//------------------------------// // 0. An object is inherently egotistic. // Story: Laws of Motion // by mushroompone //------------------------------// I got my fifth letter that morning asking me, politely, to vacate the premises. In the fifth letter, the order to comply was printed in bold: It has come to our attention that your Cloudsdale home has not yet been grounded, despite repeated reminders that airborne structures dependent upon cloud-walking dynamics are now considered illegal under the new Thaumagenic Radiation Reduction Guidelines (TRRG). We strongly urge you to take this matter seriously and to cooperate fully with all directives from the relevant authorities. Your prompt attention to this matter is crucial to avoiding further legal escalation of the situation. Next time, it would be in red ink. I’m not the only pegasus who’s refused to be grounded. Of course, most of the others are even older farts than me. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be the last one up here. Maybe I’ll be the only one watching when those stupid rattle-trap spaceships take off for parts unknown. Boy, would that piss off the old squad. I crumpled up the letter and chucked it out, just like the last four. If the HOA wanted me out, they could drag me out. Kicking and screaming. The coffee maker beeped. I hauled myself out of my chair by the window moseyed across the pillowy floor to pour myself a cup, every step a frivolous waste of magic. I could practically hear Soarin’s wing-belted voice in my ear telling me to quit it already, to just move into an apartment on the ground—you got that nice new coffee maker, Spits. See? You do like technology. New things are good. This is just new, Spits. I wished I had a horn so I could waste even more magic carrying my stupid cup of coffee back to my stupid chair by the window. I wished I could carry it with me on my stupid recreational flight later—also illegal, also had faceless ‘we’s threatening legal action. I wished I had the balls to punch a stupid hole in the stupid clouds and let the stupid morning sun spill over the stupid table while I drank my stupid coffee. But that would almost certainly have me thrown in jail.  So I just shambled back over to my chair and looked out the window at the dingy, sunless sky. A few months ago, that may have been a nice passtime, but the silhouette of the Middle-Equestrian ship was beginning to take shape on the horizon. It made it hard to forget all the crap I wanted to forget. The doorbell rang. I jumped and spilled coffee all down my front—not quite scalding hot, but enough to make me wince and hiss and pat myself off delicately with a tea towel in a way that reminded me of a granny even more than the crow’s feet at the corners of my eyes. I had been hiding from doorbells the past few weeks, on account of the threats of legal action, and so I slid my chair quietly out of view of the window. Then the doorbell rang out a second time, followed by a flurry of knocks and a bellowing voice: “Spitfire!” she screamed, a familiar lisp nipping at the front of my name. “Get your flank out here now!” I let the tea towel fall to the floor, a disgusting splotchy beige from the coffee. “Don’t make me drag you out of there!” Fleetfoot pounded the door another dozen times. “I’ll do it! Just give me a reason!” She hardly waited a full minute before kicking down my door and barging in. The flaps of her wing-belting vest hung open, dangling limply from her sides and exposed flared wings as she appeared in my doorway to my kitchen.  “Spitfire!” I shook my head and took another sip of coffee. “Guess you found a reason, huh?” I set my coffee cup back on the table and gestured to her flared wings. “Who let the girls out? I thought you were the absolute poster child of the wing-belters. Tsk, tsk, Fleets.” “The Cloudsdale Grounding Board called us.” ‘Us’ surely meaning the old squadron. “I—I can’t believe you’re this selfish!” “I’m not selfish—I’m stubborn.” I ran a hoof through my rumpled mane and re-adjusted my robe. “And it’s nice to see you, too. How long’s it been?” “You’re coming down with me.” “C’mon, Lieutenant. A little effort would be nice.” I once again rose from my chair and crossed the room. “How do you take your coffee, again?” “I’ve got more important things to do than help the Board evict you,” Fleetfoot said. “Like what?” I asked as I poured. “Like build spaceships?” “Yeah, actually.” Fleetfoot lifted her rear leg and let me see her cutie mark: what was once a speeding horseshoe was now a rocket with a vapor cone in its wake. “I’m in engine design—Blaze, too. You could help, y’know, if you just—” “Nope.” I used a wing to flip back my robe, revealing my own, un-changed cutie mark. “My flank’s just as stubborn as I am.” Fleetfoot’s eyes ran back and forth over my flank, searching for even the tiniest of differences. She found none. “You should go to destiny counseling,” she said. I shrugged. “Don’t want to.” “Well, I compel you.” “Well, you ain’t the boss of me,” I said. “You don’t get to pull rank just ‘cause you’re a rocket scientist now, Lieutenant. Do you want coffee, or not?” “No, I don’t want coffee!” Fleetfoot pounded her hoof on the floor and a little puff of cloud popped loose. “What happened to you, Captain? You used to care so much about bettering yourself and your team. Now there’s an actual crisis and you’re just hiding up here in your stupid cloud mansion?” “I’m too old to better myself,” I said. “We’re the same age, you idiot.” “Congrats on your youthful glow,” I growled. “But I guess I’m the old dog you can’t teach new tricks—and the flank agrees.” “Spitfire, please.” “Look.” I slammed the coffee cup down on the counter and whirled to face Fleetfoot. “I know my rights. They can’t kick me out of this place—I own it. I don’t care how many threatening letters they send me! I’m staying.” Fleetfoot shook her head. “First off, you clearly don’t know your rights. The Princess signed a bunch of executive orders at the beginning of the shift. She can seize any magic-dependent property with or without warning. You’re lucky you got so many courtesy calls,” she said, kicking the wastebasket filled with crumpled-up letters. I shrugged.  “Second,” she said, “let’s say you’re right. You’re old and you don’t have time to change, so the best option really is to just sit back and let it happen. Fine. But do you really want to alienate all your friends trying to make a statement?” I shrugged again. “What does it matter?” I asked innocently. “Sounds like the cloud of magic radiation or whatever is gonna choke us all out either way.” Fleetfoot clenched her jaw. Then, maybe so that she didn’t say anything she’d regret, she glanced at her watch. “I promised myself I wouldn’t stick around for more than five minutes,” she said, her voice low. “Maybe you’re fine with all this… this waste, but I’m not.” “Okay.” “I’ve got thirty seconds,” Fleetfoot said. “Are you coming or not?” “Not.” “So you want the royal guard to drag you out of here?” “Yup.” “Fine,” she said. “Maybe, if you’re lucky, I’ll still be willing to let you crash on the couch when they do.” When the thaumatologists first established the link between magical radiation and the slow death of our planet, one of the biggest questions everyone had was what, exactly, was radiating? Magic was efficient and clean. There and gone. It didn’t have a smell or a taste, most of the time it wasn’t even visible. How could it be choking us all? How could something with no substance, something entirely intangible, be weighing us all down? It’s more complicated than I really get. I’m not ashamed to admit that. I’ve had four years to get it, and still I only have the basics: every magical process—telekinesis, flight, weather control, transformations, illusions, all of it—is just the teeniest, tiniest bit inefficient. There’s some fraction of a fraction of a percentage of wasted energy that we all shed doing the stupidest things, like walking across the kitchen to get a cup of coffee or tearing open a threatening letter. Those extra wisps of magic have to go somewhere, and where they’ve gone is everywhere. The world soaked them up like a sponge into some other space—some extra-dimensional pocket, some invisible swollen thing none of us ever knew was there—and now it’s all full up. It’s taken on too much and it’s starting to leak back out. The more we fight it, the more it fights back. We don’t know how to undo magic without more magic. It will only get worse. It’s hard not to feel it now; some eddy curling off my primaries and building up in my wake, searching for a place to land, finding nothing. Leaching into the clouds and weighing them down with unplanned storms. Soaking into the earth and springing up as weeds that grab at legs. Making magic less clean, less efficient, less reliable. Spreading like little fingers of chaos through everything, everywhere, always. The whole planet—toast. Not right away, but soon. Another few decades. The estimate kept changing. The thaumatologists were working really hard to get it right. In the meantime, we would build our spaceships and prepare to run away. All of us. Planet Equus was no longer liveable—thanks to us—and so we’d just leave it behind and search for greener pastures. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater, huh? However you sliced it, the planet’s expiration date was further in the future than my own. Therefore: not my problem. And yet, somehow, it had been made my problem.  The first pony to make it my problem was, perhaps unsurprisingly, my debilitatingly self-aware cousin. This was maybe two or three months after the first news stories broke—back when ponies were still hotly debating the ethics of wasteful things like scheduled rainbows and magic fireworks shows. The precise meanings of “frivolous” and “wasteful” had not yet been decided. The beginning of ‘the shift’ as some called it. Sunburst called me one evening, and opened with this little number: “Spitfire! I am so sorry.” I was at the grocery store shopping for brownie mix, and the sorrow in his voice caught me so off guard that at first I didn’t respond—I just clamped the phone against my ear with one wing and continued reading ingredients to myself. “I-I should have called sooner,” he said. “I just—well, as I’m sure you can guess, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the lab with Twilight and… n-not that that matters, of course. Just… I mean, first your injury, and now this? I’m just so, so sorry.” “Well, ‘hello’ to you too,” I grumbled. I put down the box of brownie mix and briefly surveyed the cake flavors. “What exactly are we talking about, Sunny? You lost me.” “Oh.” Sunburst’s trademark surprise-concern. “I, um… I heard there were cancellations.” “Use more words.” Sunburst heaved a sigh. It crackled over the cheap cell phone speaker. “Your airshows?” I furrowed my brows. “My airshows?” Then, for the first time, something clicked. “My airshows.” “I’m sorry, I really thought that—” Sunburst stammered. “I-I hope I haven’t—” “Who said so?” Sunburst’s mouth ran forward another few words or so before he managed to stop himself. “Excuse me?” “You heard about cancellations,” I said. “From who?” “U-um…” The line was so quiet I thought it might have gone dead. “The numbers are public, Spits.” “Numbers?” “The radiation.” The sound of paper shuffling came through the phone in little static bursts. “Reports have been coming out almost daily with magical radiation outputs for… well, everything. About a week ago, a report came out about sporting events. Wonderbolts airshows topped the list.” He started spewing numbers around that point. I’ve never been good at math, so it all went over my head. I was able to tell that the numbers for us—for the Wonderbolts—were high, and higher than a lot of stuff considered necessities. Higher than a magically-induced rainstorm. Higher than a magically-collected harvest over so many acres. Higher than the cumulative telekinetics used during a six-hour surgery. It was some fraction of what it took Celestia to raise the sun—an eighth, I think. “Well,” I said in the first lull I sensed. I’m not technically sure that Sunburst was finished talking. Maybe he was just taking a breath. “Thanks for letting me know.” This struck my cousin briefly mute. “I… I assumed you already knew. Or at least thought. But I guess you’ve been… away.” His voice was tiny. “I’m sorry.” I snorted. “Between you and me, I think I’d already had my last airshow,” I said. “On account of the wing thing.” He could only repeat himself: “I’m sorry.” “No, no. That’s fine,” I said, trying to bite back my own anger. “I may as well just rip off the bandage—why should I try to keep the glory days alive as a coach when my legacy could just crumble overnight? I’m getting old, anyway. Probably gonna die soon.” “We’re the same age, Spitfire.” “Numerically, maybe,” I muttered. “But a middle-aged athlete and a middle-aged magician are two different beasts.” Sunburst sighed again, this time tense. “Oh, what now?” “I’m not doing magic anymore,” he said. “It was… I couldn’t. I just couldn’.” “Oh.” I sniffed. “Sorry.” “It’s fine.” He sounded so dismissive and tired. “I went to destiny counseling. The scans found thaumatology in one of my tributaries, so they… nudged me over. M-maybe that’s why I forgot to call you—I know the counselors said there can be some, ah… memory stuff.” I tried to picture Sunburst with a new cutie mark. I couldn’t really imagine what a magic-studying cutie mark—as opposed to a magic-doing cutie mark—would look like. My mind just got caught there. I wanted to ask questions, but I couldn’t. I wanted to tell him something comforting, but I couldn’t do that, either. Instead, I just said, “Gotcha.” It clearly wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but he hid it well. “Sorry for bothering you.” “I wasn’t doing anything important.” “I love you, Spits,” he said. “And i-if you ever need some distraction, we could always meet up for coffee sometime.” I shrugged. “Yeah. I guess we could.” He waited another long moment, maybe to see if I would suggest a time or show a little more enthusiasm. I didn’t really want to go out for coffee with my cousin. I didn’t want to see his stupid new cutie mark. “Anyway,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later?” “Maybe.” “Um… goodbye.” “Bye.” I hung up. My voicemail light was blinking, so I pressed my phone back against my ear and listened to an automated voicemail from some corporate office in Canterlot. Apparently my airship cruise had been canceled. The airship I had selected used magically-powered engines, and all airships with magically-powered engines had been grounded indefinitely. To compensate, I had been given some credit to put towards a future cruise on a more sustainably-powered airship. Their tagline—have a magical day!—was unchanged. I didn’t get a letter with red ink after all. The guard came a few days later and escorted me out of my home. They brought a team of pegasi that threw all my crap in boxes labeled with my name—which they wrote as two words, those pricks—and sent them down to the ground for me. They did this for all the remaining Cloudsdale homes. I guess I really was the last hanger-on. It was a cloudy day. We didn’t used to have cloudy days. I stood on the ground, in the shadow of my own home, and watched the fleet of pegasi toss boxes in a chain from my doorstep down to the waiting carriages. I had been told the carriages would take my things to a storage unit—free of charge. “We can ground your house, but I won’t lie: it’ll be expensive.” Some unicorn with a clipboard was taking notes on the whole thing, doing quick math in the margins of legal documents. “The land’ll cost you around a quarter million, and grounding construction will be another half, but the bigger expense is the thaumaturgy tax—there’s not very much land nearby, so we’ll have to tow it. You’ll be taxed for all the time spent in the air, plus the back taxes for, erm… waiting to evacuate. It’ll add up quicker than you think.” I scoffed. “And that’s legal?” “Perfectly,” the unicorn replied. “It’s all part of Last Gasp efforts—we need at least a little bit of magic to make it to… well, to the finish line, as it were.” I hated everything about that sentence, so I elected to ignore it. “Do I have any other options here?” “You do, actually!” The unicorn paused to rifle through the papers on his clipboard with his hooves, clearly an activity he was still mastering. “If you choose to donate the home to other displaced creatures, the government will cover the costs and provide you with sustainable housing credits!” He flashed me a brilliant grin full of square, white teeth. I noticed then that he had a cutie mark of a flipping solar panel. That had to be new. Whatever they called it—a tribute or something else equally reverential and moronic. One of the pegasus movers dropped a box. I watched it tumble end-over-end through the air a good dozen or so meters before exploding at the seams when it hit the ground. It looked less like a box and more like a sack of potatoes.  The pegasus fleet froze at once. One called out, “Sorry!” I didn’t answer, just shook my head and rubbed my temple with one hoof. “Where am I supposed to live, then?” The appraiser flipped through another few pages. “There's plenty of rental properties in the Ponyville area. A few in Canterlot, though they’re also getting to be pretty pricey. If you don’t mind a move, Fillydelphia and Baltimare are great options!” He must have sensed my lack of enthusiasm. “Of course, you do qualify as a displaced creature. You’d be welcome to move back into your home once it’s grounded.” I pictured my home divided up into five or six modest apartments. Sharing a bathroom with a once-seapony, now hippogriff, who took too-long showers and cried when it rained. Eating breakfast next to a changeling still adjusting to their permanent bug form who chewed with their mandibles open. Rooming with a unicorn who couldn’t even do their mane with their own hooves, and needed help from a more dextrous pony—namely me. “As good as that sounds, I think I’ll pass,” I grumbled. “Y’know, this is some grade-A horse apples. Charging me a million bits and change for my own house…” “Actually, my estimates put it closer to 2.3 million,” the appraiser noted, tapping his clipboard authoritatively. He noticed the look in my eyes and shifted his own gaze guiltily downward. “Apologies.” I tried not to growl. “Great…” I muttered, bank statements with considerably fewer zeros flashing through my mind. “And how much are the… sustainable home whatevers?” “Sustainable housing credits?” The appraiser awkwardly rearranged the papers yet again. “It’s about a hundred per creature housed. Now, we’ve taken a look at the floorplan—we estimate we can turn it into eight separate dwellings! Amazing, right? You even get paid for yourself if you decide to move in.” I made a dismissive sound at the idea. “I guess eight hundred Gs isn't so bad,” I admitted. “Pretty close to what I'd get on the market. Before the uh… stuff.” He laughed. “No, no. Eight hundred. Bits,” he corrected. “This is a charitable donation, Miss, not a sale.” I tried not to wince. “Ah. Right.” The pegasus movers had swarmed the exploded box and were working to cram its scattered contents into a new container. One of them picked up a blanket in his teeth and watched as it unfurled and another object fell from it: a trophy. I think the whole box was just trophies wrapped up in blankets. There were probably a few boxes full of trophies, actually. And yet, despite the fame and fortune they implied, I had not nearly enough money to actually keep the home I owned. I closed my eyes and let out a warm breath. “Fine. I’ll take the credits.” “Excellent!” The appraiser used his mouth to scribble my decision down in pen. It was hard to watch. “Your Princess thanks you. Sincerely.” “Uh-huh.” The movers were doing an entire slapstick routine above us--bumping into each other, smacking one another with boxes, and just generally bumbling about. I had never missed my stupid whistle more. The longer I watched, the harder it was to look away. “I’ll just need you to sign a few—” “Can we handle that later?” I asked. “Say, in your office? These bozos are throwing my crap to the four corners of Equestria. I’d like to make sure something survives the move. My dignity, maybe.” “O-oh!” He seemed to take notice of the mess for the first time. “Of course! Yes.” “Thanks,” I grunted.  I took a small step forward and launched into the air just in time to catch another dropped box. I noticed then that the pegasi movers were all wearing wing-belting vests—maybe that explained how much trouble they were having getting boxes from point A to point B. They probably hadn't flown in more than a year. Maybe some of them hadn't flown in the whole four. As bad as it sucked, I tried to enjoy the process of slowly packing my entire life into a bunch of flimsy cardboard boxes, if only because I was aware that it might be one of the last times I got to fly without getting looks and lectures. I probably took close to sixty trips between my house in the clouds and the fleet of trucks on the ground. I tried to feel every one of them to the highest degree. I tried to feel the eddies of chaos in my wake. Besides that, I tried not to think too hard at all. I was moving from one poisoned place to another poisoned place. What a difference it would make. My Princess thanks me. I packed my old Wonderbolts uniforms and flight plans into a box. I thought about fractions of percentages of magic building up over every unnecessary and frivolous airshow. Over decades.  What a waste. Fleetfoot’s laugh was so loud and sharp it was practically a bark. “Well!” She smirked and flicked an errant bit of mane back up into her coif. “This oughta be good.” She slumped coolly into the doorframe of her shiny new apartment; everything in the complex was white, chrome, or both, and it all had a sharp and unpleasant smell of shrink-wrapped newness. The peephole on the door looked a bit like the porthole on a luxury airship, only miniature. Every sound had a small echo as it tried to fill the vacant space. “Wait, wait—” Fleetfoot took a step back and pulled the door open even more. Then, over her shoulder, she called, “Look who it is, everyone!” The door opened into a galley kitchen. Beyond that, a small shared living space. There, hunched over a round table and cast in artificial white light, was about half of the old squadron: Soarin, Blaze, and High Winds. All three of them were out of uniform and graying, which was enough of a shock, but Soarin had also abandoned the usual windswept look of his mane for poorly-kept bangs that fell into his face. Blaze's jaw dropped and a pencil tumbled out of her teeth, rolling slowly across the flurry of papers on the table before finally tipping over the edge and clattering to the floor. High Winds pulled a pair of spectacles away from her face. I didn't exactly know what to do myself. I think I just gaped back at them. “We're just studying up for a physics exam tomorrow,” Fleetfoot explained casually. “Why don't you say ‘hi’ to your old squad?” I stammered something incoherent. Soarin managed to wave stiffly back at me, and High Winds added her own blabbering to the mix. “Well put.” Fleetfoot’s lip curled into a little satisfied grin. “I’ll be right back,” she said to the squad as she slid out the door and shut it behind her.  The hall was quiet. Only the low whir of some distant air conditioning echoed up and down the white expanse. “Now, Spitfire:” Fleetfoot said, that shadow of a smile still clinging to her face. “What in Equestria could have brought you here?” She said it in the air of a foal’s performer who, despite already knowing the answer, would allow her audience the fun of shouting it up to her on stage. “Funny,” I grunted. “I guess we’re gloating now?” “Not gloating, per se,” Fleetfoot said. “Just waiting for the punchline. You made it sound like you’d rather go down with your ship then crash on my couch.” I ruffled my wings and looked at the floor. All the clever crap I’d prepared, the excuses and the high road lies, dissolved on my tongue. “So the ship did go down.” Her tone was unsurprised. I grit my teeth. “Yep. Like you said: guards and all. My stuff is in storage.” I glanced up at Fleetfoot, but meeting her eyes only made my stomach plummet into my hooves. I looked back at the floor. “And I… need to crash on your couch.” Fleets was quiet for a long moment, I guess waiting for more. I had none. After the silence had really soaked into the cinder block walls, she said, “Okay…?” she said—not an affirmative at all, but a suspicious question. Yes, and? “Oh, what?” Fleetfoot’s eyebrows twitched up. “Nothin’. I just thought… I dunno, maybe you'd have more to say.” “Such as?” “Ah, gee, let me think…” Fleetfoot’s tone twisted downward into something hostile and bitter. “Maybe an apology? Maybe an admission that stubbornness isn’t gonna get you through this? Or would that be asking too much?” I scoffed. “I dunno what you’re talking about.” Fleetfoot rolled her eyes. I remembered the days when I could have scolded her for that. “I’m not trying to be your friend,” I said. “I need a place to stay for a couple days until I get the house stuff figured out,” I lied. Down the hall, a door creaked open and a unicorn peered out. I sort of recognized her, but sort of didn’t. She was wearing a thick pair of glasses and a magic-suppressing ring. “Hey, Fleets?” she called. Fleetfoot looked down at the floor. “Yeah?” “Do you have the choke point pressure data for the new nozzle?” she asked. “It’s not on my spreadsheet.” “Yeah. I’ll get it to you in a few, okay?” Fleetfoot replied, her eyes still glued to the floor. “Little busy right now.” The unicorn looked me dead in the eye, as if trying to divine my reasons for being here. “Well…” the unicorn droned, her eyes still locked with mine. “I’m a bit stuck until I have those numbers, so maybe you could—” “Moony!” Fleetfoot snapped. She gestured vaguely in my direction. The unicorn—Moony, I guess—looked at me once again. Though she still seemed a bit lost, she murmured an apology and retreated back into her apartment. “Sounds like she needs the choke nozzle data,” I said. “It can wait.” Fleetfoot waved dismissively towards the now-closed door. She then shook her head and let out a tiny sigh. “Y’know what we’re drilling in there?” “Nozzles?” “The laws of motion,” Fleetfoot corrected. “We learned ‘em back in flight camp. Remember?” I shrugged. “Barely,” I admitted. “‘An object at rest stays at rest’, or whatever.” “That’s the first law,” Fleetfoot said, a note of surprised pride sneaking into her voice. “But there’s actually an earlier one. A zero law. They added it after the shift, since a lot of the new physicists were having trouble learning the basics.” “They added a law of motion?” I repeated. That nearly got her to crack a smile. “Just to the textbooks, Captain. Not to, uh… life.” She cleared her throat. “The zero law is that all objects are inherently egotistic. Selfish. They only care about what’s happening to them, and only what’s happening at that exact instant—they don’t have memory, they don’t linger or hold grudges, they don’t act of their own volition. In a physics problem, the objects will only ever react, and only instantaneously.” “Uh-huh.” “You’re being a bit of an object, ma’am.” “I got that,” I grumbled. “I don’t think it’s your fault,” Fleetfoot went on, her voice low. “I know you’ve had some pretty good reasons to be selfish in the past. And it wasn’t exactly a disservice to the ‘Bolts—you pushed us in ways you wouldn’t have if you were more…” She let the thought trail off there. I guess I was thankful; more what? More kind? More understanding? More empathetic? “Y’know.” “Thanks.” “You can stay with us,” Fleetfoot said. “Crash on the couch. I know you need it. But you need to do something for me.” I stuttered out a syllable or two before finally landing on what I really meant: “Yeah. Fine.” “You’re gonna go to destiny counseling.” She said it like it was already decided. “Just once a week. There’s a few counselors on campus. It’ll be totally painless. Everyone’s going through the same thing, y’know.” “So I’ve heard.” “I think you need it,” Fleetfoot said, and it pissed me off how she made it sound so pathetic. Like I needed an intervention. Like I was a dog awaiting euthanization. It also pissed me off how she made a thing for me sound like a thing for her. But I guess I’m just selfish that way.