to them? We have the ability to end history ten times over, and an enemy that so thoroughly deserves it in the eyes of our leaders—and we haven’t. There’s nothing that breaks my heart more than seeing young people giving up, so please don’t, for my sake.”
“Alright,” Meridiem said with a small smile, “we won’t.”
At that moment, the man who was playing with fire made his way past them towards the exit. He reached into his back pocket and removed the trowel. “Hey! Where did this come from?” he exclaimed.