Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me

by DataPacRat

Slack

It was only by the skin of my teeth that I avoided becoming saddled with The Honorable Captain Judge Sir Professor Doctor Missy, DSc, PhD (Canter), QC, ARA, FRSC, FCIC, CChem, FWCF, Esq... I was able to keep them from throwing in some ecclesiastical titles by stating quite firmly that I was an officially ordained minister in the First Church of Atheism. I wasn't sure whether they thought I was joking, lying, insane, or telling the complete and utter truth, but they didn't bring up that topic any further. However, keeping my name short enough so that I could actually spell it came at a cost: I had to promise Luna that I'd do an encore. I was able to beg off on an immediate performance by saying I'd have to practice, but it looked like I wouldn't be able to put away that sparkly red dress for good just yet.

There was mention made of founding a new order of chivalric knighthood based on the oath I'd described on my initial meetings with the Princesses, but I couldn't tell if they were joking, lying, insane, or telling the complete and utter truth. And as the two princesses bid their farewells and left, I still wasn't sure if either of them knew who the other really was, or if they were both just still playing along with each others' gags.

I mused that a millennia-long life might make anyone act a bit odd.

---

Most of my fellow inmates seemed to be in for poor impulse control: getting into fights, petty theft, vandalism, public drunkenness, and such - pretty much all of a kind with my own official conviction for littering. During the length of my stay, I didn't even find anyone locked up for tax fraud. More serious convicts either didn't exist (unlikely, even given the sugar-bowl-like world this was), were housed elsewhere, or were taken care of in more direct fashions, such as had happened to my attackers. Pretty much everyone involved was basically treating the whole thing like a big time-out, to give them time to calm down and get them enmeshed in The System that was supposed to help them get onto their hooves.

Everyone but me were ponies, and maybe three-quarters were unicorns. As the only non-equine, I was the subject of some curiosity - but enough rumors about the circumstances surrounding my crime were floating around that it was a very polite sort of curiosity. Anything I didn't want to talk about, didn't get talked about - at least, not anywhere I could hear it.

The food was... dull. Probably designed to help make sure prison wasn't somewhere ponies wanted to go, if there was any way to avoid it. Before arriving in Equestria, I hadn't been a vegetarian; I was quite comfortable eating meat. (I was also comfortable not eating it, and had been experimenting weekly with various styles of scrambled tofu.) Faced with the dullest sort of grasses and hay in prison, I was starting to get a hankering for some concentrated protein - enough so that I was considering redirecting my dairy production to my own stomach. That would probably be the proteiniest thing I was going to have a chance to eat, as long my species stayed consistent. Even if, a number of years ago, I hadn't made a conscious decision to try to avoid eating anything that could ask me not to (hey, I was an SF fan, and liked to be prepared for any eventuality) and a number of the ordinary critters in Equestria seemed to possess a disturbing level of self-awareness, there was the minor matter that my bovine stomach and its microbial flora were designed to process plant matter.

I wondered if, if Griffin the pirate was another ex-human, he was spending any time worrying about how intelligent his food was... and decided that if we ever did come into contact with each other, that item would probably be pretty far down on the list of things to talk about.

One thing about being imprisoned - with my day-job on hiatus for the duration, no distracting food or things I could build... I had lots of time to think. And there was a whole lot to think about. For just one example: I now had my fully-finished glasses, giving me vision roughly as good as my human body's eyes had been with their glasses - and so I could no longer dismiss the odd visual effects as some sort of 'fringe interference'. Colors were bright and even, and just about everything had actual outlines. When I looked at my forehoof from the front, I saw lines along its sides; when I looked at its side, I saw lines on its front and back. The other inmates had the occasional photograph or newspaper clipping - and the images had the same sorts of outlines. I had a pretty good understanding of photons, from simple optics to how Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, expressed in terms of energy and time, described the limitations of how virtual photons appeared and disappeared in certain ways which created the familiar properties of electromagnetic fields... but I couldn't come up with any way that the sorts of photons I knew could be jiggered to cause the effects I was seeing.

For the first time in a number of years, I didn't understand a rather significant part of how the universe worked, or even how to figure it out.

I was used to being able to describe... well, just about anything, from first principles. I knew how not only a light switch worked, but how cathode-ray tubes worked, and radio, and computers' logic gates - given enough time, I just might be able to re-implement a design for the 1980-era Commodore 64, perhaps the last computer which could be fully understood by a single person in its totality. I could describe the history of the universe from a few moments after the Big Bang to any given present-day event. I knew how the heavens worked, and was hoping to eventually travel to most of the places I'd seen in my telescopes. I understood how social systems arose from the underlying neurology, how biological systems arose from the underlying chemistry, how chemistry arose from the underlying physics. But now...

Now, I couldn't even explain how I picked up a sock from the floor.

I found this to be rather irksomely annoying. I could live with being a cow, I could get used to being female, I could even acclimate to Equestria itself having a tangible existence - but a complete absence of information on the fundamentals of how reality functioned? Intolerable!

I had access to plenty of paper, I could now hold onto a quill pen, and the prison was happy to supply plenty of writing paper... so in a combination of Equestrian writing, which seemed to be well-suited for being written by hooves, and in English to cover my remaining gaps in the local writing system, I tried writing down how I might be able to figure out some of those answers. I scribbled out flowcharts, made diagrams, jotted checklists, arranged tables, and, generally, imitated Twilight when she was focused on a new project.

Eventually, I came to a conclusion that I had two main paths open to me - fortunately, they were non-exclusive and could be pursued simultaneously. First was to try to kick an Equestrian version of the Enlightenment and scientific revolution into high gear. Second was to personally investigate anomalous situations in hopes that figuring them out would supply much-needed data to fill in the holes in my model of reality. For example, just having the surface portion of the Royal Dairy investigate cockatrice-based stonifying on a purely practical level was a good start - but it would be even better to understand what was actually involved in the petrification process and its reversal. And if I found some reports on some other form of magic with similar effects, which might be useful to compare to the animal-based version, then it just might be worth the time, risk, and resources to go collect data on that.

(Of course, that entire reasoning process was made slightly suspect by the fact that I had a rather strong urge to be almost anywhere outside the prison - the southern direction seemed particularly attractive, possibly because that was the last place I'd heard Griffin might be found.)

And once I understood enough of how this world's reality worked, and even better if I understood how this world related to the one I'd been born in, then... why, then I just might be able to do something of real value. Extending one life for a few years with a simple drug was a small start - what if nobody had to die of old age unless they wanted to? If defending a town from the monster-of-the-week was a worthwhile task... how much more so was mitigating the existential risks that threatened to wipe out all sapience? And even if I failed, and fell - if I could at least inspire other people to continue in my wake, to finish the Baconian project of empirical inquiry - then that would be almost as good as having done it myself.

Of course, I'd rather stay alive to do it myself, if I could.

One way or another, though - once I got out of the slammer, I was going to be doing some traveling.

---

Of course, I was still in the slammer, for at least a few more days. And while I could happily spend days at a time holed up with nothing but papers and reading material, now that I was relying more on my own devices to accomplish things like scientific inquiry than on general existing societal supports for the same... I also had to consider whether or not doing so was the best use of my time.

And thus I considered my various fellow inmates of the filly's wing of the Greybar Hilton.

Most of them were as bashful and embarrassed about their crimes as a kid who got overenthusiastic and did a tackle during flag football - they knew they'd messed up, and were appropriately apologetic about it and trying to figure out how to keep themselves from doing it again - even if for no other reason than to avoid getting locked back up. They were, all-in-all, perfectly ordinary ponies, just a little too far out on one side of the bell-curve.

But a few... seemed to be just hovering on this side of a more severe punishment. I looked at the outline of my hoof, recalled something I'd said to Celestia the other day... and decided to perform a small experiment to test that hypothesis.

---

The next morning, after the obligatory communal shower, which was a lot less interesting than it sounds (and only partly because everyone was running around unclothed already), I cautiously examined my potential targets during breakfast. There was the filly who kept playing the harmonica; the one who kept an array of girlie filly pics on her cell wall; the one who kept stealing a spoon to spend her time 'digging a tunnel' (though rumor had it that she'd just made herself a luxurious little basement love-nest); and similar cliches, who after some thought, I dismissed as being one small step up from the background ponies.

And then there was Red.

Red Hot Chili Pepper, to be precise. A pale-bodied pegasus, her fire-engine-colored mane was what had given me my inspiration for my cabaret rendition the other night. Of all the ponies I'd seen in prison, she seemed to be the quietest, and who took the time to consider her few words before giving them. I timed my showering and drying and such so that I was just behind her in the chow line, and took a spot at the table next to hers.

After a few mouthfuls, I glanced at her, and asked, "So... what're you in for?" She frowned at me, so I shrugged and smiled a little. "Sorry. I just always wanted to say that."

She nodded, took another mouthful of hay, finished it, and then answered, "... I ripped the tag off of a mattress. How about you?"

"Littering."

This time, we both smiled at each other.

---

A little later, I said to her, "My life has gotten strange in some very particular ways lately. Enough so that I'm actually willing to entertain the idea of looking at it from a narrative perspective - as if it were a story. In which case - it's possible that from the perspective of whoever is pulling my strings, the main reason I ended up in prison was to collect a plot-coupon of some sort which would be useful later on. Like if one day I was captured and put under a truth spell, I could honestly say that I spent some time in the clink."

"... Or if you happen to meet someone who joins you in your quest."

"Exactly. The trouble is - I've also read stories where someone who joins up like that ends up betraying the hero at a critical moment."

"... A hero's life is never easy. Do you see yourself as one?"

"Not really. But I do have some time to kill here, and I have a job waiting for me when I get out, at a place which is rapidly expanding, and can use all the hooves we can get. So I thought I'd see if you might be looking for work when you get out."

"... I might. I'm certainly not going back to the weather team."

"Sounds like there's a story there."

"... There is. But I'm not due to be let out for another month, even with good behavior."

I muttered, "Man, they must really take their mattresses seriously..."

"What?"

"Nothing. But sentences can be adjusted, when doing so is for the greater good, so let's assume that's manageable. There's still, um, how can I put this delicately..."

"... You want to know if I'm a crazed convict who's going to try to eat your liver while you're asleep?"

"Not in so many words, but that's the general sentiment."

"... It's easy enough to look it up in the papers. So to start with - I'm from Cloudsdale. Worked in the weather factory. Brewing up the rainbow pools..."

---

17 Minutes Later.

"- which is why pants should be forsaken whenever possible."

"Maybe by a flyer, but the very idea of a sunburned udder gives me the heebie-jeebies..."

---

After that explanation, of course I was willing to hire her - contingent on it actually being confirmed by the relevant newspaper accounts (which it was) - and use a bit of my growing back-channel influence to get her remaining sentence converted into community service which could be served out by being my aerial gofer. Even if it did mean that I was never going to look at plumbers the same way again...

Comments

[Salacar]

That last part: Wat?

[DataPacRat]

824201
I was trying to go for this.

[Salacar]

824219

That makes more sense, I figured it had something to do with Red's 'untold' story

[Forevermore]

Prison is such a great place to make new friends.

[DataPacRat]

825398
Introducing a new character by the name of 'Red' wasn't enough of a shout-out?

[DataPacRat]

825472
Perhaps you were distracted by the shower scene?

[RealityDowngrade]

824219

I thought you did a good job of it.

[tilkau]

could per pursued simultaneously

Also, they could stutter. (I think you meant "be")

For example, instead of just having the surface portion of the Royal Dairy investigate cockatrice-based stonifying on a purely practical level was a good start - but it would be even better to understand what was actually involved in the petrification process and its reversal.

instead of just having the surface portion of the Royal Dairy investigate cockatrice-based stonifying on a purely practical level was a good start
"Conjunctive clauses, how do they work?!"

(at least part of the Y part in "instead of X, Y" has gone AWOL)

[coandco]

Enough so that I'm actually willing to entertain the idea of looking at it from a narrative perspective - as if it were a story.

Mmm, narrative causality. It'll be interesting to see where you're going with this. I trust you've read Pratchett's Discworld series?