//------------------------------//
// Chapter 11: Forest 
// Story: Synthesis 
// by Starscribe 
//------------------------------//

The autocar started driving before Dakota could even move. She wondered idly where it might be taking her, but she was so drained she couldn’t muster the energy to lift up her hand and check. At least the air in here was filtered and air-conditioned. Dakota fished around in one of the side-compartments, eventually coming up with a complimentary bottle. She downed the whole thing in a few quick gulps, spilling lots of it down her chest.

“Hey, Dakota,” Cinnabar said, after an indeterminate time laying on the backseat. “Are you healthy enough to talk yet?”

She sat up with a jerk, pulling herself sideways along the side of the van until she was in a sitting position. “Healthy enough to… yeah.” She folded her arms. “I’m not the one who we should be worried about. Some spook switched you off like a light.”

“Is that what that was?” Cinnabar summoned a thick book from nowhere, turning it near the back and squinting down at the pages. “Yeah, look here. I’ve got six minutes of missing timestamps. Who the buck can do that?”

Dakota shrugged. “My best guess is there’s some US involvement in what happened in the Thestral Arcade. Maybe there were some spooks watching it from some van across the street. Couldn’t do anything since this isn’t the US and they couldn’t risk getting caught operating here…” She trailed off. When she tried to explain her suspicions to someone else, they sounded even stupider.

“We should think about it like we’re on a case,” Cinnabar said, his polite way of pointing out she was being an idiot. Because of course they were on a case, possibly the most dangerous of their career. “Someone could buck with your implants. Implants developed by Omnistem, in partnership with Bodhisattva. I don’t think they put backdoors in your brain, Dakota. Remember, your implants are keeping you alive. There’s no reason for them to be in contact with the outside world. They just have to keep you breathing, keep your heart beating, that kind of thing.”

“No.” Dakota folded her arms. “She didn’t stop me from breathing. She was only targeting you. And your part of my implants obviously can communicate with the network, or you’d just be a voice in my head.”

“Hmm.” He nodded. “Proprietary Omnistem hardware. Which means…”

“Either she’s working with Equestria, or whoever she is working for got the biggest breach of corporate secrets of the century.” Outside the autocar, they were driving along a coastal road. Lights were still visible on some of the beaches, though most were dark. On the other side of the road, the city kept on living, bars filled with people oblivious to the slaughter that had taken place an hour ago. It’s possible the police don’t even know yet.

“I know what you’re gonna say. You’re on the Rhodes case, and Equestria is trying to keep its secrets buried. They’re ponies from the Dream Valley, you’ll say. But there’s a serious problem with that theory.”

“Oh?” She raised an eyebrow. “The one I talked to tonight didn’t give me her name, but she did want me to think she was a pony. Told me a story that could’ve come from the damn TV show.”

“They saved us. If Equestria was really trying to hide its secrets, why bother? We would’ve been shot, then burned down in that basement. Any secrets stored on your implants would’ve been burned beyond recovery by the heat anyway. If they’re ruthless killers like you think, why are we having this conversation?”

Dakota had no answer for that. She could see the resorts coming back into view up ahead, and sat in silence as they got closer. “I never said they were ruthless killers. Whoever attacked…” She swallowed. “Whoever attacked the Cave are ruthless killers. Hardware like they had suggests some serious money, and some connections too. Equestria runs the whole infrastructure anyway, I’d believe they could sneak guns into a country. But they wouldn’t have had any reason to save me…”

A few more complicated scenarios ran briefly through her head—such as Equestria staging the entire thing for her benefit. But greater complexity never presented a concrete benefit that couldn’t be had easier just by killing her. After a few seconds of thinking, she shrugged. “So what’s your theory?”

He hesitated, though not nearly as long as she had. He’d probably been preparing for this question. “I think what happened tonight has nothing to do with us. It’s two groups fighting over Equestria. Probably that was some secret, corporate militia, that knew about the China connection and didn’t want their operations disrupted. Or maybe they’re trying to capitalize on the consequences of increased tensions with the east. The Cave were caught in the crossfire because they were helping. We almost were too, because they were helping us.”

“Okay.” Dakota folded her arms. “That’s plausible, I guess. Except it doesn’t explain how we got out alive.”

The car rolled to a stop in front of a side door to the resort. “That’s the question mark. I don’t think we have the information yet. Maybe the ponies of Equestria think about this the exact opposite way you thought. Maybe they’re helping you.”

“Helping me solve their murder.” She shuffled towards the door, then stopped short of pressing the “door open” button. This van didn’t seem to be part of the standard fleet—whatever anonymization features it had also extended to not kicking her out. “Wait. I look like I just survived a disaster. I can’t just walk through the hotel like this.”

“No…” Cinnabar admitted. “But we can enhance your clothes. One of your old outfits, maybe? I haven’t seen you wear one of them since you woke up!”

Cinnabar opened a folio in front of her and started flipping through the pages. Each one had her depicted in the center, standing in place like she was pretending to be a fashion dummy. Each outfit was something different, and much of what she was apparently wearing wouldn’t have been possible. There were evening gowns with a train made of sparkles and fog that followed her around, strange tops that covered almost nothing yet somehow didn’t show her body underneath. Clothes that gave her wings like her pegasus avatar. She stopped near the back, sticking her hand between the pages. “I wore this?”

It was a trenchcoat, boots, and hat like a noir detective, complete with a washed-out sepia filter over her whole body and a light misting of rain wherever she stepped. She could practically hear the sorrowful saxophone just looking at it. “Not very often. I think it was a joke.”

She skimmed a few more outfits until she found something that looked appropriate for a beach—a swimsuit and wrap, like she’d spent all day on the shore. “I assume this won’t fool everyone.”

“It’s already late at night. The maintenance robots don’t care how you dress. Most other guests will probably have their overlays on, those are the ones you have to worry about. Human staff and pony staff will always see your overlays in a place like this. You can’t show a guest the respect they want if you don’t even know how they want to look.”

She tapped the outfit with two fingers, though there was nothing in the air in front of her and no illusion tried to trick her. The whole car filled with a flash of seemingly Equestrian magic, wrapping around her like she was a magical girl during her transformation sequence. And by the time the glow finally faded, her whole body had changed. Her chest was larger, her hips were wider—everything was idealized, rather than real. “W-why do I…”

“Everyone does it,” Cinnabar muttered. “The system forces you to see everyone else’s enhancements if you’re wearing any of your own. For a while people just sort of… fixed one thing they didn’t like. But that didn’t last long. If you’re surrounded by perfect people, you have to look perfect too. Everyone has their own definition for what that means, but overall…”

Dakota wrinkled her nose, hammering the “door open” button on the van. I can’t believe people died in front of me an hour ago. Now here I am, back at the resort like nothing had happened. Jon had been kind and helpful, though suspicious at the end. He didn’t deserve to die. None of those people did.

Dakota’s worry over her outfit was in vain. No one so much as looked twice at them all the way up the hotel to her room. A few cleaning robots busy on the floor stopped momentarily as she passed, and the ponies that represented them smiled and saluted in their goofy uniforms. She usually would’ve waved back, said something polite—but just now, she didn’t have the energy.

Her room wasn’t as empty as she’d first expected, though. A familiar woman waited inside, along with her pegasus Synth. The only person in the world who could telepresence into Dakota’s life whenever she was at “home,” thanks to the permissions Dakota had granted her. Her mother didn’t have the bits to fly to the other end of the world whenever she wanted, but telepresence was free. “Hey Mom.”


The woman sat up, glaring daggers at her across the room. Her Synth seemed to have similar disdain for poor Cinnabar, though Dakota let the stallion worry about that himself. “Dakota Nicole Tyler,” she said, pushing the chair back and glaring up at her. “Would you mind telling me why you haven’t been responding to my messages these last few days? I finally have Dance look you up, and it turns out you’re in Australia! Not even a text… I was worried sick about you!”

A few excuses and explanations danced through her brain for a few seconds, and she dismissed them all. There on the table in front of her was a plain brown box, with a first-aid symbol on the side. Dakota walked casually over to the table, slumping down and starting to open it. Her mom would be worried to see her at work, but… she’d decided to come here digitally, that was on her. “I’m sorry. I got… distracted with the job.”

“I can see that.” Her eyes narrowed. But she clearly couldn’t see how Dakota really looked, or else she had no doubt she probably would’ve screamed. Can’t see the real world if you aren’t really there. “What’s that?”

“She got a little sick,” Cinnabar lied. “Nothing serious. You know how it is—new environment, new diseases. Nothing a booster can’t fix.”

Her mother’s eyes narrowed, and she folded her arms. “Why’d you have to go back to work so soon, sweetie? You know I would’ve spotted you for cash if you needed some. My little girl, running around the world…”

“It’s fine.” Inside the box was a plastic package containing an inhaler, and a strange mechanism with transparent insides and lots of cotton. The instructions told her to take in a few breaths of the medication, then breathe as deeply as she could into the respirator, and repeat until there was no visible blood or discharge. “But mom, I really want to get cleaned up after today, and… it’s been a long day. Can I call you in the morning?” She glanced meaningfully to Cinnabar, an instruction he would interpret without words.

“Only if you promise me a detailed report.”

“Fine.” She rolled her eyes. “Fine, Mom. Detailed report.” She nodded to Cinnabar, and the two “guests” in her room vanished. 

Dakota concentrated for the next several minutes on using the inhalation kit, which was an entirely engrossing and awful process to endure. She filled several of the sterile pads with black slime and stringy blood until her lungs finally seemed to clear.

She worked herself so painfully in the process that she probably dozed for a bit. It was still dark when she woke, and Cinnabar nudged her in the shoulder. “Hey, Dakota,” he said. “Bed’s right over there. Your leg hurts enough not sleeping sitting up.”

“Right.” She made it a few steps, flung herself down, and thought no more.







Dakota woke to a room that had been cleaned of all the medical wreckage of the night before, and a bed that smelled of gasoline. Her insides felt like they were on fire with every breath, but at least she could still breathe. She spent almost an hour in the shower, breathing in the damp air and crying to herself on the floor. 

People had died yesterday—people that might’ve still been alive if she had kept her nose out of this case. She could still picture Jon standing over her, hand on her shoulder, wondering if they’d been betrayed. Maybe I’m in over my head. I could get a plane and be back in Chicago by midnight. But she didn’t get a plane—she just sat on the floor of the shower and waited for all the ash to run out of the water. And when it did, she cried some more.

“I got housekeeping to go through the bedroom,” Cinnabar said from beside her in the shower. Suddenly he was there, his fur realistically wet and his voice distorted by falling water. Dakota squeaked in surprise, covering her chest with one arm.

“What the fuck are you doing in here? I’m naked!”

“Me too,” he said, unimpressed. “Think for a second, Dakota. Who holds all of your medical history? Also, I’m a horse.”

“Right.” Dakota slumped back against the tile. “Sorry. W-wasn’t thinking.” Her embarrassment faded as quickly as it had come. She’d never been bothered by Cinnabar—he’d been consulting with her in the bath just yesterday. It was only when she had… company that she got shy. “Anything else I should know?”

He hesitated. “The international situation is… pretty grim. China is mobilizing an aircraft carrier. There are already sanctions, and promises of a huge investigation. There’s strong evidence of foul play, and everyone’s looking for someone to blame. Looks like they’re going to start giving foreigners more scrutiny.”

“Foreigners like… the ones who took a public autocar straight to the site of the shooting yesterday?”

Cinnabar winced. “Grim, like I said. And you’ve got a bit of a history back in the States, so…”

“So why didn’t you wake me up? Shouldn’t I be running?”

“No,” he said. “Guilty people run. I promise if you tried to use the airport, you’d get stopped at the gate. But the authorities don’t have any reason to worry about you leaving… not when they can watch every autocar in the country. That’s why I’m talking to you in the shower. I can mask their monitoring with the water, make it look natural. When you turn it off… don’t say anything to me you don’t want repeated at your trial.”

She winced. “I didn’t do anything wrong! If they do an investigation, they aren’t going to find any evidence I hurt any of those people. No motive, no…”

Cinnabar settled a hoof on her shoulder. She could feel the weight of it there, though strangely she still felt the water as well. “It doesn’t matter if they can prove it. They’ll be investigating. Right now they’re under pressure to make sure someone gets punished.”

“Right.” She closed her eyes, letting the sound of roaring water and steam wash around her for a few minutes. She searched for a flaw—some opening left to her. Renting a sailboat? An unregistered flight to New Zealand? Maybe, but unless she could somehow do one of those without getting caught in the act, she’d just confirm their suspicions. “I should’ve just turned myself in to the police last night. I wouldn’t look guilty that way.”

Cinnabar raised an eyebrow. “It would’ve helped. But none of the underlying facts would be different. You’d still be their best suspect. I don’t think we have time to spend a few months working our way through the court system here. Not when…”

“I get it.” She stood up, glaring down at him. “I get it, you were right. I shouldn’t be investigating Rhodes. Well, too late. I’m fucked now, and I’m not giving up. I never got the chance to tell you what I learned from Twilight.”

At first Cinnabar just glared smugly back at her—but even he couldn’t conceal his curiosity. “Well?”

She waited another moment longer. But the shower wasn’t feeling relaxing anymore. “She said Rhodes is at the Tranquility Lunar Complex.” Not strictly, precisely what she’d said, but close enough. Either she trusted Twilight as a source or she didn’t on that—there was no evidence for it, but she wasn’t drowning in other options. 

“So we’re done then,” Cinnabar said, not even sounding like he believed it. “Just give our sponsor a call and tell them that, and we can go home. Maybe waiting a week for our reservation here to expire will be long enough. The authorities can dig up whoever those soldiers were who did the killing, not blame us.”

“If we pass that information on without evidence, why would they believe it? Twilight said so, so what? Or worse, what if they send someone and she’s not there.” Dakota shivered, wrapping her arms around her chest. “Then they’re down the cost of a lunar mission, and they’re furious with me. I bet they would kill me over that.”

“Probably. But we can’t go there ourselves. Dakota, do you have any idea how much a seat on a rocket costs? How many different certifications and approvals you would need?”

“More than forty million?”

“Well no,” he sighed. “But close. It’s all corporates up there. You could buy a seat for ten, but that would be one way. Are you really going to blow half of the advance for this case on a single piece of evidence without verifying it first?”

“No!” Dakota glared down at him, indignant. “We’re not going to go there physically. Honestly, Cinnabar, you’re the pony here. What’s with your physical bias.”

His stern expression got a little firmer. “You can’t remote into a Bodhisattva mainframe. Everything about how Equestria runs is proprietary. And believe me, you won’t get the credentials to visit.”

“Maybe not,” she admitted, summoning her interface and opening the inventory. She drew out the digital ticket to the dive cruise. “But what if we were already inside one?”







Sophia’s threat to extract a detailed report from Dakota hadn’t been idle. But she had a few hours left before she had to confirm the reservation on the ticket, and the trip wasn’t even until tomorrow.

Of course, there was still a chance that the authorities would make some kind of move on her in the intervening time. Dakota tried to use her time productively, spinning a story to her mother of going to the arcade in question and being in a bathroom when people started screaming. “I hid there for a few minutes—I thought maybe we were being attacked or something,” she explained, with her mother across the table watching with horror on her face. “But then the screaming stopped, and I snuck out. There was a lot of smoke, but I made it out into the alley behind the building, got a few blocks away, and eventually made it home.”

“But what were you doing there in the first place?” her mother demanded, while Dance tried to murder Cinnabar with her eyeballs. As if she expected him to keep her from going anywhere dangerous. 

“Investigating a case,” she said, trying to use as many of the real details as possible. “I didn’t come all the way across the world just to use another arcade. But I didn’t get the chance to actually meet anyone.”

“Hope they’re still alive,” Sophia said, summoning a news report into the air between them. It was nothing new to her, but Dakota pretended to be shocked, did her best impressions of horror at the news that five people had been burned, including a Chinese ambassador. She couldn’t ask Cinnabar how good her acting was, but she hoped he’d be pleased.

“You need to get home right now,” her mother said, as soon as she was finished. “It’s too dangerous down there. If something happens between Australia and China, you need to be far away.  What if this turns into another South China Sea?”

Dakota made a mental note to look that one up. “I will,” she promised. “But not right away. If something bad happened there, the Aussies may want to interview me or something. I’ve already got return tickets, I’ll fly back at the end of the week.”

Her mother tried to pressure her—but Dakota wasn’t a child anymore. After a few minutes Sophia gave up and rose in a huff. “Fine, Dakota. But I’m giving all your information to the consulate. I’m going to tell them you’ve got an angry, terrified mother waiting for you back in the States.”

She shrugged. “Alright, Mom. Love you too.” The woman vanished, leaving her alone with Cinnabar. She turned, and he was grinning.

“Good story,” he said. “Don’t reply. They have no way of listening to me… you already know that. I don’t think I saw any security cameras downstairs, or even facing into the back of the arcade.”

She nodded. “Of course I’m still going diving tomorrow.” She summoned the ticket, though anyone listening wouldn’t have been able to see it for the same reasons they couldn’t see Cinnabar. “Confirm my reservation for me, please. I’m going to take it easy today. Hang out by the pool, maybe…”

“I get it,” Cinnabar said, taking the ticket. “They were criminals to begin with. They don’t want any kind of evidence of their activities. You should know, though…” He tapped the side of his head with a hoof. “You’ve got recordings in here of everything that happened last night. The tech is so new that I don’t think there’s any kind of legal precedent. Just… be careful with all your lies. I’ll try to keep the story straight for you, help coach you if we need it.”

“Perfect!” she responded. “I can’t wait to go diving for the first time. They say this is the healthiest reef left in the world. I could use something pretty to take my mind off last night.”

Cinnabar nodded, and vanished with the ticket.

Dakota finally had a few moments to herself to go over what she’d missed from the night before. The message waiting in her queue wasn’t from her mother—Cinnabar had already cleared those out. This one came from Beck. 

“Hey Dakota. You should know someone used that package I gave you, probably to track your location in Equestria. My code’s good—the program self-destructed before they could learn anything else. But someone knows where you were when it happened. Clean your room, eh?”

Where she was, so—the basement of the Thestral Arcade? Or did he mean the place she’d met with Twilight? Unlike with her mother, she and Beck had traded keypairs, meaning she could send encrypted messages back and forth that in theory even governments couldn’t break into. Since she read it with implants, there was no screen for anyone watching with room cameras to snoop on.

But someone could still try and force me to unlock it. She hesitated in her response, knowing that even her finger-motions through the air might be tracked. “Thanks for telling me,” was all she said. “I’ll talk to you in a week.”

“Alright, we’re on for tomorrow,” Cinnabar said when he returned a few minutes later. “They say there’s some intro to diving stuff you have to do in a pool this afternoon, so you’re ready for the trip. You still want to go?” Then he lowered his voice, though there was no physical need for him. 

Does he really think I forgot people could be listening? 

“We have Kayla’s Equestrian Identifier, don’t forget. That was the big clue that opened this case in the first place. We could try to use that.”

“How?” She wanted to say more—it wasn’t as though the system was a mystery to Dakota.

“The transaction blockchain is bucking gigantic, but with some of our death bits I could rent out a few servers to search. See if she’s made transactions with any known addresses. Every Earth retailer has a public address—and lots of Equestrian ones do too. Only individuals are private.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I still want to go diving. I know I’ve got a swimsuit here somewhere. If there’s anything you think we should buy, you can go ahead and buy it for me.”

All the confirmation he needed. What she wanted to say was Why didn’t you start that sooner, we could’ve done them at the same time! But she didn’t, and her own memory of how the EI system worked hadn’t survived intact enough to make the guess to begin with.

“I can’t wait to see what you look like swimming,” she said, sprawling out on the resort couch. “Oh, and maybe—see if Java wants to do lunch first. I’m sure she heard about the arcade thing too, she’s just too polite to pester me about it until I’m ready.”

Dakota wasn’t arrested that day. She spent her time not doing much of anything, aside from a single trip to a neighboring resort by autocar for her intro to diving instruction. Cinnabar showed her maps, depicting the ship’s route and its proximity to Bodhisattva’s operations in the Great Barrier Reef. Less than a kilometer away, as charted.

I can do that.