Archive drifted.
There was no time in the void, neither separation nor meaning. It was not death as she had known it. There was no gravity this time, no destination she had never seen to draw her in without hope of escape. Without time, Archive’s death had no beginning or end. She was everywhere, yet perceived nothing. There was peace in death, the peace of Soma and the morning dew beneath the Lotus.
So stripped of self, Archive barely felt the decay. There was nothing she could do about it this time. Archive had fought to stand against the tide and been washed away. There was nothing for her to do but wither.
Air seared her lungs like acid. Her heart labored to life, and with each twitch more pain awakened in ancient bones. Feeling returned first as agony, which left the tingling of centuries spent numb. Give up, whispered the void. Draw no more power from those who deserve it. Your age is over.
Archive forced herself to breathe. Every second was agony—like the thousand false memories she had of frostbite death. She tried to draw strength through the ground beneath her, mostly out of habit. Nothing happened.
She has another child now. Let go.
She might’ve, if she had been left alone. How long had nature been trying to kill her? Fuck you. Archive lived on out of spite.
She heard no more voices. Hours passed, hours that gradually brought back feeling into limbs long dead. Her senses returned in the same sequence she was used to, starting with touch. She was lying on something flat, with metal or glass refuse caught beneath her. Her wings felt very strange—probably she had pinned at least one of them under her body the wrong way. Archive hadn’t ever died with wings before, so she wasn’t sure what to expect.
I shouldn’t have these anymore, Archive thought, though she wasn’t sure where the thought had come from. Her memories were still trickling back.
Sight came back next. Gloom pressed in around her, broken with an arching beam of red and orange. Archive didn’t fight to get up sooner, as she had done earlier in her life. Reincarnation could not be rushed.
She lay in place long enough for weak pony eyes to adjust to the dark, long enough that she could feel the slight breeze drifting over her body, hear a shrill siren as it echoed. There were no ponies, no people. Only the siren and a flashing red light.
Eventually her limbs stopped twitching and the last of the weakness faded.
The Archive of Humanity rose to her hooves. She shook herself out, scattering a cloud of dust and clearing some of the tangles from her mane and tail.
A massive metal shape lay in front of her, hanging lopsided from enormous brackets and supports in the ceiling. Hundreds of little valves and cables were half buried in an ocean of corrosion and rust. All that was left of the fusion reactor.
Alex remembered. Her friend screaming, her daughter fighting with fang and hoof, a human soldier giving his life for her.
Archive stood in the reactor core, though few others would’ve recognized it now. State-of-the-art control consoles had been ripped from the floor in places, while others looked like they had been broken by devastating blows.
“What happened in here?” Archive found her voice came out in a low croak, tired from disuse. Her ears twitched once or twice at the strangeness of it, but she didn’t think long. There were far more significant concerns on her mind just now.
Archive made her way to the most intact-looking of the consoles, but found none of the still-working buttons actually did anything. Another sparked wildly when she touched it, but that was all.
At least someone was thoughtful enough to leave the flashing lights and wailing siren on for her. Despite the enormous vacuum of time, she remembered Paradise Crater’s layout without difficulty. The exit doors were hanging sideways in their tracks and didn’t respond as she walked nearby. The hallway from central access was mostly bare, except for the clean room suits that normally hung outside it.
The sterilization area had been shattered, medical equipment scattered and destroyed. Archive moved a little closer in the gloom, squeaking in surprise as she almost cut herself on a length of glittering glass. “Did anyone…” she muttered, digging through the refuse. She found several cyber-gauntlets, but none in pony sizes. A medical cooler slid open as she tugged, but released a stench of rotting medicine. Nothing worth having down there.
She made her way to the elevator next, always alert for a working console. She didn’t find any, not all the way from where she had started to the elevator.
The central shaft was, like Raven City before it, a glass pillar that ran the entire vertical distance of the city. It was generally reserved for priority traffic and cargo, but since she hadn’t seen another living soul…
The platform was five hundred feet higher than she was, probably near the surface. The exit doors had been violently pried apart, and hung twitching from the inside of the shaft. Even so, Archive could lean through the opening and try to get a good look at the city.
Paradise Crater, previously packed with glittering lights and scurrying robots, was completely still. Cool air rose from below in a steady stream, though there were only a few service levels beneath this one for accessing the bottom of the reactor.
Archive sat herself down, frowning up at the dark. After her last experience alone underground, she hardly felt very happy.
“Is anyone there?” she asked again, calling much louder into the dark. There was no answer.
None except the one that came from her imagination. “Hey Alex.” Cloudy Skies sounded as she had the last time, as though in the prime of her youth.
“Didn’t it take days for me to go crazy last time?”
Cloudy’s voice sounded matter-of-fact. “Maybe you never got better.”
“Maybe not.” Archive rose to her hooves, walking slowly away from the elevator. Unlike that mine she had been dumped in to rot, she knew this city. Without the power on, she would have to walk the length of its perimeter, rising to a greater elevation with each loop until she reached the surface.
“I’m not going to waste time with this.” Alex flicked her tail as she turned for another hallway. There was very little light, yet she found herself less bothered by it than she had been in the mine. Many years living in this city had also dispelled that pressing, claustrophobic feeling natural to any pegasus trapped under the ground. She had used her racial magic so little over the last few years that not having access to it scarcely mattered anymore.
“I’m not leaving.” She heard no footsteps from the pony she knew wasn’t there. Even so, the vague sense of company remained. “Not until you get out of this.”
“Whatever.” Alex found the door she was looking for, or at least where it used to be. The access ramp that led to the main thoroughfare was through a blast door nearly a foot thick. The door had been melted in from the other side. “If you’re going to stay, at least help me. Can you tell me what melted that door?”
“Better question is what happened to the whole city.” Cloudy’s voice wasn’t neutral, but then it hadn’t really ever been. “Did you know anywhere better protected? Anywhere with stronger defenses?”
“I… no.” She didn’t slow. Not as she climbed her way through the melted door, or stepped out onto the wider, gently sloping thoroughfare. Thick barricades had been erected near reactor access, and at least one mounted gun had been shattered into numerous pieces.
There were a few little puddles of water, or stray chemicals leaving foul smells in their wake, but not many. Paradise Crater had been built to survive—that included a site with a remarkably low water table and impermeable clay to keep out rain. Evidently those engineering concerns had stopped her from drowning.
Archive spoke as she made her way up—mostly to stop herself from going crazy. It wasn’t as though she legitimately thought that Sky could really hear her. No, that old friend was long dead.
“So… if this all happened right when I died, it must have only been a few hundred years, right? Otherwise, it wouldn’t even resemble the settlement I knew. Time would’ve destroyed everything… but these buildings are all the same shapes I remember. The writing is still here on some of the walls, and a few things are still running.”
It was mostly lights, and all of the same kind. The crater’s emergency network was ultra low-power, and used thermonuclear instead of the reactor. It might continue generating some power for hundreds of years, even without intervention.
“Are you sure?” Alex glanced to the side, expecting to see a pony walking beside her. She really was losing it, if she was seeing things as well as feeling in the near darkness. Yet whenever she found a light still flickering, there was clearly no one there. “The HPI uses ultra-stable compounds, don’t they? Down here there’s no water, not much air, and no seismic activity. What would rot, exactly?”
Archive stopped walking, glaring at the direction the sound had come from this time. “See, that’s how I just know you aren’t real!” she shouted. “Teleporting all around me might just mean that you’re flying really quiet, but… Sky didn’t know crap about materials or degradation or anything serious! Why the hell would I believe that you’re really her?”
She could practically feel a shrug, behind her other shoulder. “I’m not really her. We went over that, remember? You’re insane.”
“Yeah.” She sighed, setting off again into the dark. “I guess that’s right.” As she walked, Alex kept alert for anything she might use. A portable light was the first order of business, but every unit she found was dead and unresponsive. It was true the HPI’s molecular chemistry made materials that far outlasted the ones that had existed before the Event. It was less true that their batteries were different enough that they might keep working for hundreds of years.
What she really needed to find was a hydrogen gas-powered unit like the one her library had used. Such fuel cells might very well still be working, so long as the seals were intact. Unfortunately, she wasn’t likely to find one outside of the powered armor suits.
“I need to call Athena,” she eventually announced, to no one. “You see a gauntlet anywhere that still works, let me know. Or a satellite phone for that matter.”
“Okay Lonely Day. I won’t see anything you don’t already. Thought we’d already put together that you were imagining me.”
She shrugged her wings in frustration. “Yeah, I get it. Figure if I’m still going to be hallucinating you, might as well put you to work.” Her wings were still a little numb, even despite the several hours she had spent alive to recover. Under the circumstances, Alex had elected to wait to investigate them until she had proper light. Even if she had adjusted well, there was no sense in getting worked up about a problem she couldn’t fix.
She didn’t find a satellite phone, no matter how long she looked. There was no intact powered armor, though plenty of empty, destroyed suits in pony and human shapes both. No corpses, though. “What do you think happened to all the bodies?”
Sky’s voice sounded hopeful. “It probably means things weren’t super bad, right? If there aren’t any bodies, it means somebody had to bury them.”
That wasn’t precisely true, though it wasn’t as though Archive was about to argue with her. Those possibilities were so dark even she had no desire to think about them. At least with humans, there was something that could’ve happened to them that required no burial at all…
Rather than think about such dark things, Alex occupied herself searching the ruins as they came upon the city. Unfortunately for her, she found that job had already been done. The further up she went, the less remained for her to scavenge.
There were very few signs of the advanced civilization that had once been here. Wiring had been stripped from the walls, left hanging open as though huge claws had torn apart the concrete.
Archive became one of those looters. Alex found a pony helmet that looked mostly intact, its carbon fiber resin still firm despite who knew how many years. She found a backpack made for humans and used it to collect the few odds and ends that had escaped earlier thieves. A book of sturdy paper remained, along with several pencils and pens, though the paper was all blank. At least I can keep a journal.
“I wonder if I can build a satellite radio out of broken circuits and rusty nails,” Alex muttered, mostly to herself.
Unfortunately for her desires, her companion didn’t seem to care much what she wanted. “The real question is who won the war that trashed this place.”
Alex didn’t need her imagination to point out the logic of what she was thinking. “If the HPI won, they wouldn’t have abandoned the place and stripped it for parts.” Her ears and tail drooped a little, and she slowed in her fumbling walk up the ramp.
That didn’t mean all was lost, though. There had been enough belief in humanity to bring her back. Not to mention enough knowledge of human ways to know how to find almost everything of value the city had been built with.
It didn’t feel that way, but Alex had been walking for hours. The ceiling, once veiled by distance alone, gradually took shape. Its vague suggestions became the genuine beams melded with the stone. “So consider what would’ve happened when I died,” Alex muttered as she went. “I was important enough that all the ponies left respected me. Athena gets the word of my death out right away. What happens next?”
There was no response. Alex didn’t care, making her way towards the main entrance cavern. This proved clogged with rubble, so she turned and continued on. There were several smaller evacuation paths—one was bound to work. Unfortunately she hadn’t been any luckier with her salvage. She had found a few rusty tools, but they were all the sort explorers might use. Nothing that would help her get in contact with Athena.
She went on. “Bountiful would declare war the same day. Athena would’ve stopped any of the nuclear warheads from working. Then…”
“Then what?” Sky didn’t sound nearly as bored as the real Sky would’ve sounded.
“Not sure. Maybe they stay in a state of war but don’t ever attack one another. Maybe Bountiful starts recruiting regular ponies to help them, maybe they don’t. Damn ocean monster doesn’t get involved, because that would break the treaty.”
“Didn’t it break the treaty by killing you?”
She took a long time to answer. There was a little light ahead, which she took for a good sign. Not faintly flashing structural lights either, clinging to a few desperate last gasps of emergency power. Sunlight, warm and bright and inviting. “I don’t know who gets to decide what counts as breaking it and what doesn’t. I’d fucking count it if it were me, though.”
Alex stopped suddenly, eyes widening as she caught the outline of something she had almost missed. Crammed in one corner was a lightweight pony harness of some kind, one she didn’t recognize.
The room itself was about thirty feet across, with a single doorway on the far end that stretched up towards the light. A few cracks of yellow came in from far away, so bright she couldn’t look directly at them after so long adjusted to the gloom.
Alex dragged the strange broken object until it was in the light and she could get a good look at it.
As it turned out, the thing was made from milky white plastic, with clever joints of the same material holding it all together. It looked to be made to lock onto a pony’s back and point over the shoulder.
There was a cannon mounted to the right shoulder, made from the same plasticy material but with burns on the inside. “Weird.” Alex no longer felt Sky nearby, or heard her voice without a source in the dark. She had to settle for muttering to herself as she turned the thing over and examined the gun harness.
It attached by way of Velcro straps to the neck and legs, tracking the approximate direction the wearer looked with the gun and firing with a specific twist of one of the hind-legs. There appeared to be no electronics here, only gearing and joints and remarkable mechanical prowess.
There was a single magazine loaded into the weapon, and as she carefully removed it she found five bullets inside, each apparently intact. Would the darkness and temperature stability have preserved this artifact as well as it had preserved the bunker?
Archive found the gun harness only partially intact—the head tracking and aiming no longer worked, only making frustrating clicking sounds against a stripped plastic gear. It felt surprisingly light on her shoulders. Whoever had designed it had even taken the time to keep wings in mind, because it exerted no pressure on them. It still would’ve gotten in her way if she had known how to fly, but since she didn’t…
Here’s hoping you won’t need it. Alex had once had the strength of a tank and the endurance of steel plates. She had once been able to call on the confidence and strength of the spirit of Earth. She could do none of those things now, no matter how much she might still be loyal to the Keeper’s mission.
Archive made her way from the ruins of Paradise Crater, climbing steep steps towards a source of distant light. She passed through several security doors, each one destroyed. She couldn’t tell if magic or explosives had been used, but either way the armor plates and concrete barriers had been blasted to indeterminate pieces. No reason to give up. So long as Athena survived, the HPI can recover.
She saw no sign of the AI as she reached the location of the last security door, and one of the simplest exits from the bunker and onto open prairie. As she neared it she became more and more conscious of the rush of air behind her, apparently warmer than whatever waited outside. Wouldn’t it be just my luck if it was winter out there? The last security door was actually a massive bulkhead on wheeling tracks, or at least it had been. Instead of the reinforced steel and carbon fiber, Alex found a flimsy wooden board, leaning sideways on the wall.
Air rushed behind her, making her mane flutter and dance. She braced her hooves on the wood, pressing firmly on a section just a few inches above the ground. It started to lean and wobble, tilting inexorably towards her. Archive leapt out of the way just as it came down, then climbed out the opening into the light.
Lonely Day didn’t move far from the opening, standing still in the spring sunshine. A breeze lifted her wings, carrying with it the thick smells of pollen and sage. Even with her eyes closed she could feel the season all around her, as new growth stretching towards the sun.
How long had it been since Day had taken the time to enjoy nature? Her perfect memory had the answer: nine years, eight days. Well, plus however long I was dead. Day would have to wait until nightfall to know how long had passed. The only memories that weren’t clear were what she experienced while she was dead. Assuming you don’t just imagine it.
Alex opened her eyes, and nearly fell over at what she saw. A shock of white had found its way into her mane, and she pushed it out of the way. As she did, she got her first good look at her wings since she had come back from the dead, and every nightmare was confirmed.
She hadn’t been able to feel her feathers because she didn’t have any. She stretched one out, observing the dark skin, the thin bones and intricate muscles underneath. She poked it, finding the wing as tough as callous but far more sensitive.
“Guess I know how I got around so well in the dark,” she muttered, forcing her wings to close. They didn’t bend quite the same way, but a little persistence took care of that.
Alex tried not to consider her own condition too closely as she tended to the necessities of survival. In spring there was no shortage of edible plants, and she followed the thickest vegetation to a stream. Surviving out here would be trivial for her, even without pegasus magic.
But survival isn’t enough. Alex had to find her ponies. Merely eating would do her no good if the memory of Earth died.
“You still there, Cloudy Skies?” Alex asked, as she sat beside the stream and pondered what she should do next. As she had expected, there was no answer. Guess it’s only being underground that makes me crazy enough.
Lonely Day opened her senses as Sunset Shimmer had taught and searched the world for the connections that were her essence.
It was always an unearthly experience, as though she were in the center of a web of light that wrapped around the planet. She could somehow sense its every twisting nexus even though it was too big to take into her mind at once.
If her connections had always been a web before, this time someone had tried to knock it off with a broom. A handful of tenuous threads connected her to individuals, while the thicker bindings she had previously enjoyed to whole societies were gone. Except one.
It felt like half the feeble threads were all coming from the same place. Not united into a society, but thousands of individuals, each one struggling for survival.
Lonely Day had her destination. From the direction she had sensed them, she guessed they were somewhere in the midwest, or even on the east coast. Not that those places mean anything anymore. The wilderness had changed completely around Paradise Crater, every stream and tree and pond was somewhere she didn’t expect. Only the ring of familiar mountains looked similar enough for her to use it for directions.
One cord bound her strong enough that she could pull strength from it instead of giving strength. She tried to follow that one too, but found the sensations she felt quickly stopped making sense. It was on the other side of the planet at least, so far that it strained her ability to follow. She tried a few times, but eventually gave up. Whatever that society was, it could get along fine without her.
Day considered going back into Paradise Crater to search for supplies. No matter what disasters she had missed, Athena would still be there. Yet she hadn’t found anything beyond what she had carried out on the first trip, and none of it would be wiring together to make a satellite radio from scratch. I can always come back. The entrance will still be here. Maybe with a team of ponies to help and proper exploring gear. Thestrals had many talents to enhance their ability to navigate in the dark. Thinking back, that had probably been how she found her way around in the dark. She had just been too distracted to notice the information she got wasn’t quite coming from her eyes.
It will be winter soon, and I don’t have my saddlebags anymore. I don’t have Ezri, either. Day straightened her shoulders, settled the harness a little more securely, then started walking towards the connections she sensed. They were distant, hundreds or thousands of miles away. The sooner she started, the sooner she would arrive.