Replay

by Scootaloose

We're not alone

We're not alone

Tanks. Tanks everywhere. No, not military tanks, but the ones that look like hot water tanks in people's houses. Rows and rows of them, lined up to the wall and surrounded by the same cold fog that filled the entire room - which now that the fog has died down a bit around us - we saw that it was circular. In the middle of the room was a small group of consoles made up of about six large screens, all of them turned off, two of them were cracked in the corner looking like they've gotten a few hits. I felt my coat shiver from the cold, and if it was possible I bet it was going to stay on end.

"So, what the hay is this place?", Daring Do asked.

"You're asking me? I'm pretty much as confused as you are!", I retorted, a bit cranky from the cold.

"Then we better start looking around if we don't want to freeze in here. How the hay did they make this place so cold?" she asked, shivering a bit herself.

"My best bet is air conditioning, but you'd need a pretty damn good one for it to be this cold."

"Air conditioning?" she asked. "You mean the big metal contraptions that can cool air?" Hmmm... I didn't know she would know about air cond- wait what?

"Hold on, you've seen one of those?" I asked, mildly surprised by the fact that she knew what I was talking about.

"Yeah, there's one on display in the castle museum. It was discovered by one of the royal scouts that came before me. Pretty neat find, I might say." She replied, "But we don't really need those around here because it doesn't get too hot in the summer around Canterlot. The regions more to the South of here might use them once in a while, though..."

"So wait..." I interrupted her, "you ponies salvaged technology -I'm guessing out of the blue now...- from US???"

"By 'us' you mean humans? So that's where these things came from?"

"You could say that..." Well this wins the cake... Ponies are now the dominant society on Earth and this is the future, and god-knows how long time has passed!

"Ok, so now this kinda explains why I didn't see any humans around yet. But it still doesn't explain how you guys can talk..." I said.

"I guess you could say... evolution?" Daring Do shrugged. "Let's just stick with that and find any useful information around here before we freeze to death in this room..." she shivered her coat again.

"Good idea. Let's take a look at those consoles." I said. We walked to the console with the least cracked screen we could find and tapped a random key. The screen flickered a bit and displayed a list of names, along with a frontal shot of their faces on the side - none of them that I recognized.

"Wow... so that's what humans looked like..." Daring Do commented, her eyes wide open staring at the screen while I scrolled through the list. "You guys looked beautiful..."

"I could say the same thing about you guys." I smiled. "It's just so surreal it's hard not to stare sometimes..."

Daring Do turned her head to face me; she looked suspicious. "Are you implying something here?" she asked. Oh come the fuck on it was just a compliment!

"Uh... no? Why would you think that? Were you implying something when you commented on humans?" I retorted.

"No! It was just a compliment!" she exclaimed.

"Same thing with my comment... now let's just drop the subject and move on..." I sighed.

"Agreed." she nodded and faced forward to look at the screen.

When we reached the bottom the screen i broke the silence. "Well, I don't recognize any of these people - I'm kinda glad I don't, really."

"There's more than just those people, I think..." she commented, pointing at the top of the screen. "This list is called 'Staff'; there's another one next to it called 'Subjects'."

"Well that's kinda fishy..." I said, "what kind of experiments were they doing here?" I carefully used my hoof to move the cursor to the next tab and opened it, revealing an even longer list of names.

"Well this is odd..." Daring Do said. "Look at the information for each name on the list." she pointed a hoof towards the right side of the screen.

NAME: Frank Abel (Male)
DOB: September 25, 1963
Freeze Date: October 9, 2016
Status: Death from leukemia

"Freeze date? The hell?" I asked out loud, "Were they freezing dead people in here?"

"What's this leukemia he died from?" Daring Do asked, "I never heard of that. Is it some kind of creature of your time?"

"It's a type of blood disease. Pretty much fatal for all cases and there was no cure for it in our time." I answered. "But why they're freezing a dead person with leukemia is beyond me..." I closed the man's profile and loaded the next one on the list.

NAME: Hannah Annakie (Female)
DOB: March 3, 1971
Freeze Date: June 9, 2014
Status: Death from pancreatic cancer

"Another dead person..." I commented. "This is creepy if you ask me..."

"I'm with ya on that one." Daring Do said, her face mildly disturbed when I took a glance to the side.

A few minutes passed and we scrolled through the list, and pretty much all the subjects on that list were listed as dead by some type of terminal disease - most of them cancer. Luckily I didn't know anyone on that list, since that would have been pretty shocking (Not that this was not shocking in any way). By the time we reached the end of the list, it occured we were still in that freezing cold room.

"Johnny, are you still feeling cold?" Daring Do broke the silence.

"No... why? Hold on... Is it getting warmer?" I said. I realized that the room was no longer freezing cold and that the room was at a tolerable temperature.

"I don't think we're the only ones in here..." Daring Do said, now looking around suspiciously, "I'll go check out the other rooms and make sure we're safe. Stay here no matter what, I won't be gone for long." she ran towards a door in the far end of the room and disappeared, leaving me alone in the room with the console. There were a few names remaining in the list so I decided to take a quick look at them.

NAME: Amy Winter (Female)
DOB: August 17, 1996
Freeze Date: January 7, 2016
Status: In Cryogenic Stasis

"Oh fuck... this is not the kind of "alone" I was expecting... holy shit!" I said out loud, almost screaming. Daring Do came back a few seconds later. "What happened? Did you find something?" she asked. I motioned her to come look at the screen, and when she saw the last line, her eyes went wide open.

"You were right, we're not alone in here", I said. "We need to find her and get out of this place. Did you find anything on your end?"

"I'm suspecting that there are some Diamond Dogs nearby. I heard some clinking sounds coming from a wall not too far from here. Probably their pickaxes. Let's hurry up in here."

"Diamond dogs... what?" I asked, confused.

"They mine for precious or shiny materials, and this place has plenty of shiny stuff..." she gestured a hoof towards the metal tanks - which now that we looked at them, they were labelled as liquid nitrogen. A chill went down my spine. "If they break those tanks while we're still here, things will get cold pretty fast..." she continued.

"Still doesn't explain why the cooling system stopped working." I said. "Maybe they hit a power line or something... which means... oh crap..."

"The server room will probably be extremely hot, yes." Daring Do completed my sentence. "As well as killing this... Amy that is still alive and frozen in here." she said, reading the screen with her profile. "There's a console with a window near the door we came from that we haven't looked at yet.", she ran towards the console.

We reached the console with a window that was foggy when we first entered the room because of the cold air, but now that the room was a bit warmer we could see a circular room with a small hole on the centre. The console had a small screen with a prompt for a name. Seeing as the only obvious option we had was to type the girl's name, I quickly typed in "Amy Winter" with my nose on the keyboard. Her profile came up on screen, displaying the same information on the other terminal. There was a green button on the screen labelled "Subject still suitable for thaw. Proceed with thawing process?"

"Heck yes I want to unfreeze her!" I yelled at the screen. Daring Do looked at me confused, and had that "what's wrong with you?" look in her eyes. I pressed the bit green button labelled "Thaw" (so original), and a loud hiss came from behind us. One of the tanks slid underground and showed up inside the enclosed room behind the window. The glass fogged up slightly just enough for us to see some shapes, but not see exactly what was going on. The top of the tank opened up and a small stream of liquid nitrogen came out from the bottom of the tank and went through grills on the metal floor, a huge cloud of steam coming out as it did, blocking our view entirely. When the tank was almost empty, two mechanical arms went inside the tank and pulled out what we now saw as Amy in her frozen state, which surprisingly enough she didn't look like a popsicle at all. All we saw was a light pale blur being held by two metal lines in mid-air. The tank went back inside the floor and the hole sealed itself. The arms lowered Amy's body just enough for her feet to touch the floor. Another hole opened up from the ceiling and a transparent tube surrounded the girl, which started filling up with some sort of liquid. We could barely see what as going on the whole time.

"So... is it just the head or do humans have no fur other than their heads?", Daring Do asked.

"Just our heads. We wear clothing to warm ourselves up. But we have no body hair... Most of us..."

"I see...", she said. "she's going to have a hard time when she gets out of there. This room is warming up but it's still a bit cold, even for us."

The console in front of us flashed a pop-up to us, telling us that her body was being warmed up, as well as her clothing.

"Well... that's convenient..." I commented. "Though I doubt the thawing will be as fast." Another pop-up showed up, with a timer that read "10:00".

We stood there in silence... staring at the timer counted down the painfully long ten minutes that we couldn't afford to waste. "Whale oil beef hooked!" I yelled out. "This is not helping!!"

"Whale what now?" Daring Do looked at me, "what's wrong with you lately?"

"Ah it's nothing..."I said, breathing slowly. "It's just that this is probably the last living human we'll ever see in this world and we're under the risk of either instant freezing or incineration!"

"Look, the Diamond Dogs have a fair good amount of rock to dig until they reach this place, so we still have about an hour until they break through, we'll be fine on that end" Daring Do assured me, "As for the server room we can probably find another way out if the room is too hot to go through."

"Then let's go check it out while Amy is being revived, we still got a few minutes left." I said.

"Good, I'll stay here and keep an eye on her", Daring nodded.

I walked back through the small corridor and into the server room, which welcomed me with a faceful of warm air. The lights on the terminals were still blinking, they were just flashing red, probably indicating that they were overheating. Luckily for us, computers usually have a fail-safe for these situations and it wasn't long until they stopped flashing completely. Phew, I think I overreacted too much and completely forgot about that...The room went completely silent now that the fans from both the ceiling and the servers themselves stopped spinning. I let out a sigh of relief and walked back to Daring to tell her we had a safe way out..

"So uh, the server room is a bit warm, but the terminals shut themselves off from overheating" I said.

"That's good" Daring Do replied, "Amy should be ready in a few moments"

We patiently waited for the tank filled with whatever liquid it had to drain out. Once it was almost empty, the mechanical arms came back to hold Amy in place. The transparent tank went back into the floor and another pair oh mechanical arms approached her. They were holding something and they looked like so,e type of clothing or robe. Oh I see... warm clothes... Moments later a wheel chair rolled in from behind the girl and the arms let her go and she fell back on the chair. She finally woke up and groaned a little.

"Well..." Daring Do spoke, "I think we're ready to go now."

"The sooner, the better" I said, walking over to the small microphone next to the keyboard."I guess this is how I speak over to the room she's in?" I spoke into the microphone. My voice echoed through the room and Amy looked up, still dazed. The glass Was still foggy and we couldn't tell if she was groggy, confused, scared, you name it. Daring Do stood silent, watching the girl's every move in awe. Even if it was just a slight head movement.

"OK uh..." I spoke up, "Do you see an exit somewhere in that room?" She looked around a bit and lifted and arm, pointing to one of the walls. "Good" I continued, " We'll meet you there".

We walked through the door Daring had previously investigated, and we saw the door that Amy supposedly had pointed at. We heard the tiny wheezing noise from her electric wheelchair approaching and we stood there waiting for her. She was approaching the door and it was about a quarter of the way open and I saw part of her arm and the wheelchair. My heart thumping in my chest from excitement. I could almost see part of her face when the lights went out and everything went dark. Amy let out a small shriek, I wasn't sure if it was from the sudden darkness or maybe she saw us just before it went dark, but it didn't matter at the moment. Daring Do spoke after letting out a long frustrated sigh, "Ugh, stupid dogs hit the main power line..."

"What's going on???", Amy shrieked again, "Who are you guys?" Her voice sounded dry and raspy like she was dehydrated, I wasn't surprised that she coughed right after speaking.

"We're here to get you out, Amy", Daring Do spoke, "don't worry about the dark, I got that under control. Johnny, get the water from the canteen and give it to her."

I moved my hoof toward where Daring's voice was coming, but I wasn't near her enough to reach her, so I shuffled forward a bit and rubbed the ground slowly until I felt the bottom of her leg. If it was her front or rear leg I didn't know, so I followed my hoof up her leg and I felt the shape of something that resembled a flank... I gulped silently and Daring Do broke the silence again.

"Wrong move and you're getting out of here with a broken tooth."

Amy let out a dry chuckle, "Oh I think I know what happened..."

I cleared my throat and quickly moved my hoof to the side and felt her saddlebag, which I quickly reached in and pulled out her canteen and went toward Amy, hoof extended with canteen being held on it. "Here Amy, take this bottle." I felt a tug on the bottle and I let go of it.

"Well, time to put that photographic memory to work then, Daring" I said towards Daring Do was supposed to be, I was completely blind just like Amy.

"Yup.", she replied. "We better get moving then. Good thing I brought rope so we can climb up through the elevator." I heard the sound of her hooves hitting the marble floor when she took a step, making that unmistakable "clop" sound, echoing across the corridor.

"Wait..." Amy spoke, "how why did you guys bring a horse inside this lab?"

Author's Note:

Well, that kinda took a while to get published. Too much stuff to get done and too little time to write. I think I got about 6 chapters planned out on my head ever since I finished Chapter 20... It's gonna be interesting :)

Comments

[Scootaloose]

Rainbow Dash said this right after publishing:
img803.imageshack.us/img803/8021/eda82a75b820407888d1d86.png

[yrfoxtaur]

oh man. this just got really cool.

also, stupid diamond dogs will probably wind up freezing themselves.

I think somepony should go back, behind the scenes, or even in the main sequence.

Lots of tech to salvage, esp. with Johnny actually knowing a little bit about it.

[Angels]

Dammit.

Good job though.

If only The Doctor was in one of those canisters...

[dakingofmuffins]

1888084 yes i think it should have been the doctor or Amy pond

[The Watcher 509]

DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUUNNNNN