Little Blue Cat

by Chatoyance

8. Horton Memorial Arena

Once upon a time, when the ponies came to save the humans from the dying earth, there was a

Little Blue Cat

By Chatoyance

8. Horton Memorial Arena

Just in front of the Newfoal children, the human woman and the labcoated man, both stallion guards, and the lone, gray alicorn mare, a pale mass squirmed. Its dough-soft, wriggling limbs stretched and excreted brand new hooves. Submerged eyes rose and expanded to fill a freshly forming skull. Watching this scene were thousands of humans and ponies, cheering from tiered rows of seats within the former ice rink. A man had just taken ponification serum. He was in the middle of the process of transforming into a stallion, gradually becoming the newest automatic citizen of the universe of Equestria. It was quite a show.

Suddenly a blinding flash of light exploded from a spherical, expanding distortion at the far end of the arena. As the pulsating glow shrank and vanished, the regal form of princess Celestia, ruler of Equestria, goddess of the sun and sister to the moon took a single step forward, surveying the chamber and all it contained.

The gray alicorn mare looked up at Celestia, and froze in place. Celestia ignored the spectacle within the arena. Her glaring eyes were fixed intently on the gray alicorn alone. The diarch of the sun took a careful and measured step forward, as if approaching a dangerous beast.

Lillian Fogarty, the misfortunate Newfoal alicorn, bent her head briefly, as if in terror, then looked up again with purpose. She tried to bow, failed at the task, and then stood up straight again.

"Celestia! Look around you! This is the main base of the PER! This is their main staging center! Everything the PER does is supported from here! That's why I let you find me!" The voice crackled with fear and desperation. Lillian had summoned the solar princess, despite the knowledge that Celestia considered her to be anathema itself.

Celestia looked deeply into the gray alicorn's eyes, measuring her. "Remain here and take no action. Do you understand?"

Lillian nodded and stood still. She had been running, but now her run was over. There was no place left to go.

The goddess of the sun of Equestria turned away from Lillian and walked forcefully towards the writhing, changing form of what had once been a human man, now something halfway between man and pony. Celestia's horn shone with eldrich light. The poor little abomination that was Lillian Fogarty, accidental alicorn, could only stand and wait for Celestia's wrath to eventually turn to her. But first the PER - the Ponification for the Earth's Rebirth - a terrorist organization that forcibly ponifed humans against their will. Celestia despised them, and Lillian knew this. Everyone knew it; Celestia constantly called for information that would lead to their arrest and the end of the organization.

A little blue cat darted from the shadows behind the tableau of ponies, humans, squirming mass and alicorn.

Chang'e, her body under the control of princess Luna, leapt up upon the back of the gray alicorn. Her claws scrabbled slightly to gain purchase in the gray hairs of the back. Chang'e felt her body lay flat, claws embedded in coat and flesh, right between the two gray wings of the alicorn. The cat's muzzle was tickled by a facefull of golden yellow mane. She wanted to sneeze, but Luna was completely controlling her motor functions.

The alicorn mare half-bucked in surprise - only the stiffness of her fear kept her from thrashing about wildly.

Chang'e's mouth spoke, just loud enough for the alicorn alone to hear. "Celestia is distracted; this is a matter she must deal with. Thou must flee now, if thou desirest to live."

"What? Who? What are you? I don't understand! What do..." Lillian Fogarty the alicorn sputtered, apparently at the end of her ability to cope. Chang'e felt her claws dig in more deeply.

"RUN NOW!" Chang'e's voice contained some new power of absolute command, doubtless the work of Luna inside her. Lillian's legs began to move, clumsily at first, then with increasing agility and determination. Alicorn mare and cat rider both found themselves in a panicked dash towards a break in the guard wall of the rink. Luna used Chang'e's claws to tug and pull on Lillian's hide, steering her. They galloped up a narrow stairway set between the rows of seats, towards a shadowy doorway in the high wall of the arena.

In moments they had made their way outside the main chamber, to a large oval enclosure that surrounded the rink. Pennants and flags, empty booths, and piles of crates and boxes lined the walls. As the gray mare ran, Chang'e noted that the containers held weapons and ammunition, uniforms, preserved food packs, medical supplies, and many other things she simply could not identify. The Horton Memorial hockey arena must be some kind of supply depot for the PER. By Chang'e's calculation, there was easily enough stored here to equip an army consisting of at least four regiments and three battalions.

Rider and mare stopped at a large, massively blocked gate. The doors to the outside were sealed. This was reasonable, Chang'e thought, the building had clearly been repurposed as a supply depot, naturally it would have been transformed into a fortress. They faced a solid wall of stacked crates and supplies. Chang'e considered the internal map she had been making; this must be one end of a horseshoe-shaped causeway surrounding the hockey arena.

It was likely all other possible exits were either barred or heavily guarded. Chang'e considered the situation, and came to the conclusion that there was no acceptably safe way out of the arena. The proper action to take, Chang'e thought to herself, would be to immediately abandon the gray mare, flee to a hidden location, and deny all involvement - or act nonsapient - if discovered. She tried to disengage her claws, but her body was still beyond her control. 'We do not abandon those whose sad circumstance we have pledged to remedy. Recall thine own situation, former unloved toy - thy fickle human would have seen thee disposed of, if only he could.'

But I owe this strange pony nothing, Chang'e growled within her mind. This is your scheme, and I do not wish to suffer the wrath of that creature below, in the arena. Chang'e felt her claws grip harder into the flesh of the gray mare beneath her. 'That creature is my own beloved sister, cat, and we do not plot against her, but against the narrowness of her determination. We fear for her and work to protect her.' Chang'e felt a guilty stirring within her dorsal nodes. 'Still, thou art not without wisdom - what our sister might acknowledge in centuries hence, she would surely take umbrage with upon this day.' Chang'e tried again to leap off the mare's back.

'Nay, cat!' Chang'e sulked, as best she could, within the machine component that was her consciousness. 'Little Lillian was a victim of circumstance, just as thou art. She chose not her alicorn fate, no more than thou didst choose to be artificial. Her life and thine owne each hang by tattered threads. When Equestria for thee, or my sister for Lillian, hath arrived, thine endings will both be swift and regrettable. Need we must remind thee of thy compact with us regarding this venture?'

But there is no way out! Chang'e mentally bared her fangs, inside her thoughts. Your sister will easily find us, this structure is not very complex or difficult to search. And I comprehend that you cannot reveal yourself or your part in this, so you cannot fold spacetime, or perform other superphysical acts while your sister is present. I have been making a list. Teleport. Shapeshift. Multiplicative bilocation with transformation. Nonmateriality. Dissolution and creation of matter. I have begun cataloging and studying your capabilities. Increasingly I can process portions of your consciousness during the times you inhabit me. You are afraid. Your sister is significantly more powerful than you. Equestria is not what it...

Luna suddenly pulled herself into a temporally discontiguous subversal interstice, just beyond the parasplanoid ontolithic substrate. She waited there, slightly subcosmerged, still echoing her inhabitation of the artificial cat. She needed time to think. Just outside of time and space was a very quiet and convenient place to do so.

This matter with the cat was very unexpected. When her sister had described the creation of an Equestrian body for the first human she had ever encountered, she had been clear about what the process had involved. It was this which Luna herself was attempting, in the case of the artifice animal Chang'e.

One merges with the neural pattern of a meat machine, generates a thaumatic couplement that exactly represents the original complexity and function, and then the couplement can be installed into a new E-matter body, or the original body directly converted into E-matter, thus preserving and immortalizing the identity of the meat machine. The connection is always entirely one-way, because no meat machine could possibly be capable of comprehending or adapting to such an alien situation. They literally have no means to do so.

Somehow, Chang'e had found a means to reach back into Luna herself. This wasn't possible! It was greatly disturbing. Mere meat was severely limited by the way it functioned. It was not possible for a meat machine to analyze its own pathways in the manner required in order to perceive the existence of a thaumatic construct embedded within it. Earth animals were constrained by a modular neural design that limited and defined their perception and comprehension of all information. They could only perceive what they were preconfigured to perceive. It was why earth creatures were affected by sensory illusions. Consciousness in any earth creature was an emergent property of discrete modules in the brain. Anything outside the possibility set of those modules was forever beyond them.

Chang'e doth clearly possess wisdom beyond that which we didst grant her. How couldst this be? It could be because I am still right here with you, Luna. What is this... space? This is not a space. It is not a place. I require additional information to form a basis of understanding, Luna. There does not seem to be any rational dimensionality or geometry to our current...

Luna slammed violently back into earthly spacetime. Chang'e felt her body begin to breathe rapidly. Her heart rate was very high and climbing. Chang'e attempted to compensate by tuning down the strength of the signal from her artificial limbic node. The intervention worked. Apparently, Luna's control over her body was mostly confined to motor functions. This was useful to know. A quick systems trace indicated that more of her flesh component was being taken over by Luna now, likely as a reaction to Chang'e's reciprocal presence within her. Luna seemed greatly disturbed by the reciprocity.

Something was different. Chang'e had not predicted the existence of extrauniversal spaces. Now she had experienced one. She had not predicted that she was being transferred to a new substrate. Much of her machine and biological totality coexisted now within two parallel substrates. One was her original metal and flesh body. The other seemed to be an exact representation in some form of immaterial, cohesive energy with holographic properties. This was new. Something had changed. Chang'e had traced the pathways inside herself when monitoring Luna, and those pathways had led outside expected parameters. Chang'e could still access those pathways at will. She now had four eyes. Two were made of meat. Two were made of... couplement. Thaumatic couplement.

Luna had turned Chang'e's head down and to the right. There, below and through the floor of the arena was a very bright shape. The shape was manipulating long streamers and ribbons of glowing force. The shape was Celestia. Thaumatic couplement pathways provided additional sensory input beyond the electromagnetic spectrum. Chang'e had been massively upgraded as a result of tracing Luna's connection to her. Further exploration of the connection should...

Suddenly Chang'e was confined, deep within herself. This was the most disconnected from her own systems that the little artificial intelligence had ever experienced. She was imprisoned now, with only organic vision, hearing, and smell available to her. She felt information starved. 'Enough! Thou art too clever a cat by half, and more trouble than dragons at a bargaining table! Stay, thou whiskered imp, we shall deal with thee later!"

Interesting, Chang'e noted. Luna appeared more frightened than before, and decidedly upset. If she did not expect to be hacked in return, why did she have no security in place at all? Luna was a completely open system. It had seemed like a mutual, unsecured connection to Chang'e.

Despite the density of events, very little time had passed in earthly timespace. Chang'e estimated that her physical body had been immobile for less than 0.053 seconds. Luna, through Chang'e's body, began to speak to the gray mare under their belly.

"Listen to us, mare of Equestria! We will teach thee one thing; do not think beyond it, use it when we command, then crown thy horn once again when it is done."

Chang'e watched, helplessly, as the gray alicorn mare stood and shivered. Searching her confinement, Chang'e found a pathway that had not been blocked. Following it, she was able to branch out her input through several nodes, and find the trace that led to her couplementary eyes. Luna was transferring information into the mare through an extraversal pathway. Chang'e could not accurately determine what the information was, only that it was complex and seemed to involve dimensionality.

"Choose thou a place, filled with multitudes to be lost within, and then use what we have taught thee. Do it now! Her attention is turning thy way once more! Now! We command it!"

Chang'e's thaumatic eyes could be moved independently of her biological ones! This was a useful discovery. Chang'e rotated her gaze to study the horn of the gray alicorn mare. The horn was glowing now, both in ordinary light, and even more brilliantly in thaumatic force. Twisting ribbons and planes of extradimensional energy began to bend and distort local spacetime. The alicorn creature must have been given information about the process of teleportation. That was what the transfer from Luna was about.

Interesting, thought Chang'e. She studied how the alicorn applied the forces now at her command. The mathematical basis of what she was doing was not very complex. Fascinating. So this is how Luna traveled.

Chang'e created a model inside her and began running simulations. She had no horn, so there was no way to duplicate the fine control that Luna and this Lillian Fogarty possessed. But now that she had awareness of the thaumatic couplement that Luna had constructed for her, there was the possibility of using her thaumatic paws and whiskers to find gaps or weak areas in the cosmic brane that earthly spacetime was embedded within. She would never fold space and time like an alicorn. But it was not impossible to find alleyways through which a cat might prowl.

As the world bent and twisted around her, as Horton Arena fell away and was replaced by a garbage-strewn, fenced in back lot under gray skies, Chang'e decided to ignore Luna and her schemes for a while. Luna had her rogue alicorn project to work out. Chang'e found herself utterly intrigued by a wonderful puzzle. Interstitial alleyways behind physical reality. It was a truly fascinating problem to solve for.

Comments

[The almighty bread god]

I have an urge to use Hyun's super kick on Celesti-hoe.

[Walabio]

The ability to walk these backalleys of the universe will allow Chang'e to walk through walls. "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" is a reference to Robert Anson Heinlein.

[Chatoyance]

6073457
I am a huge Heinlein fan. I suspect it may show in my writing. I would be surprised if it did not.

[Chatoyance]

6073410

I have an urge to use Hyun's super kick on Celesti-hoe.

Ah! A supporter of the PER? That is rare to find and interesting indeed!

Personally, I cannot help but see value in the PER - the world is ending, so terrorist or not, they are literally saving lives. I get that they are a political embarrassment and threat to Celestia and the Bureau program over all, but... maybe people too stupid to get ponified need a push so they don't effin' die. It's like shoving a child off the freeway before it gets hit by a car. Maybe the child's personal freedom is less important than whether it ever gets to grow up.

If I were in this future, I wouldn't join the PER, but I would probably secretly cheer them on.

Then again, the PER are all deluded folks being lied to by pseudo-ponified former Worldgovernment secret agents gone rogue.

It's... complicated, and rather ethically ambiguous. Which makes for great drama, I think.

Very interesting comment. Few readers openly dislike Celestia coming in to smack down the PER. Very interesting indeed!

[Meadow]

It seems Luna bit more than she can chew, Chang'e is a very clever cat indeed.

I'm enjoying seeing Luna's and Chang'e' point of view in the chase for Lillian Fogarty. Luna is very well written and I always enjoy her way of speech. It's also good to see Lillian as Lillian, I always liked her as a character.

[FanOfMostEverything]

Oh my. Chang'e's gone Cheshire. Luna failed to consider that an artificial animal can perform system analyses with far greater precision than fully organic beings. Combined with a growing magical aspect and a cat's curiosity, it's no wonder Chang'e was able to hack her way into Luna's thinking spacetime. That's the thing about alien intelligences; they don't think like you, which makes it much easier for them to surprise you.

[Coda]

Oooooooh. I LIKE.

You know enough about the way I think. Me being me, I REALLY should have seen this coming. XD And I totally didn't! But I also think I totally would have done the same as Chang'e given the opportunity.

[pjabrony]

6073483 Let me join this in saying that while I support Celestia, and don't always support the PER, I'm also not in favor of her actively stopping them.

I have a difficult time comprehending her nature of Order Above All. I don't know if you cast her as Lawful Good or Lawful Neutral, but to me she's definitely the latter. Because to me, the good is the will and the values of any one person. The PER take away freedom of choice, but Celestia is doing no better by acting directly against them. Choice by force is not choice.

Yet all that said, it is why the concept of the diarchy is so powerful. Because existence is dichotomous, and having a second view in all situations is valuable. Good governments have a Loyal Opposition. Two godheads are better than one.

[Meadow]

6073483
The way I see it, if someone is not in their right mind and you have the cure, it's pretty irresponsible to just set it on the table and go "Well, it's here if you need it".

That said I disagree with the PER that you should put ponies' lives at risk to help those who would resist violently.

However, though I disagree now, the thought has crossed my mind that I might not once ponified, so compelled to be helpful and caring too much for my own good. I figure it wouldn't happen, but the thought has crossed my mind.

Thankfully I might have a chance to bring up those concerns while undergoing the transition itself! If I can remember to anyway.

[Wild Zontars]

6073483
Add another voice to the chorus of people who are... concerned about Celestia's obsession with Order.

I'm a fan of the Discordian (golden apple, not draconequus) view of reality: Order and Disorder are both illusions, there is only the primordial Chaos. Discord seems to be more about Disorder than Chaos, making him Celestia's natural opposite. If Luna is the balance between the two, I'm on her team.

The PER are doing the "right" thing the "wrong" way. I'm willing to be "neutral in their favor" for that.

[Also: nice touch mirroring the voice-confusion with Luna. It may be confusing for some of us readers, but the consistency is appreciated.]

[Primarina]

I may be a little late to the party, but I think I finally understand what the ponies (mainly the two sisters though) think of the humans.

Celestia and Luna are afraid of them, or more specifically, what they can do, and the reason for this is simple: they, and all e-matter creatures, possess immortality, while terrestrial beings do not.

In your stories, Chat, we've seen the equestrian afterlife, and it contains the thaumatic couplements of all e-matter creatures after their bodies have died. They retain the memories of their life for the rest of eternity, and so they're not really truly dead, not really. Anything that they did in life lives with them for forever. The humans, on the other hand, don't have to deal with this. Anything that they do in life doesn't follow them past death. If a pony were to commit unspeakable crimes both against other creatures and the environment, I'm sure that Luna and many others would not make the afterlife pleasant for them, but a human doesn't have to worry about that, and so there really is no ultimate consequence. They have a surefire escape from punishment, and that is what the two sisters don't like. So this whole 'lesser being' schtick and calling us meat machines is really just a way to justify consuming the planet and ponifying the humans, in a sort of condescending pity.

I love Chang'e's emergent behavior, by the way. I'd love to see what she manages to accomplish.

[Dafaddah]

Wow, there's a lot happening in the background in this chapter!

One of the most interesting to me is your take on Celestia's personality and mission, being the guardian of order) and Luna's relation to her in being the one that takes the edges off somewhat absolute PoV. All of this has some fascinating ramifications on Celestia's behaviour – and the consequences to Equestrian society – during the years of Luna's incarceration. With both Luna and Discord inactive, what did Celestia have to do to keep in check the more absolutist aspects of her own character? Perhaps this is how her trickster aspect (shown in several episodes) developed? And I wonder to what extent she herself is aware of this.

Great chapter!

[Toksyuryel]

Very cool to see this perspective, getting to see this is what's had me so excited for this story for so long. Glad to finally be reading it!

[PeachClover]

"Be still, and know that I am God... No, really, Be Still!"

[Gonefromhere]

Those PER must be as excited seeing Celestia like the Brotherhood of Nod seeing Kane live again in Tiberian Sun in their grand clubhouse...at least up until the solar beams start frying left and right... I kinda feel sorry for them, thinking they're pleasing their matron with such zeal, but ultimately displeasing her and earning balls of nuclear fusion (fireballs would be an understatement) for their efforts. Sure they're doing bad by ponifying people against their wishes, but also good too in a way giving them a way out of a scorched and dying earth, plus offering aid to those out in the boonies that otherwise wouldn't have a way of getting some elixir. Gray there...and that's why I'm not fond of full-on lawful types. Because Law is not Good, as Chaos is not Evil, and vice versa.

Typing of Tiberian Sun, I kinda see some similarities between the PER and Nod; in that both are rogue organizations that see what they do as right as any such group does, they seek to spread the gifts of purple and green respectively, and as Nod sees Tiberium as the next stage in human evolution, so too does the PER see ponification as an ascension of sorts. And of course, a fanatical cult around central figure/s, one with the shiny Baldness of Kane, the other with the shining Sun and Moon of Celestia and Luna. Though the end results of their handiwork are quite different. At least that's what I think anyways. (okay, been playing Command and Conquer again...)

And from there on out, Luna had to get herself a magical firewall! For she had stared into Chang'e, but Chang'e had stared back into her!

Seems Chang'e had multiclassed a few Wizard levels onto her Rogue class...

I'd read more but I'm really tired, goodnight!

[Madrigal Baroque]

This matter with the cat was very unexpected. When her sister had described the creation of an Equestrian body for the first human she had ever encountered, she had been clear about what the process had involved. It was this which Luna herself was attempting, in the case of the artifice animal Chang'e.

Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer.

As the world bent and twisted around her, as Horton Arena fell away and was replaced by a garbage-strewn, fenced in back lot under gray skies, Chang'e decided to ignore Luna and her schemes for a while. Luna had her rogue alicorn project to work out. Chang'e found herself utterly intrigued by a wonderful puzzle. Interstitial alleyways behind physical reality. It was a truly fascinating problem to solve for.

A teleporting cat.

We are all doomed.

[Chatoyance]

11501707

A teleporting cat.

We are all doomed.

I cannot claim complete originality here, Chang'e's abilities are a distant reference to Robert A. Heinlein's 'Pixel', The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. I grew up reading the greats of the Golden and Silver eras of SF.