• Published 22nd Jan 2014
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Human After All - Nicknack



Lyra discovers ancient mysteries in the Everfree Forest; one of them tasks her with helping him rebuild his lost civilization.

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Chapter 5

My parents sat at the table in our plush-decorated kitchen, but as I walked over to them, everything in the room seemed shorter than I remembered. I had to duck through the archway, the table only came up to my waist, and I could easily see the tops of my mom and dad’s heads.

I waved to them, and they snapped to me; two vacant, shocked expressions were all that returned my greeting.

“Mom?” My eyebrow shot up.

Her scream shook me out of my dream, and I popped awake in a cold sweat. After the mild hyperventilation faded, I looked around and my stomach lurched a second time: I had no idea where I was.

The décor of the room was a comfortable, flat white, so I guessed I was still in Jesse’s home. I was tucked in a bed, so I magicked the covers off and climbed out. It was farther down to the floor than I was used to, so I ended up slipping and slamming my face into the ground; all in all, I’d had worse mornings.

I couldn’t remember when I’d fallen asleep last night. I briefly went over the movies I’d watched with Jesse, but I couldn’t recall how the fourth one ended. I climbed to my feet and grinned, guiltily, as I realized I must’ve fallen asleep next to or even on Jesse; he’d probably carried me to the room I’d woken up in.

With that mystery solved, a more pressing matter presented itself: I didn’t know what the bathroom situation was like, or even if I could to go back to the surface if I needed to.

Fortunately, the smaller door in the room led to what was unmistakably a bathroom. I didn’t dwell on the similarities of various furniture and apparatuses in there; instead, I focused on testing things to see if they worked. Enough of them did, so after a few minutes, I was ready to head back…

Where am I?

The new realization that I was lost, underground, crept over me. I looked around for clues of my whereabouts. For the second time, I got lucky without much effort; a piece of paper was stuck to the door with a faint glow of magic.

I levitated it over to me; up close, I could see Jesse had drawn me a rudimentary map. A green, pony-shaped blob was in a room whose walls and shape matched the one I was in; from there, a series of red arrows pointed me through the door and down several hallways to a big, round room.

As I started on my trip back, I remembered my dream—or fragments of it. It seemed weird, to stand taller than my whole family; only now that I was awake did I realize that, in the dream, I’d been walking on my hind legs.

I thought about the psychological implications of that. Part of me knew that it wasn’t exactly healthy to spend time perpetuating such a huge secret that I had to keep from all my colleagues and family—maybe that was what the “not recognizing me” bit was about.

That led to some more thoughts about how much I’d changed over the past few months; really, I noted, I was much the same Lyra—just with more human interests than any pony alive. But I didn’t think that made me any better—or taller—than anypony…

In the end, I shrugged the whole thing off as a weird dream brought on by sleeping in a new place. Plus, I was several miles underground; that probably messed with my subconscious more than archaeology ever could.

Jesse’s map got me back to the big room outside the elevator; on my second time there, I took the chance to look around. With how many chairs and tables there were, I drew the conclusion that it’d been some sort of communal lounge.

Before I got on the elevator, I remembered my cloak and saddlebags; even if I had a map, I wanted to keep my stuff together. When I checked the nook they were in, Jesse’s lab coat was gone, so I figured he’d had the same idea.

Instead of wearing my cloak, I folded it up to pack it away. It was big enough to take all of one saddlebag, which meant I had to reorganize everything I’d brought along. The granola bars didn’t survive the process, but other than that, I was successfully able to fit my cloak into my left bag. In the right bag, I had my notebook, my torchstone, and—near the top, since it was too volatile to pack at the bottom—my little can of chimera repellant.

Once I was ready to continue on my search for Jesse, I walked over to the elevator. After the hexagons sealed behind me, the disc didn’t automatically move. Panic came quickly in the form of one resonant thought: Am I stuck in this thing?

I checked Jesse’s map again; near the elevator, he’d drawn six pairs of circles, stacked vertically. One of them—the top-right—was colored in. I looked around the tube and, sure enough, over by the door were twelve buttons. With a little grin of victory, I used magic to push the button that matched the one on the map; a moment later, the disc began moving upward.

Now that I wasn’t worried about having to be rescued, I heard the music again. I smiled for a moment at its familiarity; however, I put it in the back of my mind.

There were bigger things to ruminate on.

I remembered the movies Jesse had shown me. Even though I’d fallen asleep during the last one, I felt a ballooning sense of wonder and loss from looking into the past. There’d been huge cities, filled with a whole different species of intelligent beings.

As active as I was in my field, I’d never encountered evidence of architectural feats like I saw last night. Of course, I doubted that Jesse was lying—he had his whole city-sized, underground facility to back him up—so really, it just gave me an insignificant, tiny feeling to realize just how long ago it must’ve been when humans dominated the earth.

For the first time, it struck me just how massive an extinction event would have had to be in order to end their civilization. It reminded me of my resolve to help Jesse restore that legacy.

The elevator opened, and I began walking down the same softer, metal hallway that Jesse had taken me down on Thursday evening. Thinking of the date made me realize I had no idea what time it was up on the surface. I’d have to ask Jesse when I found him—except that made me remember my passive question of how accurately he measured the passage of time.

At the end of the hallway, the hexagonal door hissed open to let me back into the main hallway. Before I walked through, I noticed two things. First, a huge, black tube, about a foot in diameter, ran the entire length of the hallway in front of me—or at least, for as far as I could see in either direction.

Second, just like the door to the room I woke up in, there was a little piece of paper stuck to it. On it was a slightly more detailed picture of me, which I smiled at, and an arrow pointing to the right. I picked up the second paper and folded it up with the map; then, obviously, I turned right and followed the large, black tube.

I kept track of my directions as cantered along, but I soon realized that since I’d taken my little sign with me, I wouldn’t be able to tell my point of origin from the rest of the facility anymore. So in a weird sense, I had a map, I knew exactly where I was going, and I was totally lost.

The tube went on for what felt like a mile. Every five minutes or so, the tube got broken up by a large, black box with lights and dials on it. The boxes looked identical, which gave me an eerie sense of going in circles; thankfully, I was remembering my directions, which told me I hadn’t turned enough to do that.

When I felt I was overdue to pass a fifth box, I turned a corner; about a hundred feet down the hallway, the tube entered a doorway. I followed the tube to that room, and once inside, I looked around at…

It took a few tries, but I finally decided I had no idea what I was looking at.

Inside that room, wires crisscrossed the floor to connect nearly a dozen small, eye-level machines. They all hummed, and lit up in different blinking patterns, but that didn’t give me any clearer idea about what they were for.

Probably the easiest things for me to recognize were what looked like a pair of carts, but even they held their own mysteries: each held a large, two-foot-long glass cylinder. One cylinder held eerie, bubbling, purple goo; the other contained a comparatively dead, rust-colored stalactite.

A tall steel apparatus stood in the back of the room. It was wider at the top, and the black tube connected to its base on the side. A large, Y-shaped groove was set into the machine’s face, and straps dangled near each of the three ends. I puzzled over what it was for, or why the top arms of the Y were so much thinner than…

Arms.

I let out a small, muted cry of horror: It was the right size and shape to fit a human body. My horror only grew when I realized it’d been built for that specific purpose—like all human tools. But why would anyone need to be fastened to a machine like that?

Jesse poked his head around from behind the machine. He nodded recognition and began walking over to me; I watched my step as walked over wires to meet him halfway.

“Good morning,” he greeted me. “Did you sleep well?”

Despite my growing sense of foreboding, I nodded. “Yeah. And thanks for the maps.” I made a show of looking around at all the technology in the room. “What… what is all of this?”

“This…” Jesse swept his hand over the room. “Is the culmination of everything I have been working towards.” He walked over to the cart and knocked on the purple goop canister; the goop inside shrank away from his knocks in an unnatural, living manner. “For example, this is what I’ve been drilling for for the past two centuries. A self-replicating nanorobot that unceremoniously and forcibly merged with a fragment of an incredibly powerful entity. Today, I’m taking that power back.”

I remembered what he’d mentioned about reunification before. I still didn’t quite understand it. “So that…” I pointed at the goo before sweeping my hoof to Jesse. “Came out of you?”

He shook his head. “We’re more siblings, than a parent-child relationship.”

I stared back, thoroughly confused.

Jesse responded by hoisting himself up onto a table. He held his scarred hand out, and I sat down as he began lecturing: “Every human discovery and achievement paled in comparison to the discovery that chaos was not only a fundamental force of physics, but that there were sources of it, spread throughout the planet—sort of like the magnetic poles, but obviously nowhere near as organized or symmetrical.”

“The original purpose of this facility was threefold.” Jesse held up three fingers and curled them down, one by one, as he counted: “First, to collect it, like a dam. Second, to study it, to determine how it works. And third…” He pointed the final finger at himself. “To produce useable technologies that ran on it.”

I nodded; Jesse had mentioned the production facilities before.

He continued: “Raw chaos is… well, as you probably know, it needs a focusing point to be applied to anything.” He tapped his forehead, and my eyes drifted up to my horn. “After it’s focused, it still produces the seemingly impossible effects, like turning water into ethanol, but those effects can be stored and then later reproduced, which ushered in a new era of technologic advances.”

The implications of all that sank in; from what I gathered, Jesse was talking about a way of storing magic in things—which ponies could do, but it was generally expensive and inefficient. Even my torchstone needed a little spark of magic to start it; Jesse was talking about a torchstone that would light itself, so an earth pony or pegasus could use it.

It was impossibly amazing. I tried to pick a hole in the story, and it seemed easiest to start with: “How do you remember that?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I… I have history books, Lyra.”

And yet you didn’t think to share those? I let it slide; he’d probably never let me take any of them with me, anyway. Instead, I kept asking about the current history lesson. “You mentioned a focusing point? What did humans use?” I brought up a point Jesse had talked about at our lunch. “You guys aren’t very good at magic, even in your movies.”

That earned me a chuckle, but it seemed strained—almost sad. “How many lives would you sacrifice to save a hundred? Chaos-based medical technologies did just that, and hundreds times over each year—”

“Jesse…” I interrupted and leered. He was dodging the point, and he was doing it in ends-justify-the-means speak.

“It was…” He shook his head and laughed. “An organism was biologically engineered to interface with chaos. It wasn’t even human, but there were stories about it, at first, when it did its job willingly. It had a personality. When it became hostile towards the workers here, around two years into its existence…” Jesse shrugged. “They kept it placid by placing it in forced, near-constant hibernation. It never aged, it never felt pain, but some of its technicians swore they heard it speaking, in their heads.” He shrugged again. “That’s what some of the staff logs mention, at any rate.”

I looked over at the machine with straps on it, and I tasted bile. “So… you… humans kept someone asleep and just… used their body to build an entire technological era?”

“Essentially.”

“And… and you don’t have a problem with that?” I cocked my head.

“I didn’t say that. However, you can’t proclaim one life’s sanctity while throwing away the thousands that it improved, saved, and extended.”

I raised an objection, but Jesse spoke over me. “That was in the past, however. In case you haven’t fully connected the dots yet, humanity paid dearly for its dirty little secret; when I rebuild things, I have no intention of creating a second Somniator.”

Somniator?”

“That was its name,” Jesse chuckled. “An ancient word for ‘dreamer’. Because humanity wasn’t anything without its dark sense of humor.”

I blinked a few times, not even sure where I needed to begin raising questions. I pointed at the glass cylinders. “Okay. If you’re not making another magic slave, what are you going to do with those?”

Jesse also pointed to the goop. “Each of those cylinders contains one-sixth of Somniator’s neuro-chaotic transposers.” He took a deep breath and brought his finger back to himself. “This contains another sixth. By reuniting with the other two fragments, I can track down the remaining three fragments, and when I am whole again…” His mouth stretched into a wide, fanatical grin. “I can start humanity over. I can save them, rebuild society…”

He trailed off, and I just kept staring at him, slack-jawed and trying to process everything he’d told me. I decided to put off the whole “running an entire society on the back of an unconscious slave” thing, since Jesse apparently didn’t want to repeat that.

Instead, I tried to wrap my head around one simple question:

“What are you?”

His crazy smile turned into an amused grin. “I’m Jesse. Yes, at some point, there was a human and a fragment of Somniator. I’m unsure how it began, but over time, the two have merged into what I am today.”

That explains how he’s so old, I noted, but I didn’t feel like that changed my understanding of him. I went back to a simpler part of him, one that I felt I could understand: “So, rebuilding human society… that’s going to help out Equestria, too?”

“Naturally.”

“And no one’s going to get hurt? No… weird, secret sleep-prisons?”

He laughed harder than I’d ever seen him, and that gripped my throat like a clamp. It lingered in the room, even when he finished.

I stepped back when he jumped down from the table and walked over to one of the machines on the far side of the room—not the scary, strap-in one, but a smaller one that stood roughly eye-level with me.

As he began typing something onto the device, he finally broke the awkward silence. “No prisons. I’ll either rebuild a sustainable chaos-based society or one that’s based on standard and plasma-based technologies, like this entire facility, but nothing that will be against anyone’s will.”

That was as good a promise that I felt I was going to get, but more importantly, it was as good of one as I needed. Slowly, I nodded and agreed. “Okay. Next question: What’s…” I pointed over to the Y-shaped machine with the straps. “What’s that? It looks kind of prison-y.”

“I’ll get to that. For now, I want to show you this…” He gently palm-slapped the machine he was standing behind. I walked over to stand next to Jesse; on the other side of the small machine, everything looked distinctly like it was built for a pony. It was short, the buttons were large, and all of the words that glowed on one screen were written in Equestrian.

“This is what I need you for here today. Because, much like reassembling a glass sculpture that’s been broken, reuniting with the other two fragments will be an intricate process. The computers are doing most of the work, but I need you to make sure I don’t die.”

“Wait, what?”

Jesse raised a hand. “Relax. It’s easy, and you’re more than mentally competent enough to handle this.”

It didn’t put my mind at ease any. “What do you mean you might die?”

“This is a highly volatile procedure.” He took a deep breath. “It’s going to hurt. Me. It’s going to be worth it. But when the procedure begins, some of my vital signs are going to show up…” He tapped the device’s screen. “On here. The main thing I want you to watch is my heart rate; if it goes over two hundred and fifty…” He pointed to a big red button. “Stop the procedure.” He stood back up. “Also, if I ask you to stop… stop the procedure.”

Easy or no, it was still a huge responsibility. “I… couldn’t you have built that in to everything?”

Jesse walked away from me, towards the two carts with canisters. “I didn’t want to train the speech-recognition software to recognize what I sound like when I’m screaming in agony. And I don’t trust myself to do it, because I’m probably going to be distracted.”

I watched in silence as Jesse wheeled the first canister over to the strapped machine and set it vertically on top. He pressed a few buttons and I heard a quiet hiss; when Jesse tried shaking the canister, it stayed firmly where it was.

For the second time in two days, he took off his lab coat; that time, he repeated the process with his shirt. I was about to ask Jesse about the huge, jagged scars that ran across his abdomen, but he distracted me by also slipping off his pants.

He either didn’t notice or actively ignored my awkward glances; sure, he had on a smaller, thinner pair of pants, but still. It was weird. After folding his clothes, Jesse took a moment to remove his accessories: a watch he wore around his neck, and the ring he wore on his right hand.

Once he was pretty much naked, Jesse opened a panel on the machine behind him and pulled out a cluster of wires. With a wave of his hand, they snaked out of the machine and attached themselves all over his arms, legs, torso, and head. In front of me, my machine beeped to life; now, the screen told me various statistics about Jesse: neural oscillations, blood pressure, and heart rate.

There was something striking about little graphs that flashed to life next to each number—numeric representations of his life. I remembered my duty, and my qualms; they came out as, “Jesse, I’m not sure if I can—”

His heart rate spiked to one-hundred and thirty two. I snapped my attention to him; Jesse wore a grimace that could easily be explained by the thick plastic tube that he was currently stabbing into the right side of his stomach. A thin trickle of blood flowed down to his hips; it made me squeamish.

“Hard part’s over, right?” He chuckled, but it sounded strained, and his heart rate stayed at over a hundred.

“Why did you stab yourself in the…” I looked over him, and two more tubes snaked through the air to slide into both his arms. “Everything?”

“These are for some chemical aid to my organs, to help them endure what I’m about to go through…” He carefully turned around and stepped up, into the Y-shaped groove. When he stretched his arms out, his magic woke up the straps, and they slithered to bind him to the machine.

He let out a loud, pained grunt, and his heart rate shot above one-sixty—less than ninety away from the upper limit I needed to watch for. I shouted a question across the room: “What… are you okay?”

Now I’ve been stabbed… everything,” he answered through grit teeth. At the same time, though, his heart rate dropped down by thirty…

Heart units? I wondered what the term was. I wasn’t a doctor.

Jesse gave me some last instructions. “This shouldn’t last more than ninety seconds, Lyra, and it should go by… well, you shouldn’t have to push the red button. If you do, that’s okay; I’ve got contingency plans.”

In a weird way, the plans for failure increased my confidence. “Okay.”

“Are you ready?”

I took a deep breath and shook my head. “I mean… I’m here to help you, right?” I shrugged and braced myself, hoping I could forget the gnarled knot in my stomach. “Whenever you are.”

He muttered some words in his old language; then, after a moment of silence, I heard an oddly soft, pleasant-sounding beep. It introduced a new, steadily increasing whirring; when that hit a peak, a loud buzzing filled the room.

At the same instant, Jesse arched himself back into the machine—or at least, he tried to. The straps…

I looked away. I wasn’t a doctor or some sort of sick torture-loving freak; all I had was a screen with numbers, so I sat there and counted them off as they slowly rose:

Two hundred ten… Two hundred fifteen…

A third noise joined the symphony of horrors on the other side of the room. I tried to tune it out. I didn’t want to remember what it sounded like when any living creature was in that much agony.

Two hundred twenty-six… Two hundred twenty-nine…

The numbers were slowing down, but they were still steadily increasing. In a brief moment’s regret, I wished I’d thought to time the procedure—but then again, I didn’t know which of the sounds was the actual start of things. The buzzing? That hadn’t been more than twenty seconds ago…

Two hundred thirty-five… Two hundred thirty-seven…

Sweat broke out all over my body, and I wanted to set down my saddlebags. Maybe that would help me feel cooler? I kept my eyes locked on the screen as I magicked them off to the side; sure enough, it didn’t help. The entire room still felt like a furnace.

Two hundred forty… Two hundred forty-one…

I suddenly wished that Jesse’s heart rate would spike to over two hundred fifty. Surely, that’d mean he’d be close to some sort of death—if he could even die—but… at the same time, I just wanted this to be over.

Two hundred forty-six…

My own heart leapt up when Jesse’s spiked by five; if it could just do that one more time, then I could put a stop to all of this. I’d tell him next time, to figure out how to do this alone; yes, I wanted to help, but this was too much.

Two hundred forty-seven…

I tried to think back to the movies we’d watched, or the stories he’d told me over chess. Those had been good experiences—a little frustrating, but wondrous nonetheless.

Two hundred forty-eight…

I couldn’t make the connection between Jesse’s loud, screaming agony and helping to pass along or restore his culture. I tried, but I couldn’t. It was so close, too, to the point where I could just end this.

Two hundred forty-nine…

I watched the screen, transfixed, as I hoped and prayed for it to just bump up two more numbers. He’d said over two hundred fifty, right? That meant it had to be at least two hundred fifty-one…

Two hundred fifty…

I held my breath, and my own heart pounded in my ears. Sweat dripped into my eyes, which added a stinging excuse for some of the tears. I forced myself to keep watching the screen, even though its lights turned streaky and star-like.

Two hundred fifty…

“Just one more…” I whispered to myself.

Two hundred fifty…

“Please?”

Abruptly, the buzzing sound died, and I looked up to look at Jesse. He was slumped down, hanging from the straps, which scared me; looking back at his heart rate, it was steadily declining.

For an incredulous, thought-less moment, I didn’t know what to do. The machine’s whirring wound down to silence, which filled the whole room with an ominous, dead quiet.

Jesse’s heart rate was well into the safe half of a hundred, but his machine didn’t say if he were breathing. From what little I knew about biology, I knew that, if something had gone wrong, electricity could very well be faking a heartbeat.

I picked my saddlebags back up and reattached them around myself. I didn’t really know why I was doing it; it was mostly a mindless reflex that felt comfortable. Like a hug. Then, I started walking over to him. For all the things the machine told me, it didn’t tell me if he were breathing, or even if he were alive anymore.

I had to check for myself.

As I drew nearer, I smelled ozone, which added a scary level of reality to my hypothesis. On top of the machine, the canister was now filled with a dull, metallic gray goop—it wasn’t glowing purple anymore. Maybe they both died, I thought, which caused a lump to form in my throat.

When I stood right below him, I looked up at his chest. My ears drooped; his hair wrapped around his slumped face, and he wasn’t moving—definitely not breathing. I gasped, which caught in my throat; after clearing it with a cough, I blinked my watery eyes and asked, “Jesse?”

He roared to life with a great, raspy breath that sounded like he’d just broken the surface of a lake. After the first breath, he started breathing regularly again, and he looked down at me with a grin.

Relief washed over me, followed by a tiny feeling of disappointment. I buried that dark thought and asked, “Did it work?”

Everything holding Jesse to the machine suddenly exploded away from him; I hopped back and shielded my face. When I looked up at him again, he was wearing his clothes again; the only difference was now, his eyes were glowing the same color of purple that the ooze used to be.

“Better than I could have dreamed.”

His voice was different. It sounded… almost like there were two of him, talking in dark unison. I took a few steps back, but he didn’t seem to care. I also asked what I hoped was an obvious question: “So, you’re not… doing the other canister yet? ‘Cause I could use a—”

The second canister—the one with the red stalactite—flew across the room, into his waiting hands. He smiled carnivorously, which was scary enough, but then his eyes and mouth filled with bright purple light.

I wanted to run, but my hooves locked into place.

Black tendrils of magic flowed out of the canister and into Jesse’s hands, permeating his skin. I realized that he didn’t need the machine anymore, which told me that the procedure had been a success. That knowledge didn’t make me any less terrified.

He threw the canister aside and it shattered; the stalactite tumbled out from the broken glass and rolled over to me. Up close, I could see the distinct spiral shape that had grown into it, which led to an utterly horrifying revelation:

That wasn’t a stalactite.

It was a horn.

I looked back up from what had to have been the remains of a unicorn; he was looking at me, dead on, like an evil jack o’ lantern made of flesh.

He took a step forward; I took a step back. I couldn’t even find the words for what I felt. Betrayal? Stupidity?

I took another step back, but that time, I tripped over one of the wires on the floor. I fell on my left side, which thankfully meant my folded-up cloak cushioned my fall. Without looking up, I could see a pair of black shoes as they slowly crossed the floor and walked closer to me.

I moved to get up; when I did, I looked up; he was now bent down, reaching for me…

On pure instinct, I snapped open my right saddlebag and flung my canister of phosphorous upwards at him.

It sprung open, and a fireball of heat and light exploded as the white, waxy pellets did exactly what they were supposed to do: deter powerful, magical creatures from hurting ponies in the Everfree Forest.

I didn’t look back as I got up and ran; from the high-pitched, agonizing screams I left behind, I knew I’d lit him on fire. I started crying, even despite myself; I didn’t want things to get to where they were.

When I was in the hallway, a huge, guttural voice yelled out my name.

I ran, not knowing which way was out, just that I needed to get away.

An explosion behind me told me that running might not even be fast enough. I cleared a corner and weighed my options; my scared brain kept coming back to autoteleportation.

Which, under the best of circumstances, teleportation wasn’t the safest of ways to travel. I knew the theory, but I hadn’t ever had a need to practice it; whenever I used magic to travel somewhere, it was part of the Equestrian Teleportation Network, so I had both my departure and my return covered on both ends.

The basics were simple enough: create a long, thin, magic-vacuum that contained you and your destination. If you made it right, the residual magic outside of the vacuum would try to force the “bubble” to its smallest size. It was a fast, violent, and very prone-to-error process. If you messed up, you were just as likely to overshoot your destination by thousands of miles as you were to get crushed, dissolved, or stuck inside something—like a mountain.

However, none of that mattered when something was chasing after you with the intent of killing you and eating your magic. I risked a glance over my shoulder; sure enough, even though he was black and burning, he was running after me in a dead sprint.

I’ll take my chances with the mountain.

Quickly, I imagined my Ponyville apartment. I imagined the path between my living room and me; then, I slowly pushed all the magic away from that path. Like a siphon, it got easier once I started; finally, I felt it reach a familiar point of no return.

With a lurch, I teleported out of the facility.