//------------------------------//
// Chapter XIV 
// Story: Blank Slate 
// by Integral Archer 
//------------------------------//

	Littlepip braved the walk down the hallway, her head held high.

Though she felt the walls closing on her, though she felt her vision blurring as her brain began to draw erroneous conclusions from the lack of any distinctive marks in the hallway, she kept her walk straight, for she knew where she was going, whom she was going to see, and why. Her purpose was clear in her mind, and though the hall intimidated her, this kept her going. It wasn’t difficult, but she thought back to the first who walked down that hallway; she thought of Copper Chromite, barely an adolescent, who had first skipped down the hallway after it had been abandoned, not knowing where he was going, not knowing what was at the end, not knowing if there even was an end, just for the purpose of exploration and knowledge. Maybe that kept him from feeling dizzy? she thought. She wondered what that would be like: to have the only motor of her being, the only thing protecting her in a hostile new world, a thirst for knowledge. It was probably wonderful.

She turned the last left and beheld the two steel doors. The one on the right gave forth a bright yellow glow from its margins.

She approached it undeterred but cautiously hesitant, like a cat at the sight of the red dot of a laser pointer. She put a hoof in the distorted yellow square in front of the door. It didn’t burn; it felt like nothing. But it gave her skin a strange shine, a color that she had never seen before, indescribable. The borders of the door allowed the passage of this light; but the light seemed to only pass in one direction, out of the room, making it impossible to look inside. The brightness appeared to her as a living sentry; it quivered as she moved through it but watched with a heavy stare, a stare powerful enough to eradicate the very thought of trying to see the subject it protected without express permission. It consciously deterred her.

She raised her hoof to knock, and only then did she see the sign. It was a white sheet of printer paper taped to the front of the door. It said “The Inviolable Domain of CuCrO.” In a different color pen, somepony had messily and hastily scribbled the subscripts 2, 2, and 5 under the u, the r, and the O respectively.

The second her hoof landed on the door in the form of a knock, the light went out. She heard the shuffling of beer cans banging against one another, combined with the rustling of papers. Another sound which she could not place also came to her ear: the sound of rattling plastic, glass?

Then, suddenly—silence. She stared at the metal door, expecting it to open any second. The door did not budge. She pushed her face to the metal. Silence. She could hear nothing. But, though she wouldn’t admit it to herself, she could have sworn that she felt something on the other side: the metal was hot, not cold like steel, almost as if there were another face pressed to the other side—like some sort of standoff.

She pulled her face away and looked at her Pip-Buck. At two minutes, she thought, I’m leaving.

At the one minute thirty second mark, she turned her head to the left to glance at the other door. It was just a glance, not even that, a twitch. When she turned back, she recoiled with such a force that all four of her feet left the ground. She screamed as she fell.

Copper Chromite was standing two inches away from her face.

He looked the same as he always did, disheveled, unkempt, tired. That close to him, Littlepip could see rivulets of sweat on his forehead and cheeks. She was surprised; she had expected his mane hairs to be standing on their ends, like those of the stereotypical mad scientists. She expected a frenzied, chaotic look in his eyes, his tongue to hang loosely from his mouth; all the while desperately trying to affect a smile like the Stable Colt, coming close, but not close enough, to a genuine grin—in short, an eerie appearance. But Copper Chromite didn’t look as if he were trying to affect any artificial appearance, and he didn’t look condescending, judgmental, or sarcastic, as he usually did. He had not even reacted to her scream. Rather, he just stared at her blankly, through her, as if she weren’t even there, his mouth closed, his ears downcast, his eyelids drooping.

“God, Copper!” said Littlepip, pulling herself to her feet. “I didn’t even hear you come out. You scared the hell out of me!”

For a second, he was silent. Littlepip’s words hung in the air around his head, hovering like a cloud of flies waiting for the second that they would be permitted a landing. When they found their mark, Copper Chromite’s ears first perked up. His eyes then flared to life, darting left and right before settling on Littlepip.

She expected a smile; she got a stare of confusion.

“Littlepip?” he said. “What . . . what are you doing here?”

“You told me to come here, didn’t you?”

“Yes . . .” he murmured, staring at the floor, “yes, now that I think about it, I do believe I did . . .” With a snap, his eyes refocused. He was staring at her with a fervor that she had never seen before, and he smiled. “That’s right, I did! But I didn’t think you’d actually come. Ugh, what was I saying before that! I don’t remember. I didn’t think anypony was listening. I remember getting a hold of myself after I asked you to come.”

“Don’t worry about it. I don’t remember what you said either. Nopony does.”

“And . . .” he went on, “and you just came?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because you asked me to. It sounded like you needed me.”

“I asked you to come, and you did? Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“And you weren’t expecting anything? I didn’t have to bargain, to offer you something in return, and you came just because I wanted you to?”

“Yes,” said Littlepip. Then she turned her head, slightly ashamed, and said: “Well, no, not exactly. You said that you had something for me and that it was really important.”

“I did?” Copper Chromite bowed his head. “Oh, yes, right. I did say that.”

“Well?” said Littlepip.

“‘Well’ what?”

“What do you have?”

Copper Chromite blinked. “Oh, yes. Well, I can’t really tell you. It’d just be better if I showed you what it was.”

Littlepip shrugged. “All right, then. I’m here. Show me.”

“It’s in my room.”

“Show me.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s in my room.”

“So?”

“I don’t let anypony into my room.”

Littlepip groaned. “That’s fine. Just bring it out here, then.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because what I have to show you, it can’t . . . well, I don’t know how to explain it, but . . . it needs to be in my room when I tell you, that is. I don’t want to bring it out.”

“So,” said Littlepip, putting a hoof to her head, “what you have for me has to be given to me in your room, but you don’t let anypony in your room, so you can’t give it to me?”

“That is correct.”

She sighed. “Well, I suppose we’re at an impasse then!”

“Yes. It appears that way.” Copper Chromite made no motion. He stared at her as if he were waiting for her to respond.

She turned on her heels to leave.

“Wait!” yelled Copper Chromite, the second she took a step down the hallway.

Littlepip turned back around. “Are you going to show me what you have, or are you just going to stand there like an idiot and waste my time?”

Copper Chromite said nothing.

“Well?” said Littlepip.

“I’m thinking,” he said.

She turned to leave.

“Wait!” he yelled. “Alright, alright, alright!”

“‘Alright’ what?” she said, not turning to face him.

“Alright, you can . . .” He ground his teeth together and winced. “You can . . . come in.”

She turned around, with a smile. She trotted toward him. “Alright!” she said. “We’re getting somewhere!”

“But! stop!” he said. “It’s conditional.”

She stopped. “Fine. What is it?”

“Touch nothing.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me: touch nothing. I’ll let you in, but you can’t touch a single thing you see. Got it?”

Littlepip rolled her eyes. “Fair enough.”

“Alright, then.”

He pushed on the door, opening it just enough for a body to slip through. “Come on,” he said, gesturing to her with a forehoof. “Quickly, quickly.”

She looked. It was pitch-black in the room behind him. She could see nothing in the room, not even the shape of anything on the floor. The light from the hallway penetrated three inches through the threshold and stopped abruptly. It seemed unnatural.

When she stepped through, her face was assaulted with an overbearing heat. It felt as if a giant creature were continuously exhaling its warm, putrid breath into the room. And putrid it was: what she smelled could only be described as an invasion of the nose—sweat, rotten food, decaying plaster, body odor. For a second, she thought she smelled drying fish. But, all in all, she was surprised at how much she didn’t mind it. The rest of the stable smelled like nothing, sterility and blankness; the rest of the stable was stone cold. But this room felt like a warm hug. She felt the heat as a breath, the smell as a mosaic—and her senses told her that something existed in this room, something other than a zero.

“Where’s the light switch?” she asked.

“I don’t have one,” he said.

“How do you work, then?”

He said nothing. She saw him disappear into the darkness in front of her. “Copper?” she asked. “What do you have to give me?”

“I’m getting it for you,” he said. “Close the door, would you?”

She stood three inches from the door. She did not want to push it any farther, much less close it. It was slightly ajar, and it let in the only light into the room. Save for a few inches in from the threshold, the room was in complete darkness. But this darkness was not like the darkness in the basement, an empty, void, free darkness, where thoughts could fly on any whim, unrestricted, unchecked, unquestioned; the darkness in this room felt heavy, firm, close, suffocating—suffocating not in the sense of oppression but in the sense of authority, a darkness as black as the robe of a judge, a darkness that watched her thoughts closely, preparing to rule upon them with firm and disinterested attention, about to decide which of her thoughts were appropriate and which ones were unbecoming to a creature of her intelligence. Thus, her brain refused to process Copper Chromite’s last sentence. She leaned softly against the door; it started to move; she saw that it was shunting the light from the room; she leapt off of the door in a flash, with the same fervor and panic as if she had just seen a pool of water in the desert drying up.

A shape approached her out of the darkness; its body was straight, but its head was elongated and swaying back and forth, much like a hammerhead shark. When it came closer, she recognized Copper Chromite. In his mouth was a long, rolled-up piece of paper. “Here,” he said, through his teeth. “This is for you.”

He opened his mouth as Littlepip lit her horn, taking it away from him and levitating it. She was slightly more comfortable now; the glow of her horn gave a little bit more light—though not enough to see around her and not enough to see Copper Chromite completely. “What is it?” she said.

“Unroll it, and look at it.”

“I can’t see,” she said. “Where’s the light switch?”

“I told you; there isn’t one in my room.”

She groaned but unrolled it regardless. The little amount of light from the hall only permitted her to see the title, in block letters, across the poster: GENERATION II Pip-Buck PROJECTION.

“This is . . .” she said, “this is great, Copper, but I already have one.”

“Are you sure?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. She moved her eyes down the poster, lifting it higher and higher so that the ray of light could traverse the page. “I was working with it in the cafeteria when I was talking to you, and—”

She stopped in mid-sentence when she saw the symbol in the bottom-right corner: a circle etched within another circle; two dotted lines, one vertical, one horizontal, bisecting both circles through the middle, the horizontal one bisecting a trapezoid—to the right of the circles.

“Copper . . .” she said. “Is this . . . is this . . .”

“Yes,” he said, “a third-angle projection.”

The whiteness of her face in surprise could almost be seen in the darkness. “My God, Copper . . . my God! I’ve been struggling for days on a single Pip-Buck. I haven’t gotten any work done, because I only have one projection, and it’s first-angle, and I can’t read it . . .”

“I saw you struggling in the cafeteria,” he replied. “First-angle projections, can you imagine anything more unintuitive? And I thought, hey, I think I have a third-angle one in my room somewhere. Though I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want to get your hopes up in case I didn’t have it. But I did. Don’t ask me why; I just did.”

“I’ve been looking everywhere for this! Thank you!”

“Don’t mention it.”

She breathed rapidly. She couldn’t remember a time when she was more happy. He said nothing but let her enjoy it. She couldn’t see his face, but she felt his presence implying a smile.

“So,” she said, setting down the projections beside her, “is that what you wanted to give me? I mean—don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining. I’m very happy, truly happy.”

“Well . . .” he said. “No, not entirely.”

“What?”

“That was just an excuse. That’s not really what I wanted to give you—I mean, I did, but it wasn’t the whole thing, you know?”

“What is it?” she said.

There was a pause. “Close the door,” he said.

The smile drained from Littlepip’s face. She looked to the door. It was open slightly; a sliver of white light permitted her the sight of the entrance to the room and the vague silhouette of Copper Chromite in front of her. “It . . .” she stammered, “it is closed.”

“No,” he said, “I can see light coming from the hallway.”

“It’s closed enough.”

“No, that’s not closed. Closed is when you push it until it goes click. That’s closed. That”—she saw the gesture of his forehoof in the direction behind her—“is not closed.”

“Oh, come on, Copper. Why all the secrecy? It’s unnecessary. Just give me what you wanted to give me, and—”

“I’m not doing a damn thing until you close the door!”

His voice took the tone of an order and sent ice through Littlepip’s veins. It froze her to the spot. It was rage, not very much, but pure, concentrated, and potent—all the more terrifying because she had never seen it before in him. She heard him breathing heavily. “Alright,” she said. “Alright, no need to get angry.” She leaned against the door. When the light went out completely, when all she saw was black, she heard the click.

“There,” said Copper Chromite, “that wasn’t too hard, was it?”

“So what is it?” she said.

“Give me a second.” She heard him shuffling away from her.

Then came that familiar sound: beer cans, plastic, a general rummaging among miscellaneous parts. It sounded exactly as it did when she heard it on the radio. She laughed.

“What’s so funny?” she heard from the darkness. The clash of plastic stopped.

The voice was a judgment. She stopped laughing. “Nothing, nothing,” she said.

The noise continued.

She stood there for minutes; she knew it was minutes, but she was too confused to count them. It could have been two minutes; it could have been twenty. The sound continued. She said, too anxious to stand there and say nothing: “So, what do you work on in here? I mean, when you’re not on the radio, of course.”

“Myself,” he said.

“What?”

“I work on myself.”

“Yes . . .” she said, slightly dejected, “yes, of course you do.”

“Do you feel anything around your feet?”

“What?”

“I said: Do you feel anything around your feet? Any wires, objects—anything?”

“No,” she said, shuffling her feet, “I don’t think so.”

“Don’t move!” he yelled. “Stay exactly as you are. Don’t even flex a muscle.”

She obeyed. The silence grew once more. “Copper,” she said, at length, “you once said that you were working on earth pony magic in here.”

“I never said that. But I suppose if you want to think about it that way, you’re not entirely wrong.”

“It’s funny,” she said, “’cause I didn’t know that earth ponies could use magic. I only thought unicorns could.” She opened her eyes as wide as possible, hoping that her pupils had dilated enough to allow her to see him. It was pitch-black. She saw nothing.

“We can,” he said. The rummaging stopped. “Well, it’s not exactly ‘magic’ in the sense that unicorns think about it, but it’s definitely a force peculiar to earth ponies, just as powerful, arguably more so, than unicorn magic. And more difficult to harness, too.”

She scoffed. “Yeah, right. Try levitating something using only your mind, and then get back to me.”

“I’m serious,” he replied. “Earth pony magic requires a greater use of the mind than unicorn magic. It’s so difficult, in fact, that most earth ponies don’t even try. That’s why you think that earth ponies don’t have any powers; most of them don’t even try to use it—it’s that difficult.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said.

“You already have,” he said. She heard a click. “Alright, there.”

“Ready to show me?” she said.

“Yes. Now, close your eyes. Shut them tight.”

“What?”

“Close your eyes. Don’t even peek. Shut them as tight as possible.”

“Copper, I can’t see anything as it is, much less see what you have.”

“I’m not going to warn you again. Close your eyes.” This wasn’t an order. It took the tone of a friendly, caressing suggestion.

“Before I do anything you say, first tell me what the hell—”

Her sentence was cut short when she felt a pierce to her brain, like a knife, straight through both her eyes. She screamed. Reflexively, she slammed her eyelids shut and collapsed to the ground. Even with both her hooves over her eyes, she still felt the surge make its implacable course straight through the middle of her head. In her confused mess of thoughts, she knew it to be an overload: her eyes had received too many signals too quickly, and the inundation had burned out her brain. She didn’t see blackness; she saw too much whiteness, too quickly, and she couldn’t process it all. The firing of her neurons haphazardly felt like a lightning strike to her head every time one fell. She writhed on the ground, moaning.

“I told you,” she heard a voice indistinctly say. She heard a slightly condescending and contemptuous laugh.

“What hell, Copper!” she screamed, her hooves over her eyes. “What did you do!”

“What do you see?” he said, his voice calm.

“I see nothing!” she yelled. “I’m blind!”

“Look harder,” he said. “You saw something, and it was powerful. It was so powerful that you can’t ignore it, nor unsee it. Look hard, and you should still be able to see it. What is it?”

“I don’t see anything!”

“Describe it to me.”

“It’s nothing!” She squeezed her eyes as tightly as possible. “It’s . . . it’s a sort of . . . bulbous extrusion, kind of like a teardrop, but much fatter.”

“Is it cold like a teardrop?”

“No,” she said, her eyes still closed, “no it’s . . . warm. Unbelievably warm. Hot. Burning. It’s burning me! It’s left its imprint! I can’t get rid of it! Help! Don’t just stand there!”

“Is that all you see? Is there anything inside the teardrop?”

“No! That’s all!”

“Are you sure? Look harder.”

“There’s nothing, there’s . . .” She felt her mind beginning to cool. The pain ebbed. “There’s . . . something in the teardrop.”

“What is it?”

“It’s . . . it’s kind of a screwy kind of thing, a screw. A coil of some sort, straight through the middle of it.”

“And is the screw hot or cold?”

Her voice flattened out. “It’s unbelievably hot. Copper, I take it back: The teardrop is cold. It only looks and feels warm because of this screw. The screw burns red, red hot. It’s hotter, redder, and brighter than a stove element. It’s warm. . . . It’s inviting.”

“Open your eyes. Carefully, now.”

It hurt, but she was only aware of the pain in that it existed; it did not get to her, and it did not deter her from looking:

At the end of the room sat a short, plastic beige box. Wires connected on either end of the box. On the top of the box was the tear-shaped extrusion. It was bright, brighter than anything Littlepip had seen before. She wanted to look at it, but it was too bright to stare at directly. It seemed to command her, telling her that her eyes were unworthy to behold it in its full glory, that she would have to make do with what it gave. Beams of yellow dust shot out from the extrusion, each serving as conduits of light to every cubic millimeter of the room, like the passage of blood through an infinite number of arteries. And the light was . . .

“Yellow,” Littlepip breathed.

“What?” said Copper Chromite.

“The light that that thing is giving off. It’s not white. It’s yellow.”

“Yes it is.”

She rose, shakily, made more difficult by her uncooperative head, which would not turn away from the light source for even a second.

“What . . . what is it?” she stammered, hypnotized.

“It’s a lightbulb, Littlepip.”

“That?” She stared at him incredulously and gestured to the light with a forehoof. “That is not a lightbulb. Out here”—she reached for the door—“these—”

“Don’t you even think of opening that door,” said Copper Chromite.

He didn’t have to explain himself. No explanation was necessary. She obeyed. She understood exactly why she had no choice but to obey.

“But . . . but that light . . .” she said, “that light is yellow. That’s not the right color for light. Light is white.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“But I could’ve sworn—” And then, her eyes lit up, trying their best to imitate the bulb, and she exclaimed: “Oh God, you’re right! Light is yellow! In all the picture books we read as children, light is drawn yellow! I . . . I never questioned it; it just seemed right. But I’ve never seen yellow light before; I’ve never seen actual yellow light until right now. Why haven’t I? Copper, what is that?”

“The stable uses fluorescent lightbulbs. This is an incandescent lightbulb.”

“What?”

“This lightbulb doesn’t use mercury vapor to make ultraviolet light. Instead, that coil in the middle—you can’t see it right now because it’s too bright, but you saw it in the afterimage—is made completely of tungsten. Tungsten has the highest melting of all the metals. Tungsten stands even when the metals around it have long since liquified; and the sign of its rebellion, its refusal to submit, is a light brighter than any beacon that I know of. And why shouldn’t it be?”

“Incandescence . . .” was all Littlepip could say.

“I light this room only with incandescent lightbulbs. I found a stash in the basement a few years back, and I only use them. The sockets in this room”—he pointed to the long, cylindrical holes on the ceiling—“take only fluorescent lightbulbs. So I built this circuit here—watch your step, don’t want to electrocute yourself—to power this lightbulb. I only use incandescence to light this room. My grandfather would always sit in the dark. He said that he would rather see nothing than see the unnatural white light given off by the fluorescent bulbs. He always asked for incandescent lightbulbs, and he was always refused them. He said he liked them better, because the light they gave was the same yellow as the sun. How many bulbs do I need to light this room, Littlepip? How many do I have connected to this circuit?”

“You have the sun in your room . . .”

In just the light of the one bulb, the room was completely illuminated. Littlepip stood in awe of the things around her. Beer cans were littered everywhere, covering the floor almost completely, lying on, below, and beside various colored wires that ran from unknown sources and ended nowhere. Breadboards were almost as abundant; they mingled with the beer cans, and the rest had been thrown into a box on a flimsy wooden table occupying the entire right wall of the room with no system of organization, the box overflowing. On this table, cluttered to the left and right sides, various boxes with numerous switches, displays, dials, and buttons, stacked one on top of the other and sat like building blocks. Wires snaking from the backs of these boxes went around the desk, behind it, onto the floor. In the middle of the table sat a microphone; next to it was an old computer terminal. Various papers, some blank, some with thousands of unreadable digits, lay strewn across the table, across the wires, across the boxes. In the corner of the room was a sleeping bag, right by the lightbulb. Next to the door was a small table, a nightstand, sitting on top of which was an oscilloscope; an adhesive note had been attached to the oscilloscope’s display, and it read: “Fix me!”

She had not expected to be struck dumb, reverent by the sight of so much trash. She had never felt reverence. She had thought that the first time she would have experienced it would be in the presence of something big; she had not thought that it would have been brought on by the sight of beer cans and chaos. No, she thought, it wasn’t chaos. There was a method to this. It was the organized habitat of a unique creature. He knew where everything was at any given moment. Everything, from the crumpled beer can to the computer terminal, was exactly where it was meant to be and served a very specific purpose. She now understood why he had not wanted her to touch anything.

The other room, separated by the one-way window, did not allow the passage of light from the incandescent lightbulb; thus, it remained dark.

Copper Chromite was sitting on a small swivel chair in front of the table. He pressed a key on the computer, and the screen flickered on.

Littlepip laughed.

“What’s so funny?” said Copper Chromite.

“There were so many legends circulating about your room once upon a time. We thought you were crazy. But you’re the most normal out of all of us.”

“I never understood that,” he said. “There’s no secret, no inexplicable phenomena—it’s just me and my room.”

Littlepip chuckled again. “You said you were working on earth pony magic.”

“I never said that. I said that earth ponies do have powers, and I was using mine.”

“Where?”

Copper Chromite gestured to the lightbulb. “There it is.”

Littlepip groaned. “Oh, come on, Copper! That’s just electricity.”

“Yes.”

“How is that ‘earth pony magic’?”

“How is it not?” he said, standing up. He was not looking at her; he was looking at the bulb. “Electricity is one of the fundamental forces of the earth. I channel it so that it passes through a chemical element, a pure substance which comes from the earth, and I make these things do what I want. I have these earthly artifacts, which were useless and scattered initially—I have them harnessed for my own purposes, to serve me and my own needs. Before, electricity only killed. Before, tungsten just took up space. Now, electricity is the most useful force known to us. Now, tungsten is the most useful substance we know of. And these things come from the earth. This utility hasn’t always existed. These things were useless, even dangerous, on their own. Something put them together and made them how we know them today. What would you call it, then, the ability to tame this most deadly of forces the earth can produce, to create utility from uselessness? ‘Earth pony power’—I don’t like the word ‘magic’—it implies something innate, instinctual, unlearned—is the quickest way I can describe this.”

“Huh,” said Littlepip, scratching her head, “I never thought about it that way. I suppose you’re right.”

Copper Chromite said nothing. His eyes were fixed on the lightbulb. He raised his neck and sighed contentedly, like a father proud at his son, before turning around and sitting down on the chair in front of the terminal.

Littlepip stood alone, watching him type. Suddenly she gasped. Her eyes went wide. She had just realized something that had been screaming indistinctly at her; she had not recognized it until this very moment.

“What is it?” said Copper Chromite, turning to face her.

“Where is he?” she said, her voice in a frenzy. She dove for the stack of papers.

“Don’t touch anything!” screamed Copper Chromite.

She stopped herself. Instead, she spun around in a circle, jerkily, inconsistently, looking all around the room. “Where is he!” she yelled.

“Where’s who?”

“I can’t find him!”

“Whom can’t you find?”

She turned to him. “The Stable Colt! Where is he?”

Copper Chromite sighed. “I tried to get rid of him completely in my room, but he’s still here. In one place. One place where I couldn’t get rid of him.”

“Where?”

Copper Chromite turned the knob of his Pip-Buck and flashed the screen to her after he settled on the right page. “Here,” he said. He was showing her the About screen.

“Oh, that doesn’t count!” she said.

“Why not?”

“It just . . .” she said, spinning back around, “never mind.”

She looked around the room a few times, in disbelief. Copper Chromite didn’t seem to notice.

On her third spin, something bright, something colorful, something that danced in the light of the incandescent bulb as the spinning of her body cast waves of shadows across the walls, caught her attention. By the threshold to the room, on a small wooden shelf on a wall about head height stood a long, tall tube of glass. The tube was cylindrical, except for the top, which summated in a point like the spire of a skyscraper. In the midst of the tube, hovering as if by magic, were ellipses of various colors, blue, turquoise, orange, teal, navy—but these colors were not random; rather they were calculated, clear, defined in shape. She drew closer. The tube was filled with a clear liquid. The ellipses were bulbs, fat spheres with pointed tops; these bulbs were also clear, and they appeared to have their own liquids inside of their bodies; the liquids inside these bulbs were dyed brilliantly, each one a different color, each one shining as if it had its own light. She noticed on each bulb, fixed to the bottom, there was a golden ring with a golden plate hanging from it; they looked exactly like modest earrings. Four of the bulbs were floating; three had sunk completely to the bottom; one floated directly in the middle of the tube.

“Copper . . .” she breathed.

“Yes?” said Copper Chromite, spinning around in his chair.

“My God, Copper,” she whispered. “It’s beautiful.”

“What is?”

“This.” She didn’t point or gesture. She stood, mesmerized.

Copper Chromite didn’t need an explanation to understand the cause of her admiration. “It sure is,” he said. “Do you like it?”

“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“Yes. Another example of earth pony power. The earth has many things; electricity is just the obvious one, and—what are you doing? Step away from it!”

“I have to touch it,” she said. “I have to.”

“No!” he screamed. “You promised! You promised not to touch anything!”

“Copper,” she said, turning to him, “I have to.”

“Will you die if you don’t touch it?”

There was a pause. She stared at him, fully, openly, completely exposed to him, and said, without irony, without humor, without a hint of disingenuousness:

“Yes.”

Copper Chromite sighed. “Fine,” he said, as if defeated. “Just be really, really, really careful.”

But as soon as she lit her horn, as soon as he saw the slow motion with which the glass tube descended from the shelf and floated toward her, he knew that his last sentence to her had been unnecessary. Not ever taking her eyes off of it for a second, not ever ceasing to cast her levitation magic on it, she held it in the curve of her forehoof like a mother holding an infant. The bulbs clinked against each other, against the wall of the tube as she held it, swaying it back and forth with a gentle, pendulous motion. “It’s so . . . delicate,” she said. “I feel if I were just to turn it horizontally, it would crack under its own weight.”

Copper Chromite said nothing; he only looked upon her and upon the tube with dreamy, tired eyes—but filled with proud contentment.

“What is it supposed to mean?” said Littlepip.

“What?”

“Who’s the artist? Do I know him?”

“It’s not a sculpture or an artistic statement.”

She looked back at it, at the vivid colors, at the bulbs. The bulbs, though sculpted in the same image, differed slightly from one another: some were more lopsided than others, some slanted more, some were longer, some were fatter. The colors were pure, clean. The glass was smooth, almost invisible. The liquid had not the faintest impurity in it.

“What?” said Littlepip, in disbelief. “What is it, then?”

“It’s a tool.”

“This,” she said, with a smirk, “this is too delicate to be a tool. What does it do?”

“It’s a thermometer.”

Littlepip raised her brow in confusion. “What?”

“Look closely at the tags.”

She looked at the golden plates hanging off of each bulb. “There are numbers!” she exclaimed.

“Yes. It tells the temperature.”

“How does it do that?”

“Earth pony power.”

She scowled at him. “Be more specific.”

“It uses a fundamental law of nature to provide something of use and convenience. As the temperature in the air changes, the temperature of the liquid changes. As the temperature of the liquid changes, its density changes. I’m not entirely sure what the liquid is, but it’s a liquid to which the densities at certain temperatures are known. Each bulb is individually blown to make sure they’re all the same mass and density. The densities of each are then adjusted to certain temperatures by the addition of the tags. As the liquid gets warmer, it becomes less dense. Each bulb’s density is slightly different, and it equals the density of the liquid at a certain temperature. The bulbs rise and fall depending on the density of the liquid, so you can tell the temperature that way.”

Littlepip held the thermometer vertically. “So how do I read it?”

“The bulb that is neutrally buoyant displays the correct temperature.”

She looked. One bulb was floating in the middle. She squinted and looked at its tag. “It’s sixty-eight degrees . . . ‘F.’” She looked at Copper Chromite with bemusement. What are degrees ‘F’?”

“Degrees Fahrenheit,” he responded. “It’s how they measured temperature in the old world.”

She cocked her head to one side. “What’s that in degrees Rankine?”

“Add four hundred sixty to it.”

She eyeballed the glass. “It’s five hundred twenty-eight degrees in here . . .” Her voice trailed off. Littlepip realized that she had no reference for that number. The Pip-Buck did not have a thermometer function. The number, five hundred twenty-eight, floated just like the bulbs; but, unlike the bulbs, the number floated in nothing, over nothing. They were just words, meaningless units, grounded to nothing.

“The refrigerator in the cafeteria is maintained at about four hundred ninety-five degrees,” said Copper Chromite, as if he had heard the unspoken qualm that she could not help but transmit through the room. “To cook a pizza, an oven has to be about eight hundred sixty degrees.”

“Huh,” she said, scratching her chin, “I . . . I could have sworn that it was much warmer in here.”

“I’ve got a million electronics running in here, in this small room, and no air conditioning, not to mention that the incandescent lightbulb gives off more heat than light. It’s much warmer in here than in the rest of the stable.”

Littlepip shivered.

“Actually,” said Copper Chromite, “funny story ’bout that. My grandfather gave it to me as a birthday present on the day I got my Pip-Buck. He said that he had this bag, you see, when he was wandering through the destroyed wasteland of Equestria. He said he collected things that grabbed his attention, the things that had color in the bleakness of the world around him. That was one of the things, he said. He said that when he stumbled into the stable, they made him get rid of his bag, but he said that he forced them, somehow, to let him keep that. I’ll tell you’”—Copper Chromite smiled—“grandpa was a cool guy, but he said the most ludicrous things at times.”

Littlepip smirked. “Really!” she blurted. “Out of everything your grandfather said, that is what you don’t believe?”

“Well, I mean,” he said, “for one thing, what saddlebag would be big enough to hold it? But, more importantly, just look at it: It’s flawless. It’s so delicate and perfect. There’s no way something like that could have survived out there. It would have been the first thing destroyed.”

She stood there holding the thermometer with her magic and cradling it with a foreleg for a long time. At length, she spoke: “Copper . . . do you ever feel that in the presence of something beautiful, something better than you, something you admire, can only aspire to but can never fully reach, you feel unworthy just to touch it, to look at it, to be in the same room as it?”

“Never in my life. Only recently. Before, I’d only heard about that feeling from others. Others told me that it was the most humbling feeling in the world, that it was the most wonderful feeling that one could ever aspire to; but to me, it sounded horrible. And when I finally did feel it, I realized I had been right: it’s a horrible feeling, feeling small and insignificant. But that . . . that was my fault.”

“I feel that way about this thermometer right now.” She staggered. “I can’t hold it anymore. I have to put it down.”

“Put it back, then.”

She turned toward the shelf for an instant—then turned back. She approached the table.

“What are you doing?” said Copper Chromite.

“I’m not going to put it on the shelf in the corner. It’s too good for that.”

“Put it back on the shelf, Littlepip.”

“No, Copper!” It was a plea. “No! I’m not going to put it where it’s going to collect dust. It needs to be right here, on your table, in the middle of the room, right in the direct beam of the lightbulb.”

“I did not invite you into my room so you could rearrange my things!” he yelled. “Put it back on the shelf!”

“But, Copper!” she shrieked, “on the shelf, it’s put away; it doesn’t shine like it’s supposed to! You can’t use it for anything—can you even see the tags at that distance? If it’s on the table, it’ll be the first thing you see when you enter the room. You’ll open the door and beauty will be there to greet you, and it will reflect the light from the lightbulb in every direction; it will be the most brilliant thing in the stable. On the shelf, it’s away; you can’t see it, and if you can’t see it, then nopony can see it, and—”

She stopped herself in mid-sentence. Copper Chromite’s expression was unchanged, but she saw in the reflection of his eyes the true meaning of her own sentence, and she saw in his previous sentences what he had been meaning to say, like suddenly seeing an addendum written in red ink in the margins of a statement.

“Alright,” she said, “I’ll put it back.”

“Thank you.”

As slowly as the first time, she raised the glass tube with her magic, guiding it on the right path away from her with her forehoof. Though she set it as gently as she could on the table, the bulbs shuddered against the wall of the glass, twisting and convulsing as if struck through their hearts. The clinking sounded like a cry. The sixty-eight degree bulb shook longer than the rest, turned forward and back, as if it were trying to fly to the warmness of the bulbs at the top but instead being sucked down by the coldness of the bulbs at the bottom. It twisted, unsure, fighting against a force that couldn’t be seen—then it stopped, settled out; and slowly, imperceptibly, it began to ooze downward until it settled soundlessly on the cold bulbs at the bottom. The whole process looked like that of a creature being drowned.

There were now no neutrally buoyant bulbs in the thermometer.

She looked back to Copper Chromite. He had not seemed to notice. He was staring at his computer screen.

She stepped behind him cautiously, quietly, and looked. From the top of the screen to the bottom showed the lines of his past commands. The very last line showed his current working directory. A small green rectangle sat on the last line, blinking as the computer waited for another order.

Copper Chromite began to type. Littlepip squinted and leaned closer to the screen. The rectangle moved as he typed and left behind it as a trail the command:


rm shittyrecording.flac


Copper Chromite slammed the enter key on his keyboard with such a fervor that the rattling of plastic nearly popped the caps lock key out of its socket. He sighed and leaned back in his chair. “That felt good,” he breathed.

“What did you just delete?” said Littlepip.

“The recording that Velvet Remedy made yesterday.”

Littlepip blinked as the question came to her. It was an innocent question, and she wasn’t quite sure where it had come from, but she knew the answer to it was the explanation of the feeling that had pulled at her for the past two days.

“Why was it called ‘shittyrecording’?” she asked.

Copper Chromite spun slowly in his chair toward Littlepip. Even before he established eye contact with her, she could see that he was scowling derisively. His mouth was slightly ajar.

“What?” said Littlepip.

“That is literally the dumbest question I’ve ever heard in my entire life.”

Littlepip groaned. “You know what I mean!”

“No, I don’t.”

“I mean . . . why was it shitty?”

“You liked it?”

“No, I didn’t say that. I asked why it was shitty.”

Copper Chromite closed his eyes. He bent his neck, put a forehoof to his head, and sighed. “Were you listening to the broadcast?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember when I had to go answer the door?”

“Yes. Who was that?”

He did not look at her when he spoke next. He stared absentmindedly at the screen of his Pip-Buck. “It was the overmare. Out of all the times for her to come! Well . . . she wanted me to read one of those speeches she writes for me—you know, the kind that I have to say every so often as a condition for my broadcasting. I mean, usually, I don’t mind; they’re innocuous enough, and I usually say them at the end of the show when nopony’s listening, and I say them as fast as possible. So she came to me and said that I had to say that—what I said before the recording started. I told her that that was fine, I didn’t mind, and I would do it after we recorded the song. But this time . . . but this time, for whatever reason, the overmare was adamant that I do it before I recorded the song. I was afraid of that. I wanted my speech—you remember the speech I made at the beginning, don’t you?—to lead into the song. Now, you see, I had told Velvet Remedy that the first song she was going to sing was ‘Unconquered,’ that that was the song I wanted to hear, that no other song could be the first to be played over the new frequency. I thought, at first, that she was going to ask me questions, what was it about that song that I liked, why I insisted that it be played first. I thought I’d have to explain and that she wouldn’t understand it. But she asked no questions and agreed instantly. I think she knew, ’Pip. I saw it in her eyes. It has to do with the song. Its spirit. But the thing about the spirit of  ‘Unconquered’ and the speeches that the overmare gets me to say . . . well, let’s just say that I didn’t want that speech to introduce that song. I told the overmare so, but she didn’t budge. There was a point where I was prone, pleading to her, grovelling at her feet, giving her permission to do anything to me as long as I didn’t have to lead into ‘Unconquered’ with the speech that she had given me.”

Copper Chromite sighed. “You know, I’ve never felt embarrassment before. But I felt it then at the feet of the overmare, even though it was on the threshold of this room, even though Velvet Remedy couldn’t see me, and even though none heard me but the overmare. I was making the most pathetic sounds imaginable. I swear . . . if anypony saw me or heard me then, I wouldn’t be able to show my face outside this room again. I can barely face them as it is, considering all that happened.”

“Wait,” said Littlepip. “You don’t . . . know?”

“Know what?” he said, raising his head.

Littlepip opened her mouth to say something but stopped herself abruptly. “No, nothing. Forget it. I don’t know what I was talking about.”

He lowered his head once more. “I listened to the overmare’s ultimatum: ‘Either you say this first or you say nothing again.’ At the time, I thought of the choice as this: Either I martyr myself, refuse to say it, lose the radio, save Velvet Remedy for herself, but lose her to me in the process; or I martyr her, say the speech, allow her to sing ‘Unconquered’ in the wake of that message, and allow her sublime voice to be mingled with my voice which is wretched. If I speak, I lose my pride, but I get to bring my machine into the world; if I say nothing, I destroy myself utterly. That was the choice I thought I were confronted with.

“I looked at the speech. I saw what it said, and I identified its root. I had to think quickly. I thought: It preaches selflessness and sacrifice. To fight that, why don’t I do something unbelievably selfish? So selfish, so horrible, so grotesque that it would cancel out what the speech would make me say in spirit. So I made the choice. I thought I would sacrifice Velvet Remedy to me. I would get what I wanted from her while leaving her empty. I wanted her voice for my channel. I thought I would have something from her in the end; I knew that it wouldn’t be satisfying, but I wanted to get something. I couldn’t bring myself to say no.

“When I was saying the speech, I hoped Velvet Remedy wasn’t smart enough to understand its implications or understand what I was doing. I was wrong. She understood it from the first word. Do you remember when I was talking about ‘it’ yesterday? I couldn’t find a word for that driving spirit, so I just called it ‘it.’ You wanted to know what happens when ‘it’ is killed? ‘It’ died for Velvet Remedy in that room over there yesterday. You heard perfectly what happens when ‘it’ dies.

“And when she first opened her mouth, I realized the horror: I realized that I had not understood the choice that the overmare had given me. I had thought that the overmare were giving me the choice between selfishness and sacrifice. I know she wanted me to sacrifice, and I chose the option that I thought were selfishness in rebellion to her. But don’t you see, Littlepip? ‘It’ wasn’t just killed for Velvet Remedy by my choice; ‘it’ was killed for me as well.

“I was right in thinking that the overmare was presenting me the choice between sacrifice and selfishness. I was wrong in evaluating the implications of the choices. The overmare knew! I didn’t think it at the time, but she knew well what she was asking me to do! The moment they played the first note of that song, I realized it:

“I had had two choices, both of which the overmare knew: I could either destroy my integrity, thereby destroying Velvet Remedy and eviscerating and mutilating everything that composed her: her integrity, her pride, her conviction, everything that made up her being, everything that made me want her. . . . And with all that gone, my channel, my creation becomes nothing more than a sort of hideous canopic jar in which I place her voice bloody, pungent, and covered in gore, all the more horrible for me to listen to because I know that it was I who had brought it to that state. I could have done all of that—or I could have refused to do that. I could have conceded to the overmare and immolated myself, my machine, and Velvet Remedy for the overmare’s purposes—to preach the value of immolation—or I could have said no. And I chose immolation.

“At the time, I thought that saying no would be letting her beat me—but it wouldn’t have been! I would’ve beaten her! And she knew! I didn’t think so at the time, but she did! She knew exactly how to frame the decision, just to benefit her! She knew exactly what she was asking me to decide between and exactly how to ask it to get the choice she wanted! And I had fallen right for it!

“When I came to this realization, I felt my mind burning. My thoughts refused to work for me. I was a stranger in my own body. I felt myself torn between reality and nonexistence as I held the contradictions in my head. What I was saying for the past four hours before I said your name on the radio earlier—that was the result of a brain dying.”

He pushed a button on his Pip-Buck. “And . . . that’s it,” he said.

“What’s it?” said Littlepip.

He chuckled sadly. “That’s the end of the speech I’d written. I wrote it before my brain burned out completely, so that I could read it again and again so that I wouldn’t forget.” He flashed the screen of his Pip-Buck to her. She saw the words and paragraphs, exactly as he had said them, on the display.

“Copper . . .” she whispered, at length, “can you give me a copy of that speech?”

He looked up at her with heavy eyes. “Why?” he gasped.

“I . . . because I, too, don’t want to forget. I’m worried I’ll forget.”

He shook his head. “No.”

She gasped, as if shot. “Why not?”

“Because I need to think practically here. I wrote it on my Pip-Buck; the file’s metadata has my name and the time of composition. They find you with this”—he gestured to the words on the screen—“they’re going to be after me when they’re done with you.”

“Then scrub it,” she said. “Remove the metadata. Make it a blank file. It’ll look like I’m carrying a ghost file. That way if I’m caught, only I’ll get in trouble.”

“That would raise more questions than answers. Who even knows what metadata is, let alone scrubbing? There are only a few ponies I can think of: me, you, the overmare; and, possibly, Doctor Shrink. You think, considering what the file contains, they won’t know whom it comes from?”

“But I’ll forget if you don’t give it to me.”

“I hope you don’t. But I refuse to martyr you, too. That’s why I came to you when I realized I could never speak to Velvet Remedy again. After what you said to me in the cafeteria, about my grandfather, I figured—” He stopped abruptly and glared at her. “Wait . . . now that I think about it . . . do you actually believe the stories about my grandfather?”

She groaned. “Oh, come on! You’re still on about that?”

“I want to know. I want to know if I’ve been wasting my time with you or not. I want to know if I was right in my decision of you. What do you think about my grandfather?”

“I think—”

“Wait. Before you speak, know that I won’t tolerate anything other than the truth. In my room, everything is exposed for what it is. Secrets run free in my room if nowhere else in the stable. What do you actually think? Don’t sugarcoat it for me, and don’t you dare check what you say for the sake of sparing my feelings. There’s nothing I hate more than ponies who try to manipulate my emotions for their own purposes.”

“I think . . .” said Littlepip, “I think . . .” She threw a forehoof up in the air with exasperation. “You honestly want to know what I think? I’ll tell you: I don’t know. There, I said it. Professor Rein says that you should never say that, that it’s a dishonest answer, that it shows signs of intellectual impotence, but that’s the truth: I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. Your grandfather says that he was a soldier, that he came from outside. But the overmare tells us he’s a liar. It’s her word against his. Whom am I to believe? Each is as convicted as the other, and each has as much to back it up as the other. I’d like to think that your grandfather came from outside; I’d like to think that we’re not stuck in here for the rest of our lives; I’d like to think that; it’d be nice; but I don’t know whom to believe. That’s the truth.”

She winced as she saw Copper Chromite’s face twist into incredulity. For a moment, she perceived it as an unwillingness to accept what had been said; that he thought it had been too harsh and too down-to-earth for him to take. She thought she had destroyed his fantasies and had thus destroyed him. But when he spoke next, she almost hit herself for the thought, as she remembered everything he had said before.

“That,” he said, calmly, “was not only the most truthful answer I’ve ever heard in my entire life, but it was also the most rational. Thank you. I’m glad to see that I was right all along.”

And then he added: “I like being right.”

She laughed. She expected him to join her, but she saw him looking at her with wide eyes—utterly open and relinquished.

“I had to tell this to somepony,” he said. “It was killing me having the premises unvoiced, to have them not listened to. I wanted to tell Velvet Remedy—I thought that she’d be the only one who’d understand—but after yesterday . . . remember when I said that I hadn’t known what it was like to feel dwarfed by something you admire? I now know what it feels like. She’s everything I admire and desire, everything that I think is good, whole, right! I love her! And after yesterday, I can’t even look at her anymore without feeling unworthy, like I’m small, a worm in the dirt looking up at the statue of a goddess. And I’m right to feel that way. Because I’ve failed my ideal; I tried to bring her down to the abject level I had sunk; and, thus, I became unfit for her by the very act of doing so, even if I failed. I became unworthy to look at her.”

There was a silence. In the stillness, Littlepip noticed that the lightbulb gave off an almost imperceptible hum. It whispered at a frequency almost too high to be heard; but it was, nonetheless, full and shrill. It demanded to be listened to. She couldn’t ignore it.

“I can’t do it anymore,” he murmured. “I’m leaving.”

Littlepip rubbed her ears with a hoof, in disbelief. “What did you say?”

“I said I’m leaving.”

“What . . . the radio?”

He looked up at her. He smiled and said: “Well . . . strictly speaking, yes, but . . . but that doesn’t really capture the entire essence of—”

Littlepip laughed. “Oh, Copper, don’t be silly.”

“Excuse me?”

“You can’t leave your job.”

Littlepip was taken aback by the manner in which Copper Chromite responded to her. He sat up straight, removing the slouch that she had thought were permanent in his spine. He parted his mane across his face so that he could be seen fully. His brow furrowed, and he said harshly, through his teeth: “And why not?” The sentence, combined with his pose, had the sound not of a question but of a challenge.

Littlepip was about to say the obvious response: because you’re not allowed to. But something inside her told her that Copper Chromite wasn’t going to accept that response. He looked like a stallion who would not take no for an answer.

She took a minute thinking about how to respond. She quickly ran a summary of her life in her head, trying to remember the times she had successfully gotten somepony to do something for her and how exactly she had gotten him to do it. She thought of the advice her mother had given her: To get somepony to do something, flatter him. Make it seem like he’s wonderful, and whatever it is you want him to do would be a great favor to you, that you owe something to him because of it. She thought about this; it was true. Everypony likes flattery. Tell him he’s great at what he does, she thought, and he’ll be too full of himself to even consider leaving. He stays, and I don’t have to give him the real answer, the answer that he wants but will not accept. It’s perfect.

“Well,” she said, smiling, “you can’t leave the radio. Because, if you leave, who will make us laugh when you’re gone?” She was quite proud of her solution. The second it left her mouth, she felt like she had answered in the best way possible.

It felt like a knife stab in her chest when she heard Copper Chromite’s forehoof slam on his table, rattling his keyboard with a frightening shudder, causing an ammeter to topple off the stack of boxes and crash to the ground with a sound like a punch. “No!” he said sharply. He stood up and faced her directly for the first time in the conversation. “How dare you!” he yelled, as loudly as he could. His voice made the walls of the room vibrate and the glass of the thermometer on the shelf across the room clink. “How dare you, you presumptuous interloper! How dare you have the audacity to suggest that I exist merely for your entertainment!”

His loose, slender muscles tensed in a second; it was as if a bolt of lightning had struck him erect. Sparks shot from his eyes; saliva coursed from his teeth with every sharp exhale he made. Even in the humid, hot atmosphere of the room, she could still see the clouds his nostrils expelled. His ears were perked up. His back legs kicked the chair he had been sitting on over and braced themselves with two loud stomps against the floor, firm, with a power that they did not seem capable of. Copper Chromite had been annoyed, irritated, aggravated, frustrated, angry even; she had never seen him in a rage. It was a terrible sight to behold.

He lunged toward her with a movement that his posture had suggested, a movement that she had wholly expected. She dove out of the way into a corner and covered her head with her hooves. Her first reaction was to yell to him, to apologize for the comment with everything in her heart, and to hope it mollified his oncoming onslaught. She was about to yell—but she stopped herself and said nothing. Though she wanted to scream as loudly as she could, she could not bring herself to. It seemed to her that it would be inappropriate; it seemed to her that it would be a further affront to him to apologize, to say that she hadn’t meant it. Because it wouldn’t be true, she thought, in that moment; when she had said it, she had meant it. His reaction now was not from a misunderstanding between him and her; he had correctly interpreted exactly what she had meant to say, and he was reacting. And, in the next moment, she realized that he was right. In his room, in his inviolable domain, to presume to speak for his purpose, made her, in Littlepip’s mind, completely in the wrong and made his reaction entirely appropriate. But more than that, she thought. She thought of her more egregious sin, which was to check her speech in his room, where honesty had been the standard, to say what she thought he wanted her to say rather than to say what she actually thought. Evil, she thought, that was pure evil, and I deserve the worst from him as retribution. And though she was afraid, she thought that whatever he decided to do to her in the next moment she deserved fully. She braced herself, preparing to accept his decision, like a disheveled and wretched prisoner awaiting the pronouncement of the judge’s sentence after egregious incriminating evidence has been put against her and a verdict of guilty has been returned.

All of this took place in the flash of a second.

Time froze. She peered out of the corner of her eye to behold his sentence. For a brief glance, a snapshot in time, she saw Copper Chromite moving toward the spot she had stood a minute before, charging headlong into it as if she were still standing there. She watched him pass through the spot she had been standing and continue on his way; but he moved through the spot not due to inertia but to emphasize the fact that nothing was there and that nothing had been there. It didn’t seem to her that he had even noticed that she had jumped out of the way.

And in a second, she understood: she understood that in his mind, she had been reduced to an entity of nonexistence. She saw that he did not regard her as something that was worth expending the energy of a retaliation on. He regarded her as an object in the room, as low as a scattered beer can—not even that, for a beer can has a presence, has mass, and serves a purpose. She understood that her punishment for her insolence was the removal of her presence from reality, to exist as nonexistence, to be a zero. She knew that she would continue to be nothing to him until he said otherwise. And she understood that this punishment was worse than any prison sentence, any method of execution, any torture that could possibly be inflicted upon her.

Copper Chromite, within the span of microseconds, crossed the room, threw his hoof around the handle of the door, and pulled it effortlessly. The door flew open as if blown by a hurricane.

Silver Dollar’s horn clipped the tip of Copper Chromite’s nose when the former’s owner fell into the room.

Silver Dollar landed at Copper Chromite’s feet, face first. He brought his face up, ready to say something, but his words failed him when he looked into the room. First, he made eye contact with Littlepip, curled up in the corner by the door. But, as if he too regarded her as a nonentity, he said nothing to her. He looked up not at Copper Chromite but at the air around him.

“Yellow,” breathed Silver Dollar.

“What the hell are you doing here?” yelled Copper Chromite.

Silver Dollar rose slowly to his feet, staring at the walls of the room. “Yellow,” he said again. “Why is your room yellow?”

“Why the hell are you here!”

Silver Dollar’s head came to, as if he had just noticed Copper Chromite’s presence. “Oh . . .” he stammered. “I was just passing through. You know, I never come around that much, and I was just goin’ for a little stroll, and I happened to be passing by your room and—”

“You were listening!”

“No . . . no I wasn’t. What are you talking about?”

“Listen,” said Copper Chromite, gesturing his forehoof in the manner of a professor making an argument, “do I come down to the kitchen and listen to you jerk off into the dishwasher?”

“I don’t . . . I don’t jerk off into . . . into the dishwasher . . .”

“The answer is no, I do not. So do not come down to my kitchen and listen to me jerk off into my dishwasher. Is that clear?”

Silver Dollar twisted his mouth into an expression of bemusement and disgust. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You’re playing the fool, I know. Silver Dollar’s an idiot. He thinks he smart because he’s convinced everypony that he’s an idiot. But he’s so stupid because he doesn’t realize that he’s become a proper idiot in the process. And this idiot has been listening to me! And the idiot has convinced himself that I’m an idiot too!”

Silver Dollar stepped closer to him. His voice took on a cautious, deliberate tone. In any other context, Littlepip would have thought that it were respectable. “Copper,” said Silver Dollar, as if he were a hostage negotiator, “listen closely to yourself. Do you even hear the things that are coming out of your mouth? You need to take a breath and just calm down, okay?”

It looked like an indistinct blur from her position. She saw Copper Chromite make a fast, defined, calculated—above all, disinterested and cold—motion with his hoof. She heard a scream; and in the next moment, Silver Dollar was on the ground again, his mouth open, his eyes wide in disbelief, blood coming from his nose.

“You hit me!” he shrieked.

“Silver Dollar,” said Copper Chromite, as if he had absorbed his victim’s cool tone and replaced it with his frenzied one, “do not take it upon yourself to come down to my room and dictate to me how I will conduct myself. You will not presume to speak for me or for my best interests under any circumstances.”

“You . . . hit me!” The vacillation of his voice was evident more of shock than of pain.

“If you come here again, I will smash my oscilloscope over your head.”

Silver Dollar tried to stagger to his feet. Copper Chromite pushed him back down, rolled him with his forehoof across the threshold of the room, and slammed the door behind him before he had a chance to retaliate.

He stood with his body against the door, his eyes closed, his breaths heavy, his jaw strained in an effort to keep his teeth together. He remained thus for a minute.

“Copper . . .” said Littlepip.

He didn’t respond. He didn’t look at her reaction. His ears didn’t even twitch when he should have heard her voice. She understood: she had not been permitted back into existence yet.

In a flash, Copper Chromite threw open the door again.

Silver Dollar was ten yards from the door, his head leaned in its direction, his ear forward. When he saw Copper Chromite, he turned tail and took off at a sprint down the hallway.

Copper Chromite, his whole body channeled for the single purpose, reached with a foreleg to the broken oscilloscope on the table beside the door and lifted it swiftly. He pulled it toward him with such an ease that it seemed as if his will negated the presence of the mass. The force with which he hurled the oscilloscope down the hallway could only be rivaled by a titan.

The sound of rushing air was audible as the oscilloscope cut its inexorable path through space, tracing a perfectly straight line on its trajectory. Silver Dollar was still running; he had not slowed, but from Littlepip’s perspective, with him and the oscilloscope simultaneously in her vision, Silver Dollar appeared to be pulled back, dwarfed and restrained by the speed of the oscilloscope. At the ultimate moment, it began to arc into that recognizable parabola. It fell short of Silver Dollar’s head and landed on the ground just before his back heels. Dozens of small pieces broke off, and the oscilloscope’s center of mass slammed upon the hard tiles of the floor, sending a deafening blast echoing through the hallway like that of a gunshot.

A smaller piece broke off and shot at an impossible speed toward Silver Dollar, continuing the chase. Littlepip saw it slice against his heels. Silver Dollar let out a sharp yelp; he stumbled, almost fell, but quickly regained his foothold. He disappeared around the corner a second later.

Copper Chromite seemed indifferent. Littlepip wasn’t sure that he had even watched the path of the oscilloscope. He closed the door disinterestedly.

Littlepip said nothing.

Copper Chromite picked up the knocked-over chair and sat down upon it in front of his desk, his back turned to her. Littlepip sat up in awe as she watched him work. With his mouth and his forelegs, he collected the loose, seemingly unrelated wires that lay strewn on his desk, but he not once took his eyes off the box with the hundred holes. He tossed the wires around with the ease of a pianist who knows his work by touch alone. Their chaos and entanglement seemed to mean nothing to him. In a heartbeat, he had organized them in a manner which appeared to Littlepip as meaningless as the order in which they had been left before he had touched them. He then set his body into movement, yanking wires from their holes, putting them into different jacks, plugging in new ones, moving to reach the back of boxes. He moved with just as much motion as was required, as if every gesture had been calculated long before, had been planned and outlined just like a circuit diagram. Littlepip got up and looked at his face. His eyes were immersed in concentration, but they contained no amount of stress. His breathing was paced and regular, his movements firm but easy, as he made new connections and destroyed old ones with a rapidity and will rivaling that of a god creating a world. And in his intransigent countenance, Littlepip understood what devotion looked like. The same mind and the same body that had thrown the oscilloscope in a rage was now building a circuit just as efficiently as it had picked up the cudgel, the same ability now channeled for the purposes of creation after being reserved momentarily for destruction—two diametrically opposed methods of operation, both acting to and for the same purpose, turned at an instant by the implacable will of his mind.

When he was done, he flipped a switch and tapped the microphone with his hoof. He said, clearly and slowly, as if he were just reading the news of the day: “Attention, attention Stable 2. This is Copper Chromite. I need to make an announcement regarding something very important. Silver Dollar, a certain unicorn with whom you live, is not what he pretends to be. An encounter I just had with him proves this unequivocally. He’s a manipulator, a deceiver, and a mountebank. And when I looked into his eyes, I saw what true evil was: the liar. Fear not the murderer, the armed robber, the assaulter, for they hold no pretenses, for they never try to hide their malicious intent. Fear the deceiver, that parasite that slides into your entrails under the guise of sustenance and eats you from within, day after day after day, draining your blood until you are nothing more than a carcass before it moves on to its next prey. That is the most insidious of the destroyers. That is what you must fight. How to fight it? Pursue nothing but the truth. That is all.”

He punched the switch; the movement had as much finality as the period at the end of a sentence and as much irrefutability as the quod erat demonstrandum at the end of a proof.

He spun his chair around to look at Littlepip. He said nothing. His posture and glare conveyed the words of a damning censure. Littlepip pinned her ears. She did not speak. She knew that she no longer had any right to speak in his presence, not even if her words were to take the form of an apology, an apology which she had no right to give and he no right to accept.

“I’m not mad at you,” he said, at length. “Because, a moment ago, you weren’t speaking as Littlepip. You were speaking as the overmare. No, worse—and yet, the same: you were speaking as Stable 2.”

She said nothing.

He went on: “Stable 2 looks to me to make them laugh. It’s always: ‘Say something funny, Copper,’ or ‘Do the voice, Copper,’ or ‘Tell a joke, Copper,’ ‘That Copper Chromite is such a joker.’ They’ve pressured me into a role I don’t desire for myself. Littlepip, I don’t want to be known as the funny guy.”

The deep, solemn silence after his words was deliberate on his part. He meant it as a command to speak. She said: “That’s fine. I understand. But . . . may I ask a question?”

“Go on.”

“What’s wrong with being the funny guy?”

Copper Chromite sat up straight. “Absolutely nothing. But I’m not him. I don’t want to be him.”

And he added: “And that’s why I’m leaving Stable 2.”

She tried to restrain herself, but she couldn’t help bursting into laughter. Every time her abdominal muscles contracted during the throes of these spasms which took the form of laughs, it felt like the admission of an intellectual guilt she had so long tried to hide. “Come again?” she said.

“I’m leaving Stable 2,” he said again, just as solemnly as the first time.

“What do you mean ‘leaving Stable 2’?”

“I mean that right now, I’m in Stable 2. And tomorrow, I won’t be in Stable 2.”

“What do you mean?”

“What exactly is so difficult to understand? I’m leaving the stable.”

“But! . . . but! . . .” she sputtered, reflexively, as if she had not consciously processed what he said and were speaking automatically, “but you can’t leave!”

“Why not?”

“Because . . . because nopony leaves the stable!”

“That’s begging the question.”

Littlepip was speechless. At the sound of the words “I’m leaving Stable 2,” her conscious mind had immediately surrendered its responsibilities. A multitude of arguments against the assertion, without her volition, had instantly lined up in the queue in her brain to exit through her mouth. In the brief amount of time that she was able to examine them, she concluded that each was irrefutable, that each one was stronger and more convincing than the last. She had expected the one she had just spoken to decimate him and his thought; and the train had halted in shock, as if it had just encountered a mountain, when he had torn apart the argument with a mere four words. Now, she could only watch as each passed by one by one, out of her control, with a hope that one would destroy him, with a vague, almost inaudible desire that they wouldn’t.

“How will you get out?” she asked.

“Through the door,” he replied.

“But the door doesn’t even open!”

“Doors, by definition, open. If they don’t open, then they’re not doors, they’re walls.”

“But it’s probably locked.”

“It is.”

“Well, then, I guess you’ll have to stay.”

“I’ve checked it. It uses the same kind of lock that the default security system on my computer uses. It would be trivial to crack.”

“But it’s probably alarmed.”

“It is.”

“Can you crack that?”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to turn that off.”

“Then you’ll be caught.”

He shook his head. “By the time they figure out what’s going on, by the time the alarms get to them and they run downstairs, the door will be open and I’ll be long gone. An alarm is nothing but a loud sound. It’s an argument by intimidation—scary, threatening, but impotent.”

“And then?”

“And then I’ll be outside.”

“The sun will burn you alive!”

“It didn’t burn my grandfather. It didn’t burn those before him. It won’t burn me.”

“But . . . radiation!”

“What about radiation?”

“There’s radiation!”

“So?”

“Do you have a radiation suit?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll get vaporized!”

“Radiation emanates from point sources. Taking a single step back from that point source is the protective equivalent of putting one foot of lead between you and it.”

“What will you do for food?”

“I’ve packed a substantial amount.”

“But you’ll run out!”

“Then I’ll grow some more.”

“But you don’t know how!”

“Then I’ll learn.”

“There are probably dangerous creatures out there!”

“If there are, it means that the outside world isn’t as hostile to life as we think it is. If there are, I’ll fight them.”

“With what?”

“With weapons.”

“Do you have weapons?”

“No.”

“Where will you get them?”

“I’ll make them.”

“You don’t know how!”

“I’ll learn.”

She stared at him with her mouth wide open. “You’re insane!”

“Any more insane than staying in this cave, drinking beer by myself, eating the same processed foods every day, getting skinnier and more sickly by the minute, spouting nonsense day in and day out, working for I-don’t-know-what-or-whom, purposelessly building and rebuilding circuits, dying in the same place and in the same manner I was born, wondering what could have been, wondering if it could have been any different?”

She groaned with frustration. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked.

“This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, for my entire life, even. I couldn’t bring myself to just get up and leave. I’ve faced myself with your line of questioning time and time again, and it’s always deterred me. But after yesterday, I showed what happens when one adopts a moral code that bases itself purely on uncertainty. And I won’t let that happen to me again.”

He stood up and took a step toward her. His body obstructed Littlepip’s view of the lightbulb in the back of the room. The dust in the air became the vessel of deliverance for the rays of light. They shot in oblong spears around his limbs, illuminating everything in the room but his countenance. He stood not as a body but as a silhouette. His head was angled slightly downward, and Littlepip only realized now that she was slouching with lethargy—no, she thought, more like slouching under the weight of a pressure I’m too weak to support. Littlepip thought that if any other were in her position, he would have thought that Copper Chromite appeared like a gargoyle cast in shadow, a dark guardian that protects something so beautiful that the gargoyle in its wretchedness is forbidden to bask in that beauty lest it be seen for what it is. But she thought he looked like an electrical generator, and his ideas were the potential energy, and the periodic moving of his jaw to allow the passage of words expressing those ideas was the turbine. And she thought that that word carried more weight than that of gargoyle: The electrical generator is a guardian, but it is worthy of the thing it protects; it protects life, work, and ability, removing the darkness that puts a premature end to work, and it is that work and that life which made such a guardian as an electrical generator possible in the first place. The electrical generator watched over those who worked, and those who worked watched over it, one in one moment the guardian, in the next the guarded. A symbiosis of mutual gain, a relationship in which none is better than the other, in which the weak does not survive by leaching the strong, where the strong does not flourish by stamping out the weak—a relationship of supreme admiration.

“Did I ever tell you how and why I became the radio operator?” he said. Littlepip had not said a word of her thoughts, but she knew from his rigid posture, evident in which the conscious thought to not move, that he had heard it regardless. “When I was little, I read a book. In that book, the hero finds the world around him destroyed by evil that he alone had recognized only too clearly. He finds himself the only survivor left in the bleak desolate world. He finds a radio tower, spends a day climbing to its summit, and switches it on. It was the tallest tower in the world, the most powerful broadcasting tower that had ever been built. It operated on a single frequency. There were other frequencies, but they only jumped up intermittently: the cries of ghosts and phantoms in the darkness, ramblings of those who had lost their minds, the sound of gunfire, meaningless noises, messages where words proceeded one after the other without connection. The radio tower he’s in is powerful, powerful enough to force away all the ghost signals. If there were any left, they had no choice but to listen. He talks. He talks for three hours. What does he say? He says why the world was destroyed and why it had been avoidable. He describes what the world could have been. He describes what it had become. He describes what had been lost. He describes what could have been gained. He goes from the beautiful, what should have been, and then goes to how it was destroyed. But, despite all this, he’s not angry. He ascribes no blame. He outlines everything like an argument, demonstrating why one naturally followed because of the event preceding it. At the end, he announces the location of his beacon—remember when I asked you about wave theory? Waves are energy. They can be neither created nor destroyed. Once a radio broadcasts a sound wave, it goes on forever, out into space, to be picked up by whoever wants to whenever he pleases. So the hero gives the location of the broadcast tower not as a desperate cry for help but as a record of a history of the world, to alert any out there—aliens, perhaps—that the creatures of the planet had died knowing what had killed them, that they had not died ignorant, that they wished none others to die in ignorance, so they left the message for others to find. He goes to sleep that night. When he wakes up, he finds a crowd around the bottom of the antenna—survivors, just like him. From far and wide, they rally around his tower. It serves as a beacon of hope for the future, a sign to weary travelers who view it in the distance as a symbol of salvation.

“Ever since I read that story, I wanted to be a radio operator. I wanted to talk for three hours like he did and be listened to. When we had to do that aptitude test, I chose not what I thought to be the right answer but the answers I thought they were looking for in an electrical engineer. When the results came in, when I found that I was to be the electrical engineer, I thought that there were nothing I could desire more in life. But when I got older, when I finally took control of the radio, I found that I was gagged. I found my listeners deaf. I was not the hero who had climbed to the top of the tallest tower in the world; I was a rambler who filled the air with nothingness. I have thought about leaving the stable every single day since I realized this.

“If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to leave Stable 2. I’m going to find the radio tower, wherever it is. I’ll climb to the top of it. If it’s weak, I’ll boost the signal. If it only covers a few frequencies, I’ll force my way into every single one—it’s not as difficult as you’d think. And then when that’s done, when I’m sure that I can be heard by all those who are still alive, I will talk for three hours. I will hijack the other frequencies, even Stable 2’s. The overmare won’t be able to turn me off. If there’s any still alive and if they have anything that can pick up a radio signal, they’ll have to listen to me; they won’t have a choice. I have the speech on my Pip-Buck. I’ve been writing it ever since I had even the vaguest idea of what I’ve wanted to say. But it’s the funniest thing: though the words change as I get older, though I always find more eloquent ways to express them, the message behind it is the same as when I was little.”

When Littlepip spoke next, her voice was neither belligerent nor hysterical. He had eradicated argument after argument, all of which had appeared irrefutable. Her bestial usurper, whatever it was that had forced her consciousness away and had replaced it with the line of arguments that it had just fired and missed, had become downcast, upset after this failure. She listed off the remaining ones, one by one, saying them as if she were ashamed:

“You don’t need to leave the stable to talk for three hours. You talk for eight hours a day, and we listen to you. You talked for four hours straight this morning.”

“Do you honestly believe that in a single word during those four hours this morning there was anything? Do you believe that anything I’ve ever said on the radio was anything? That speech I made yesterday before Velvet Remedy, possibly. For the past hour and a half you’ve been here, I’ve spoken more than I’ve ever said during my thousands of hours on the radio.”

“I want to help you, Copper. I really do. But think about it for a second. Just think. You’re idealistic. That’s fine. But the world is more complicated than that. The world is not a children’s storybook where the hero finds all the means to his end at his disposal. Maybe you are the hero; you probably are. But our world is more cruel than that. It took away all your means. You put it better than any could, yesterday: ‘What’s outside? Nothing. It’s all gone. Kaboom.’ There’s nothing outside. Your radio tower isn’t there, Copper. Nothing is. Everything’s destroyed. And, I’m sorry to say, I think that a little bit of metal designed to reflect and transmit signals would be one of the first things destroyed.”

The electrical generator did not stir. She saw no gesture of recognition. He turned to his table after her words, but the movement was not like a wounded soldier turning away; it was the movement of volition, a gesture made for no other purpose than to fulfill a desire.

“Come closer,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

He began to sift through the papers that were spread out over his desk. When he turned over one, Littlepip saw a small white square, too small to be a letter-sized paper and too small to be a postcard. Copper Chromite slid his hoof under it and overturned the paper as if it were a burger on a grill. “Canterlot,” he said. He continued looking through the papers, as if he had found nothing.

Littlepip craned her neck. It was a small, glossy photograph. It was black-and-white, but it was sharp. It was a picture of a landscape—filled with rubble, uprooted trees, decaying vehicles; and a garbage bag being blown by the wind, the picture holding it frozen in midair, giving the picture the atmosphere of a suspension of time, as if it were depicting a calamity so horrible that time refused to press on and allow the bag to land, in fear of the pain that would come next.

Another picture fell down next to it. “Fillydelphia,” she heard him say.

She saw more rubble. The bones of skyscrapers looked no more significant than the stripped trees around them. A poster was falling from its billboard; the only visible part of it was a wide row of teeth—the remnant of a smile.

Another picture fell down. “Los Pegasus.” Then another. “The outskirts of Ponyville.” Another. “Manehattan.” “Baltimare.” “Vanhoover.” “Tall Tale.” “The Badlands.”

He let a few minutes elapse while Littlepip looked at the photos. “Notice anything singular?” he said, at length.

“I don’t . . . think so,” she said.

“What do all these picture have in common?” he asked.

She shook her head. “The only thing I see is abject desolation.”

“No,” he said. “Look harder.”

Littlepip squinted. She looked at the skyscrapers. They were still standing in a way, she thought, but she shook her head again. Those were not intact. No words could be construed to even suggest that they were still what they used to be. She feared that Copper Chromite would reference those. If he does, she thought, I’ll stay silent and bow my head reverently. I’ll effect the proper manner one would at a funeral.

“I don’t see anything,” she said.

Copper Chromite pressed his hoof to the corner of the picture of Canterlot. “What’s that?” he asked.

She looked closer. A black line shot up in the sky where his hoof pointed. It was thinner than a stick, completely black and shapeless, almost two-dimensional. “I don’t know,” she said. “It looks like a smudge on the film, or . . .”

“What’s that?” he said, pointing to a distance in the picture of Fillydelphia.

It was one of the skyscrapers she had not given any attention to. It was spindly, like the body of a creature that has starved to death. But it retained its form, and though she didn’t know what purpose it served, it suggested that it had served a purpose, unlike the appearance of every other building around it. “It’s the bones of some building or other,” she said.

“What’s that?” he said, pointing to the Ponyville picture.

It was a large, round dish. “Oh!” she said. “That looks like some sort of military base, a center of operations, or a communication center . . .”

“What’s that?” he said, pointing to a building in the picture of Baltimare.

“The headquarters of a news organization.”

“What’s that thing on the top of it?”

“It’s how they received their information, how they knew what was going on in the world so they could write about it the next day . . .”

“What’s that?” He pointed to a building in the picture of Vanhoover.

“A nightclub. No, not a nightclub, but a place that plays loud music—it plays music to the whole world.”

“What’s that?” he said, pointing back to the extrusion in the first picture.

Littlepip looked again. She could not be mistaken now. “It’s a radio tower,” she said.

“What’s that?” he said, pointing to the spindly beams in the second picture again.

“A radio tower.”

“What’s that?” He pointed to the dish in the third picture.

“Also a radio tower.”

He turned to look at her. “Do you understand now?”

She stared at him wide-eyed, in disbelief. It wasn’t possible, she thought. This will, this thought, this planning, this power of acute discrimination—it wasn’t possible in a single creature.

“Everything in those pictures is destroyed,” he said, “except the radio towers. I don’t know what they built those things out of; but whatever it is, it’s invulnerable. It’s inviolable. They’re still there, Littlepip. If nothing else exists, the radio towers are there. Do you see that glare on the top? The light is flashing. They still have power. Something is giving them power. I don’t know what, but I don’t care. And I wouldn’t expect anything different. This is the proof of what I’ve been thinking my entire life: The radio is indestructible. It’s just as much a force of nature as the wind, the rain, or the sun. Can all the evil in the world destroy the sun? Evidently not. It allowed the photographer to take these, whoever he is. Evil can’t destroy the radio any more than it can destroy the sun. But it recognizes the radio as a threat; if the radio knew what it was, if the radio knew what it could be, evil would be exposed; evil would be shown as the impotence that it is. But evil knows the radio’s weakness: Taken by itself, the radio is an inanimate object. It needs a driver. There are good radio drivers and bad radio drivers, and the radio is only as good as its driver. And evil knows that it’s trivial to turn a good driver into a bad one, especially if the driver possess no convictions or is uncertain in himself in any way. There is a radio tower somewhere nearby; I’m sure of it. At night, I turn on my Pip-Buck slightly off my frequency and I hear white noise—a random signal, the chaotic bouncing of waves lost, trying to find their way home. But when I switch my Pip-Buck’s tuner to the frequencies outside, I hear pink noise—and that’s not random. You remember, yesterday, don’t you? I played you the white noise and the pink noise. The first one was white noise—you’re right; white noise is caustic and grating. But the second thing I played to you was pink noise. That’s different. It’s peaceful. I play it to help me fall asleep; I can’t imagine falling asleep without pink noise. Pink noise indicates the presence something guiding, something pushing those lost waves somewhere. It’s the noise of the outside. It’s fractured, but it’s there. It just needs to be nurtured.”

“Copper, I don’t believe that the radio tower still is operating at the exact strength it had before the war. Even if it’s still standing, even if it still has broadcasting capabilities, it’s probably in disarray. It won’t transmit like it used to.”

“Probably. But I’ll fix it.”

She groaned. “It’s one thing to work and fix the stable’s radio; it’s another thing, a completely different thing, to work a national broadcast tower.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“The skills aren’t transferable. You don’t know how to work a broadcast tower.”

“Then I’ll learn.”

“Stop!” she screamed. She pinned her ears.

“Stop what?”

“Stop saying that!”

“Stop saying what?”

“‘I’ll learn.’ That’s all you say! ‘I’ll learn. I’ll learn. I’ll learn.’ You can’t just say that as a rebuttal to any difficulty you encounter! It doesn’t work like that!”

“Why not?”

“It . . . it just doesn’t!”

“Why doesn’t it?”

Her usurper was stripped naked. It had nothing left to give. She felt it falling, relinquishing its wrongful position. She felt her consciousness coming back in a surge—but the usurper lashed out in a supreme effort at her memories, rifling through them for anything it could use in an ultimate attempt to abridge that what she did not want to admit to herself that she wanted.

She remembered her own insolence when she was little. She remembered always wanting to do something that she was told she was forbidden to do. She remembered the fights with her mother. One day, her mother had told her her final argument, and Littlepip had been defeated. She saw her mother’s argument as unbeatable, immune to logic, rebuttals, and reason. And it had stood for her. She thought it would stand for Copper Chromite.

Using the exact words her mother had used, but modifying them for the occasion, she said: “You know, Copper, sometimes we don’t like the cards we’re dealt. Sometimes we want a do-over. Sometimes we want to fold. We look at others, and we ask why we couldn’t be born as talented, as pretty, as smart, or as able as them. They can do things that we can’t. Why can’t I do these things? And that’s fine. It’s fine to think that. We’re all unsatisfied. Nopony is happy with the things he has. We always want more. That’s just a part of life, being constantly unsatisfied. But there comes a point in every pony’s life when he realizes he’s stuck with how he is. He’ll look at back at all the times he was unhappy, unsatisfied. He’ll realize that much of his dissatisfaction comes from him not knowing why he was dissatisfied. But then he’ll realize that there are just some things he’ll never be able to get, that others will but he will not. But if he just stops thinking about it, he’ll eventually find his place, find what he does, and the only thing he can do is to do it as nobly as possible. He has a position he’s in. We all have a position to fill. All unhappiness comes from trying to rise from that position. Unhappiness is Celestia punishing us for saying we know better than Her. Celestia places us in our roles as She sees fit. Who are we to question Her judgment? Fighting your destiny means fighting Her. Who are you to question Her judgment? Who are you to question the destiny that She, in Her benevolence and omnipotence, laid out for Copper Chromite?”

He said, simply, without insolence: “I’m Copper Chromite.”

She blinked. “What?”

He laughed. “You’re out of bromides to spout, ’Pip. You’ve saved the best—or, rather, I should say the worst—for last. That last one reveals all. It reveals the philosophy which the stable has adopted. And it is a sewer of a philosophy; it is that philosophy from which all your other arguments before it were derived. The words before it are the quagmire of the sewer: they look solid, but they yield underfoot, as I’ve just shown you.”

“You . . . don’t believe . . .”

“I reject your philosophy, solely based on the reason that I’ve followed it to the letter and it has brought me no happiness. Something was lacking.”

“What do you believe in?”

“The mind comes into the world as a blank slate.”

The words landed like the breaking of glass on her ear. “What?” she said; it voiced more the desire to make sure she wasn’t deaf than the desire for clarification.

“It is the polar opposite of what you preach. You can say that we are born with what we have, with everything that we’ll ever have, that we fill our positions from the moment we’re born, that we’re programmed from birth to execute a routine action for something of which it is not possible to have any knowledge, that any action we attempt to do otherwise will necessarily fail since it goes against our programming, that we walk a path that has already been charted and planned before us, that we have a ‘destiny’; or you can say that you’re born as a blank slate, that your mind is completely void of any amount of knowledge, ability, or experience when you’re born, that your mind is a sponge from birth, a sponge that is good for nothing but only to soak up reality, that everything must be acquired—from learning how to walk to learning how to work a radio—that all knowledge must be learned, that all skills must be grown by your own volition and work, that your life is nothing from the beginning and only becomes what you make of it. I see the latter possibility as self-evidently true. The word talent has no meaning for me. I wasn’t born knowing how to build a circuit or how to wire a radio. I had to learn it. Do you see now why the answer ‘I’ll learn it’ is so easy for me to say but so difficult for you to hear? Now you know. I don’t know how to work a national broadcast tower. When I was born, I also didn’t know how to talk. And I will learn how to work a national broadcast tower just as I learned how to talk.”

“But your cutie mark,” she said, the last gasp of breath from a dying creature. “It’s different for all. We have destinies to fill. We all have our special talents. If you try to do something else, you fail because you weren’t meant for it.”

Copper Chromite smiled. “You want to talk about that? It’s the strongest evidence for the blank slate. Are you born with your cutie mark, Littlepip? Are you a Pip-Buck repair technician before you can eat without drooling on yourself? Do you know who you are and what you’ll become before you can even speak? No, you don’t. You are born as a blank slate. You have to learn everything for yourself. All skills have to be acquired, and none can help you with that but you. A cutie mark is earned, not given. If it were given, you’d be born with it.”

She only now just noticed his. At a glance, it looked like nothing, one of those floating phantoms in the corner of one’s eye. At a closer look, it looked like somepony had drawn with a permanent marker on his haunch. It was a black line. At its start, it ran straight from nowhere; in the middle, it was jagged, coursing up, then down, then up again, a jagged line—but a sharp jagged, as if it had been drawn with a purpose, not a haphazard jagged like the drawing of a child—and at the end, it ran straight for a distance equal to that with which it had started straight.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s an electrical resistor,” he said.

“I know.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“I wanted to hear it from you.”

He bowed his head, and she knew that it was not out of servile deference nor out of a respect for her but a sign that he had said everything and that she was to ask no more questions. She didn’t. She had no more. She had taken enough from him. It was time for her to give back. She didn’t have much to give, but she hoped it would be enough.

“Copper,” she said, “I have a secret. A big secret. I’ve never told anypony this, because . . . because I thought I were the only one. But after everything you’ve said, I think you’re the same way and you’ll understand. You’ll understand, won’t you?”

“I’ll try,” he said. “What is it?”

Littlepip took a deep breath. “Well, you see, I work in a hallway downstairs. And the walls are pretty boring to look at. There is one poster. It is one of Stable-Tec’s ones, you know? And it looks so runny, messy, a gooey fluid, not even paper . . .”

“Like gallium?” said Copper Chromite.

“It’s like—yes!” said Littlepip. “Yes, like gallium! How did you know?”

He shrugged. “That’s how I think of it. It’s gallium: it calls itself a metal; it has the appearance of a metal; but under pressure, heat, it holds up to nothing.”

“And then you started to put up Velvet Remedy’s posters . . .”

“Ah! Thanks for reminding me. I’ve got to take those down before I go. It’s going to kill me, looking at her, looking at that broken promise, tearing her away. But I have to do it. That’s the only integrity I have left to me: to be able to look her in the eye and admit openly that I failed her.”

“And there’s one of her right next to the poster—the gallium. I have the gallium and her in front of me. And I . . . I . . .”

“What?”

“I like the poster of her better.”

Copper Chromite laughed. “After all that I’ve said, you’d be hesitant to tell me that?”

“Do you feel the same way?”

“Do you even need to ask me that question? Of course I do—well, did, anyway. I had a thousand of her posters plastered all around this room before what happened yesterday. That one that you’re describing where you work—that was a mistake on my part. I didn’t want her anywhere near the gallium. Not because the gallium would run off onto her but because she was too good for it. What do you associate her poster with? You associate Stable-Tec’s with gallium. Is there a metal you associate her with?”

“No. I just think of her as electricity.”

“I think of her as tungsten.”

“Yes . . .” said Littlepip, her eyes widening, her breathing slowing, “yes, she’s tungsten. She can’t be anything else.”

Copper Chromite laughed. “A while back,” he said, “I had the two posters in front of me. I pressed my left hoof to Velvet Remedy and my right hoof to the Stable-Tec poster. After a few seconds, I felt nothing underneath my right hoof. But my left hoof just grew hotter and hotter and hotter—until I had to take it off, convinced that I was burned. And that makes sense: she’s tungsten, and Stable-Tec’s gallium. Gallium is the first metal to melt. Tungsten is the last. I love tungsten. I love her. And I don’t dish out my admiration and love simply because somepony happens to be the same species as me, contrary to what Stable-Tec and the overmare want me to do. There are virtues that I see desirable, a reflection of how I try to be, something I need to make myself worthy of—and I see that in Velvet Remedy. That’s why I admire and love her and nopony else. If I held a bomb and were forced to have it kill her or blow up the entirety of the stable but sparing her, I’d blow up the stable without a second thought.”

“I would, too,” Littlepip blurted. She slapped herself in the face with a forehoof. “Oh, but that’s horrible! See, we shouldn’t say that, even if we feel it. We shouldn’t think that! That’s not what anypony else thinks. It’s a betrayal to the stable and all that we stand for, all that which helps us survive.”

“Not what anypony else thinks?” He laughed again. “Whom are you kidding, ’Pip? Everypony thinks that way. Even the overmare would if you asked her to think hard enough about it. Of course, she never would.”

“Everypony thinks that way about Velvet Remedy?”

“No. Everypony has something that they admire, value, and desire. There’s something that everypony has that they wouldn’t immolate, destroy, or sacrifice for anything else in existence. There are some things that you can’t sacrifice. That unwillingness to compromise those things is what gives an individual integrity. When you compromise them, you destroy your integrity. And with no more integrity, you become as abject as those you tried to appease. What are those things called, those things that define who you are, those things that if you compromise you destroy yourself? Principles, Littlepip. They’re called principles. Principles define who you are and allow you to pick your values. And these values take many different forms: maybe it’s work from which one derives pride; maybe it’s happiness through integrity—a simple, wonderful thing!—or maybe it’s happiness at being worthy of one’s own admiration and love. But it’s a precarious pyramid, Littlepip. Violate a value, you violate your principles, and you violate yourself by corollary. Violate yourself and you end up losing that value by the very act. I did that, and I already told you who was irrevocably lost to me in the process: she whom I love. And that is just. After everything that’s happened, that’s the way it should be.” He sighed plaintively.

She gasped. “Oh, but how can that be? We’ve always been told that our principles and values are the same. Not just from the overmare; I’ve never heard anypony but you speak differently. Not even Velvet Remedy. Maybe that’s why you feel unworthy for her and why she won’t love you—because you’re too different. If I were to go to the cafeteria now and propose the dilemma you just said to everypony there, the dilemma about the bomb, each one, even Velvet Remedy, would say to save the stable and that any answer otherwise would be immoral.”

“Well,” said Copper Chromite, rolling his eyes, “of course they would say that. Each one of them is divided. They have their insides telling them what’s right, and the outside—Stable-Tec, the overmare, all their neighbors—telling them that what they feel on the inside is wrong. And then it’s a big act, pretending you’re moral when you feel immoral, a constant battle to keep what’s inside down and to digest the poison from the outside. Even Velvet Remedy, if I were to ask her, would tell me that I’m wrong, that the overmare’s right. But she wouldn’t say it for the same reason as everypony else; she, unlike me, knows how to keep her mouth shut and recognizes the futility of martyrdom. And I know it’s futile, and I know she’s right, but I . . . I can’t sit and do nothing and say nothing! To look around me and see that not one has the rectitude to analyze the situation, analyze how he feels, what he’s told, realize that what he feels is proper, what he’s told is destructive, and say no! Nopony has the rectitude but me and her, but she’s gone to me now. And that’s why I’ll be gone tonight.”

“The alarm will sound?”

“Yes. I don’t know what it will sound like nor do I know how loud it will be. I imagine it will be scary. But you won’t have to be scared. It’ll blare; you’ll wake up and hear it; but while the rest of Stable 2 will be put on edge, terrified and confused, you’ll just shut your eyes and go back to sleep, for you’ll know that Copper Chromite is free.”

“Well, then,” she said, and Copper Chromite raised his head. He had heard for the first time in her voice the rousing of a dignity that she had always had but not shown until now. She extended her hoof toward him. “Goodbye, Copper Chromite.”

He reached out with a forehoof as well. As soon as she felt the touch of his skin, she felt a surge of energy course through her spine. For a second, she felt as it felt to be in his body, that anxiousness, that inability to sit still, the incapability to look at something and wish without action. She felt herself pulled toward him unexpectedly, and in a sense unwillingly, a movement too rapid for her to have made with her own volition. But she thought that that motion were something that could be learned; she no longer felt her lugubriousness as an unbreakable chain around her neck. She now knew it to be something self-imposed, only taken by her and assumed because she had not known better. She now knew better, and she felt that newly acquired knowledge in the fresh, liberating weight of Copper Chromite’s legs around her neck as he embraced her.

“Did I ever tell you how much I hate hoofshakes?” he said. “It’s as if the one offering it is saying: ‘I don’t want to touch you, but I have to because you expect me to,’ and it’s as if the other who accepts is saying: ‘I don’t want to touch you either, but I’m going to because it would be considered rude to refuse your offer.’”

He held her thus for a long time. She had thought that he would feel cold, like logic and reason. He did not feel cold but overwhelmingly warm. She thought his bones were made out of tungsten, and she could not imagine him animated by anything other than an electric current. She felt him as one feels a newly-lit incandescent lightbulb.

When he let go of her, she saw that his eyes were red. He sniffled once and turned his head away.

“Copper,” she said, “will you be alright?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Go on, now. Get the hell out of here. I’ve got some things to take care of before I leave.”

She felt the air on her face grow colder as she walked away from him and toward the door. The door handle was icy cold.

“Wait!” he said.

She turned. “Yes?”

“They’ll probably ransack my room once I’m gone and loot it. That’s fine; there’s nothing really of any value here. But you need to get here before they do and get the thermometer. Will you take it and keep it safe?”

She looked to her right and saw the glass tube sitting on the shelf. As she rocked on her heels, the liquid swayed, twisting the golden tags in the light of the bulb. They flashed before her eyes. They seemed to be winking at her.

“Want me to take it now?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Wait until I’m gone. I want to look at it for a little while longer.”

“Of course,” she said.

“Littlepip . . .”

“Yes?”

“You’ll . . . you’ll listen to my broadcast when I make it—won’t you?”

She smiled. “I won’t have a choice now, will I?”

He laughed in answer. It was sublime, expressing pure delight at the existence of an irrevocable knowledge. It was what she had waited for since the beginning of their conversation. She had only ever heard it over the radio. And hearing it now as clearly as it should be heard, with no static, with no Pip-Buck speaker to dilute its potency, with nothing to get in its way between him and her—it was as wonderful as she had always thought it would be.

“Yes. Yes that’s right,” he said. “You won’t have a choice.”

“But can you do one thing for me?” she asked.

“Anything,” he replied.

“When you give your speech, laugh twice: once at the beginning, and once three hours later at the end.”

He laughed. “What do you mean?”

“Just like that,” she said.

And as she turned away from him and toward the door, she smiled as that satisfaction she craved so much redoubled in her, for he laughed yet a third time.

A darkness hit her when she opened the door. Though fluorescent lightbulbs lined the entire length of the hallway before her, she saw nothing. In front of her, for a few feet, the light of Copper Chromite’s incandescent lightbulb extended, terminating in a firm horizontal line, as if it marked the end of the domain; and on the other side, she knew that she no longer had any protection. She was scared, but she knew that she was armed. She took a hesitant step forward, as if waiting for her pupils to dilate.

The room had not been hot. The hallway had been unbearably cold. She shivered when she crossed the line.

She permitted herself one more glance back. She once more saw the guardian, standing on the threshold of his domain. A solemn hoof was raised in farewell, the light dancing around his mane and his hoof as if he were sending her a few last rays into the darkness. She firmly shut her eyes, trying to imprint that glare into her mind like it had been when he had first shown it to her. A flash remained; by gritting her teeth, she felt that she could hold onto it. She turned, her eyes firmly shut, and continued down the hallway. The shutting of a door was audible through the ringing of her ears.

Her foot caught something, and she almost fell forward. She opened her eyes and looked: it was Copper Chromite’s oscilloscope, mostly intact, but pieces of wire and plastic protruded from it like a wound. She laughed as she lit her horn. The pieces flew to one another. The process looked like watching a film in reverse. The strewn parts gathered onto one another until they were all together in a manner that bore some semblance of organization.

She turned once to look back down the hallway, then back to the oscilloscope she was levitating. After standing thus for a minute, she shook her head and walked away.

Before she retired to her room, she placed the oscilloscope gently down on a shelf in the closet marked “Spare Parts.”