Twilight took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Roughly twenty ponies sat at a long table in Town Hall, chatting as they ate food donated and delivered by The Hayburger. To the side at a separate table sat Twilight Sparkle, Starlight Glimmer, Rainbow Dash, Applejack, and Spike. The rest of the building was empty. Everypony else in town had already been taken care of.
"Starlight Glimmer, status update," said Twilight, between exceptionally messy bites of her burger.
"Well, it's almost nightfall. Everypony's been sorted since early afternoon, according to Pinkie Pie, including her sister Maud and Zecora. Pinkie's still out searching for any visitors or tourists we may have missed," said Starlight. "Big Mac stopped by to tell us the sheep and cattle were all fine, not to mention Apple Bloom. It appears we've solved all the togglers except for a few that Rarity and Fluttershy are working on at the hospital, and I'm sure we can trust them to manage that by themselves. We're left with surprisingly few ponies that still need our assistance, thanks to everypony's hard work. It even looks like we'll have enough time for a good night's sleep."
Starlight smiled and clopped hooves with Rainbow Dash, who spoke next. "Like Star said, great job everypony. Anyway, about the stats: not counting foals, most ponies who die before fifty die from accidents, falls, poison, or suicide. We have to learn about it in the Academy because part of what we do is roll-out prevention efforts," she said. "Most of those are going to be blinkers, so they've probably been handled by now."
"Right, so it's not a big surprise there aren't many left," said Spike. "I guess any foals would already be in the hospital?"
"Most of them, yes," said Twilight, wiping the ketchup off of her cheeks with a napkin. "Congenital defects are what tend to claim foals early, and most families know it's coming in advance. Minus those in the hospital, how many do we have in the 'Early' categories?"
"Um, pardon me for the interruption, but could you kindly explain the two 'Early' labels again?" asked Applejack. "I wanna be sure I don't make no mistakes if I gotta help out with 'em."
"Oh, certainly," said Twilight. "The 'Kinda Early' category is for ponies who are scheduled to die between one-third and two-thirds of their life expectancy based on current age and gender, while the 'Really Early' category is for ponies who will die sooner than that."
"Read this if you want a headache," said Rainbow Dash, passing an instruction page to Applejack. "The charts on the back tell you how many years somepony should live to fall into one of the edge cases."
"I thought my charts were more precise than this?" said Twilight, looking one of the instruction pages.
"Sorry, that's my fault. I changed them a little after we finalized them, Twilight. I appreciate your dedication to exactness, but we needed to be have a chance finish in time. I was pretty sure the math you provided would be too difficult for anypony else to do in their heads," said Starlight. "I used a close approximation instead. Any cutoff we went with was bound to be arbitrary anyway."
"Oh. Well, I suppose that works," said Twilight, wrinkling her muzzle up.
"It's fine, Twi. We can only do what we can do," said Applejack. "Besides, I still ain't sure what we can do for somepony if they're not a toggler. What options do we have?"
"We'll need to brainstorm on that now. How many Earlies are left, Starlight?" asked Twilight Sparkle.
"We barely have a hoofful of ponies left to solve. Two of the ponies over there are fine, they're just parents of the young foal next to them who still needs our assistance," said Starlight. "In total, there are fourteen Kinda and three Really, not counting the ponies who were in the hospital today. That said, I still have no ideas on what we can do about the non-togglers. The spell we used is fate-driven, and if we could have helped them, they'd be blinking already, wouldn't they?"
"There hasn't been much for me to do today so I've been wracking my brain on this for hours," said Twilight. "I keep getting stuck in a recursive loop with the logic. If we don't try to save them because they aren't a toggler, then it's consistent that we could have saved them as long as we never would have bothered to try in the first place. The reason togglers toggle is that we would have tried to find a solution for them regardless, either because their date was unusually early, or because something about the marking or the pony had a special significance that would have made us look deeper."
Starlight frowned. "Exactly, and that's another reason we have so few 'Kinda Early' cases. There have to be preventable deaths we can't detect, because the recursion doesn't capture them with the same kind of ontological paradox that causes the toggling in other ponies. There are lots of ponies who might have been togglers if only we would have used a looser criteria for the categories," she explained. "To put it another way, the spell isn't going to show two dates unless we would have written down the early date or otherwise looked for a solution, without having seen the later date. This accounts for Twilight, since her date is so unusual we'd almost certainly have written it down anyway. Plus, she's one of us, so to speak, so we would have been thorough."
"Well, if they're going to live one to two-thirds of their life expectancy based on however old they are now, unless they're really young at the moment, that's actually a pretty long life," said Dash. "I'm not saying we shouldn't try to help them, but we shouldn't beat ourselves up about it."
"If they're already old, that might even be past a normal pony's life expectancy," said Spike. "That's not a bad outcome."
Applejack nodded. "We had to get her done quick, and we did what we could," she said. "There was no way we'd fix them all. I mean, it's amazing we done this much."
Twilight held her hoof against the base of her horn. "I still feel guilty, but you're all right," she admitted. "Anyway, here's the crux of the remaining paradox that I haven't been able to solve. There's a chance we might be able to save some of the remaining ponies if we try. But, if we try to, and there's any chance we could save them, then they would already be toggling, because they fell within our screening guidelines... and they're not toggling. So we can't save them, which means trying to save them would be traumatic and pointless, but in that case..."
"...in that case, that reluctance to try might be the only reason we can't save them," Starlight continued. "Yeah, I've been thinking precisely the same thing. My gut here tells me there's nothing we can do. We've saved or extended the lives of more than seven hundred ponies today, which is beyond incredible. We might need to count this as a win and move on. Most of the Kinda's don't matter that much, except for a teen who will probably die in early adulthood—but he has cystic fibrosis, so that isn't a surprise to him or his family. It'd actually be weird if he didn't have the card."
"Okay, so let's ignore the Kinda's for now. Who are the Really's? There's only three of them, right?" asked Twilight.
"Two of them are already over sixty, so I think we can put them on the back burner with the Kinda's," said Starlight. "I don't mean that their lives don't matter, of course, but they've already lived a long time. The big problem is the third one, the foal. I don't remember his name, but he and his parents are tourists."
"How old is he?" asked Rainbow Dash, craning her neck to get a good look at the little colt across the room.
"And, er, how long we talkin'?" asked Applejack.
Starlight Glimmer closed her eyes. "He's five, and he has a little over nineteen months remaining. I did the sort myself, and there was nothing particularly unusual about him. His parents told me they recently took him in for an extensive physical when he fell ill, but the doctors found nothing abnormal. He got better after having his tonsils and adenoids removed, and that was that."
"Oh no. This is terrible," whispered Twilight. "We have to do something."
A long silence pervaded.
"But what can we do?" asked Spike.
Applejack looked away from the group and stared at the wall as she spoke. "Guys, y'all need to recognize somethin' here. We can't stop everypony from dyin', that just ain't how life works. Maybe we gotta accept he ain't gonna live long, and make peace with it," she said. "Obviously if we can think up a plan to help him, we should take it, but... if we can't, at some point we're gonna have to deal."
"Well, even if we do give up like a pack of cowards, what in the clouds do we tell his parents?" asked Rainbow Dash.
Starlight paused in thought. "Wait a moment. Do we tell his parents?" she asked.
"Wow. I... I have no idea," said Twilight. "I mean, if I were a parent, I would... no, wait, I don't know. I'm not a mother. I have no sound basis for making an estimation."
"Maybe pretend it's somepony you know, like, your niece?" said Spike, and then he winced. "Sweet Celestia—Twilight, I'm already sorry I said that."
Twilight grimaced, but shook her head. "No, no, that helps. It certainly hits close to home. I'm pretty sure I'd want Shining and Cadance to know. But, well..." she said, her voice trailing off as she began to chew at her lip.
"Obviously we gotta tell them. We made this bed. Maybe it was the right thing to do, but now we gotta sleep in it," said Applejack.
Rainbow Dash shook her head. "No we don't! We're just going to traumatize the family by telling them the truth," she said, then dropped her voice when she noticed ponies at the other table beginning to look their way. "Do you really want to ruin the short time they have left together?"
"Well, they might already know," Applejack pointed out. "Surely they've seen his date. Maybe they only seem okay 'cause they're expecting us to whip out a miracle."
"That's a good point. Wiping the memory of his date won't be enough to for the parents to forget that their foal is terminally ill," said Twilight, rubbing her bleary eyes. "But, they're tourists, right? They don't need to remember anything at all. I could erase their memories of the entire day, and we could come up with some sort of excuse to explain it. So we still have a choice to make, I just don't know what the choice should be."
"It's a bucked-if-you-do, bucked-if-you-don't scenario," said Starlight Glimmer, staring into space.
"What happens if we can't decide?" asked Spike. "Should we flip a coin, or something?"
Twilight tapped her hoof against the table repeatedly. "No, wait. There is a solution." she said. "We could invite the whole family to stay at the castle overnight, and tell them everything, up front. Then, they would be able to make the decision. If they choose to forget what we tell them, I can cast the spell to make it happen."
Starlight Glimmer narrowed her eyes in thought. "I'm not seeing a flaw, but I have a bad feeling about the idea. Even asking them to make that decision is going to be traumatic. Erasing their memory of the proposal won't change the fact that we traumatized them in order to give them the choice. That kind of undercuts the utility of making them forget."
"Hmm. It ain't ideal, but I agree with the plan," said Applejack. "It's the only fair way to handle it, by lettin' the parents be the ones to make the decision."
"At least this is the only loose end, but... it's just awful," said Spike. "If we can't save his life, it's bad no matter what we do."
"Well, yeah, fine. It's really sad. But it would have happened anyway, okay?" said Rainbow Dash. "I mean, he was already doomed. It's not like we did this to him! We helped all those other ponies... we just failed to... ugh, this sucks." She quickly dumped a carton of horseshoe-shaped hay fries into her mouth. It did little to hide the glum expression spreading across her now-distended muzzle.
Twilight Sparkle sighed. "Unless we come up with another idea, I guess this is all we can do. I'll have everypony here go home except for the family. We'll invite them to the castle, and I can have the uncomfortable talk with them there."
Applejack cleared her throat. "You sure you wanna be the one to do that, sugarcube?" she asked.
"Yeah," said Twilight. "I need to do it, actually. Maybe it'll be cathartic for me, and maybe it'll be Tartarus. But I'm the regent here, and the ultimate responsibility falls to me."
"Twilight, you need to lean on your friends for support," said Spike. "It doesn't matter if you're a princess or not."
"Exactly. We're in this together," said Starlight Glimmer.
Twilight proffered a half-smile at that. "I'm sure I'll need your support tomorrow, but I can handle the talk tonight. Anyway, we should all meet again in the throne room before dawn. We can wait until the original spell elapses, and then I'll cast the memory charm to remove the date memories from everypony in town," said Twilight Sparkle. "But please keep your headbands on. It's important. I'll explain tomorrow."
"I think I already know where you're headed with this, but yeah, let's keep the bands on," said Starlight. "Thanks for your help, everypony."
Rainbow Dash swallowed the lot of fries in a single gulp, then coughed a few times before she could speak. "Look, we saved a lot of lives, including mine, and I'm super thankful for that. I don't think we have anything to be sad about," she said, looking sad anyways.
"Agreed," said Applejack. She gave Rainbow a sideways hug, which made the pegasus smile for a moment.
Twilight Sparkle tried her best to smile, but came up empty. At the moment, shouldn't feel sad and don't feel sad were light-years apart.