//------------------------------// // Chapter 21: Transmission // Story: Equestria 485,000 // by Unwhole Hole //------------------------------// The facility was massive, and had been dug deeply into the earth. Based on its structure, Twilight had concluded that it had at one time consisted of even, organized rooms that had been designed and built by some sentient force. Since then, though, it had grown outward seemingly at random, populating a number of tortuous tunnels of varying size. Whether those were carved by the ever-growing fungoid machinery or some other force remained unknown.             Although Rarity had stolen the body of Twilight’s morphiplasm suit, Twilight had retained the central processor and forward sensory array. Doubtless, Rarity would have no use for them anyway, despite her extreme and almost uncanny proficiency at reconfiguring the suit itself. This proved to be an advantage, as Silken had moved quite deep into the tunnels to set up her factory. Finding her without technological assistance would have been difficult, and searching would likely have indeed been dangerous.             The other ponies had elected to follow Twilight. She had no idea why, but their attitude toward her was surprisingly warm. It almost seemed as if they were afraid to be without her now that she was at least able to recognize them.             Applejack and Rainbow Dash approached Twilight and walked alongside her. Rarity remained behind them, occasionally shifting her clothing without a word and thinking that Twilight could not see. Fluttershy cowered in the rear, and Pinkie Pie lagged with her.             “Applejack,” said Twilight. “I’m concerned about Pinkie Pie. I don’t remember much, but I know she wasn’t like this.”             Applejack turned to Twilight. She looked a bit pale, and her expression looked curiously similar to Pinkie Pie’s. “She’s hurting. Bad.”             “But she’s always so happy!” said Rainbow Dash. “I mean, I keep expecting her to make a joke or jump around…” She paused. “Actually, I really need her to, about now.”             “Her whole family’s gone. Not just that, everything. Ponyville, her job, all our jobs. You can’t expect her to take something like that lightly.”             “You seem to be tolerating it,” said Twilight.             “I’m stronger than she is. Twilight, you know she’s sensitive. There’s nothing in this world she loves more than her sisters. And to be honest, I understand. I mean, I kind of knew I’d outlive Granny Smith, but…Big Macintosh? Applebloom? And my farm’s got to be gone now too, now that I think about it.” She let out a long sigh. “I’m barely holding up, Twilight. And to be honest, you could have handled telling us a little better.”             “I told you what you needed to know,” said Twilight. “But…now that I know who you are, yeah. I’m sorry.” She looked to Rainbow Dash. “I guess you’re feeling the same?”             “No. I just feel…I don’t know. Kind of weak. I guess that makes sense, I mean, I’ve been out of practice for like a thousand years…”             “Four hundred eighty five thousand,” said Twilight. “That’s almost half a million years.”             “See,” said Applejack, “there you go again.”             Twilight winced. “Sorry.”             “Oh. I was never good at math,” said Rainbow Dash. She shrugged. “Thousand, million, it doesn’t matter all that much. What matters is that I’m out of practice! Like, REALLY out of practice!”             “You’re not sad? About your family?”             Rainbow Dash sighed. “Well, yeah. Who wouldn’t be? I mean, my parents, Scoots…that makes me feel real bad. But you said they lived a good life, right? Did Scootaloo ever learn to fly?”             “I don’t know,” said Twilight. “I don’t remember that name.”             “Oh,” said Rainbow Dash, looking crestfallen. “Well, that’s in the past, right? I mean, now it’s just forward. And I’m behind! I’ve got a lot of records to break all over again.” She paused, thinking. “Actually, I bet I set a whole bunch of them back then…so…I’m going to have to beat all my own records! Yes! It’s going to be so AWESOME! First thing’s first, I’ve got to get to the moon!”             “Not right now,” said Twilight. “Right now, I need to get to Silken.”             “The robot? Why?”             “Because I still have a job to do here. Equestria is not a place ponies are supposed to be. Not anymore. I only came back because I had to.”             “And that wasn’t for us,” said Applejack.             “Applejack,” said Twilight. “If I had known you were here, of course I would have come.” That was a partial lie, of course. There would have been a great deal of consideration required to know if recovering ponies who had been dead for thousands of centuries was even a worthwhile endeavor. “But I came here for a different reason.”             “What?” asked Rainbow Dash.             Twilight tried to phrase fifty thousand years of history in a way that was as simple as possible. “There is a very deadly disease afflicting the Empire right now,” she said. “We call it the Mortality Virus. Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to cure it, and our population faces extinction within less than ten thousand years.”             “Extinction?” said Applejack. “But why? How? There has to be a cure- -”             “I came here to make the cure,” said Twilight, omitting the fact that it required salvaging genetic material from Cadence’s inert but immortal body. “This our last hope. If I can’t do it, then…”             “Well, that’s a dumb thing to say.”             “What?”             “Of course you can make it!” cried Rainbow Dash.             “Indeed, darling,” said Rarity, picking up her pace to join the three ponies in the front of the group. “Twilight, if there’s anypony who can make a cure for a disease, it’s you!” She paused. “Although, if I recall, Zecora was always a bit better at it…”             “Thanks. Sarcasm,” said Twilight. “But there hasn’t been a living zebra in…well, a long, long time. They tolerated the Exodus poorly.”             “I do have to ask, though,” said Rarity, her voice falling slightly. “If I’m going to be spending time amongst your new subjects, what is the threat to us?”             “To you?”             “Yeah,” said Applejack, seeming to catch what Rarity meant. “This virus thing. Can it get us sick?”             Twilight thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “So far, it can infect every pony except pure alicorns. So it would probably infect you too…”             “Oh my,” said Rarity, her expression and entire body posture changing suddenly. “Then that means…I can’t…”             “But I doubt it would lead to symptoms,” said Twilight. “The Mortality Virus progresses extremely slowly. It creates a degenerative illness that limits a pony’s lifespan to on average three thousand years. Since your lifespans are already so short, you probably would never feel it.”             “Three thousand years?!” cried Rainbow Dash.             “Golly! And that’s a ‘shortened’ lifespan! That’s like saying a short ton of apples is light!”             “It’s long to you,” said Twilight, “but tiny to them. Before the virus struck, ponies were universally ageless.”             “Ageless?” said Rarity, her attention picking up.             “Immortal to time. They didn’t age. Ever.”             “But three thousand years is still a really long time,” said Rainbow Dash. “I mean, do you know how many naps I could take in that?”             “It’s more than that,” said Twilight. “It’s hard to maintain a population when a mare can only produce one or two foals in a ten-thousand year period.”             “That long? Couldn’t they…you know…”             Twilight shook her head. “There was never evolutionary pressure. In fact, immortals reproducing quickly would be a disaster. It’s called fecundity. And it’s too low for our population to survive unless they’re immortal. We can’t replace ourselves.”             “Speaking of replacing yourselves,” said Rarity. “Have you…”             “Done my part to increase the birth rate? No. But not for lack of trying. Unfortunately, pure alicorns are barren. Yet another thing Celestia neglected to tell me…”             “But Cadence- -”             “Was a unique occurrence. And she only ever ovulated once.”             “Ah,” said Rarity, clearing her throat. “You mean Flurry Heart was an only child, then?”             “Yes. And for a time she was the only thing keeping our birth-rate tolerable.”             The other ponies looked extremely uncomfortable at this.             “Now, Twilight,” said Applejack, “I know for you, she’s got to be getting pretty old now…but she was just a little filly a day ago for us. And now you’re talking about her…being a mare…”             “Yeah, it’s super weird,” said Rainbow Dash.             “I was just planning her cutesinera,” said Rarity. “I wonder if I ever did get to it. The other me, I mean. Oh, it was going to be impressive! I suppose she’s still around? Flurry Heart, I mean?”             Twilight looked forward, not turning her head. “She was not a pure alicorn,” she said, flatly. “The Mortality Virus claimed her eight years ago.”             The other ponies stopped walking.             “Twilight, I’m sorry, we didn’t- -”             “It doesn’t matter,” said Twilight, still not looking back at them. “The past is the past. The dead are the dead. But you can see why I have what you could call a ‘vested interest’ in curing this disease.”             Silken was indeed deep in the facility, in a place where the unnamed and unnamable machines that grew on the walls had grown thick and wild as rope-like tentacles diversifying into their own webs of glowing mechanisms and luminescent pipes. There were less lights, but because of the type of machines in this area that did not matter; vision was still possible, even if the shadows had grown more strange and ominous.             When Twilight entered the room where Silken was waiting, she heard screams from behind her. She turned, confused as to the reaction of her compatriots. Then she looked to Silken. There was nothing unusual; she had assumed a full-interface mode, splitting her body in half and opening her face to reveal her gray, convoluted central processor and the support structure beneath. After a moment, though, it occurred to Twilight that seeing a pony-like form split open into an unrecognizable form was probably slightly unnerving to those unaccustomed to it.             “Silken,” she said. “Progress?”             The part of Silken that had been her head turned toward Twilight, illuminating her with the light of the blue hard-light cables that led from her central core to the machinery on the floor. The nanobots had indeed grown, and assembled a factory- -although not quite the one Twilight had designed. They were spread out over the black substance of the floor, which had grown upward into a complex form that integrated and interfaced with the silver-white fluid and metal arches that rose and stretched across the floor.             “What is this?” said Twilight.             “The fundamental structure of this environment reacted to the presence of the nanofactory,” said Silken. She paused, and then closed her body, carefully reassembling her shell over her central processor but keeping the interface cables, which she moved from her head to one of her auxiliary notochords. “It assembled a support structure.”             “That was not in my original schematic.”             “I altered the design to accommodate a substrate layer. This increases the efficiency of resource acquisition. I cannot interact with the black mold, but it appears to understand what the nanofactory is and what it requires to operate.”             “It doesn’t ‘understand’ anything. It’s mold.”             “Yes. But it reacted in a beneficial way.”             Twilight sighed and separated a large programming cube from her own processor. “Here,” she said. “These are the parts.”             “Building them will take a few moments,” said Silken. “Even with the advanced architecture, legacy technology still has an effect on our speed.”             “Once we get connected to the ship I’ll have them send down a modular factory,” said Twilight. “A real one.”             Silken installed the schematics into her interface program, and the nanobots reacted, rising up in their various wells and frames like a silvery liquid. Silken, while performing this task, turned to the other ponies. “You brought friends,” she said. “And gave Ms. Rarity your morphiplasm.”             “Well, I may have…borrowed it,” admitted Rarity. “Without asking.”             “Ah,” said Silken. “I’m sure you read the appropriate documentation and understand the spells necessary to denigrate it.”             “De…integrate?”             Silken nodded. “Removing that type of suit is almost impossible otherwise. After all, it is engrained directly to your nervous system.”             “Oh…”             “Don’t scare her, Silken,” muttered Twilight.             “It may be less painful than I anticipate,” said Silken, shrugging. “After all, you seem to show an almost unnatural proficiency at using it.”             “Oh. Well, thank you.”             “Your welcome. But I did not know what else I should have expected. The legends about you are true, it seems.”             Twilight froze.             “Legends?” said Rarity. “Oh my. Twilight, you didn’t tell me there were legends!”             “I don’t know how comfortable I feel about being a legend,” said Fluttershy, softly.             “That’s because there are no legends,” said Twilight, turning quickly to Silken.             “Not widely known ones, no,” said Silken. “But I reviewed my memory systems, and I began to develop a suspicious about the identity of these ponies.”             “That’s not possible! I didn’t even know who they were!”             Silken smiled, mostly because she was programmed to. “No. You had forgotten. But my mother would sometimes tell me stories, about the Elements of Harmony. They got distorted over time, I suppose, but I like to think that many of them were still partially accurate.”             “Your mother? How would she…” Twilight’s eyes widened. “Silken, what generation are you?”             “Mother?” said Rainbow Dash, stepping forward and taking control of the conversation. “Wait a minute, wait a minute! Since when do robots have mothers?”             “Everypony has a mother,” replied Pinkie Pie. “Except me, now, apparently.”             “I told you. I am not a robot. I am a remnus. A remnant. I was born, just as you were.”             “But you’re some kind of machine,” said Rainbow Dash, clearly not understanding.             Twilight and Silken looked at each other. “I don’t think they know,” said Twilight. She turned to her friends. “Remni are a byproduct of the Mortality Virus.”             “What are you saying, Twilight?” asked Applejack.             “All modern ponies have pseudo-genetic cybernetics architecture- -”             “Um, in Equestria, please,” said Fluttershy. “I mean, if you don’t mind.”             “Cybernetics. From birth,” said Silken. “Our bodies and brains are augmented by machinery. It grows with us, and gives us far greater intelligence and ability than we would have without it.”             “We…?”             “When a pony is infected with the Mortality Virus,” continued Twilight, “her brain begins to decay. The cybernetic architecture compensates, replacing damaged portions with artificial components to maintain function. Most ponies don’t even realize that it’s happening. That their brain is dying.”             “Twilight…”             “In one in one thousand cases,” continued Twilight, “the brain continues to function even after no organic portions are left. When that pony is…well, dead.”             “As was my case,” said Silken. “In life, my name was Cloudy Heart. I died of the Mortality Virus, and my central processor was placed in a manufactured body.”             “Then you’re…” Rainbow Dash gulped. “…undead?”             “Yes,” said Silken with a smile on her face. “I am devoid of volition, consciousness, or identity. We remni persist to serve the living. Usually.”             “Usually?”             Silken nodded. “The normal half-life for remni is twenty years. Few of us live longer than fifty.”             “Because the architecture decays,” said Twilight.             “No,” said Silken. “That is a misinterpretation.”             “But the scientific studies on the aspect- -”             “Oversimplify. Remni do not fail. They self-terminate.”             Rarity gasped. “Wh- -why?”             “Because we realize what we are.”             “And how old are you?” asked Pinkie Pie.             “One hundred and eighty seven,” said Silken. She looked at them and gave a far more sincere smile. “But please don’t be afraid of me. I was once a pony, but I’m entirely machine now. There is no reason to be frightened.”             “Well,” said Applejack, “I can’t speak for the others, but I don’t feel afraid. I just feel….”             “Weirded out?” said Rainbow Dash.             “Yeah. Really, really weirded out.”             “I am told that fades,” said Silken. “All ponies invariably come to accept us as part of life in the Tribunal Empire. After all, they kind of have to. We outnumber the living three to one.”             “Three to one?” said Rarity, trying to do the math in her head. “But that would mean…”             “That the situation is very dire,” said Twilight, finishing Rarity’s sentence for her. “So hopefully you realize just how dangerous this virus has been to us.”             There was a sudden sound of a bell. Fluttershy squealed and hid behind Pinkie Pie.             “What was that?” asked Twilight.             “The bell,” said Silken. “It means the parts are done.”             “I didn’t design a bell into the system.”             “No. I did. I added it because I thought it would be cute.”             “In all honesty, it was,” said Rarity. “Very quaint.”             “Thank you.” Silken turned to the machine as the silver fluid began to depart from the bed of parts that it had assembled. Silken took control of the remainder of the factory, lowering the various arms and effectors necessary to lift and assemble the components. She did so manually, but with mechanical precision and speed. Within seconds, she had assembled a communications hub. In accordance with Twilight’s design, it was roughly eight inches in diameter and circular.             Silken immediately began integrating it to the nanofactory and the fungoid substrate below it.             “I am interfacing the central hub to the holographic projectors around this room. This place is permeated with them.”             “Are we receiving a signal?”             “Working.” Silken paused, her visor appearing over her large eyes and dilated pupils. Then, after a moment, she looked up. “Yes,” she said. “Signal link established. Shall I connect us?”             “Immediately,” said Twilight.             “It will be done.”             The lights in the room flashed and flickered, and then dimmed. The tendrils of black material shifted and turned, opening and producing needle-like projectors. These linked to one another through thin, rainbow-colored beams. Twilight- -and the other ponies, although with much greater amazement and fear- -watched as the center of the room over the hub began to shift. A hologram formed, separating shapes and generating false colors. Within seconds, a slightly distorted holographic image of the captain appeared.             The room ceiling was high, allowing the captain to materialize a representation of herself at full scale. Twilight was surprised to see that she was represented partially in reasonably realistic color. It was not hard, though; to Twilight’s more evolutionarily primitive eyes, all modern ponies looked nearly white.             The other ponies gasped at the sight of a pony who might very well have been one or all of their descendants, and although the captain was nearly blind her eyes shifted toward them, and then back at Twilight.             “Goddess,” she said, speaking in her own language. Not only did she not know the ancient and forgotten language of Equestria, but her vocal organs were not capable of producing consonants. “What is this?”             “I’ve been delayed,” said Twilight, replying in the appropriate language. “The atmosphere had more interference than I anticipated. Your remnus did not have the necessary range.”             “That is not what I mean,” said the captain. The holographic representation of her thin, atrophic body moved through the air, showing no signs of the supports imbedded in the back of her skull. “What are those…things?”             “They are inconsequential,” said Twilight, for the second time that day telling a partial lie. “I’ve been delayed on my mission, but I need to make up time.”             The captain’s eyes narrowed, to the extent that they could. “It would seem to me that you have already solved it.”             “No,” said Twilight. The captain was not privy to the entire context of the mission; she was not aware of the necessity of retrieving Cadence’s genetic material. “I’m not done yet. I need support.”             “Do you think I don’t know what those are?” demanded the captain. Her eyes turned back to the ponies, and all of them save Rarity- -who stood wide-eyed and transfixed by the sight of the immensely tall and thin alicorn before her- - recoiled from her gaze. “I am familiar with paleontology. Two earth-ponies. Two Pegasi. One unicorn. All extinct species. At least, they were supposed to be. Do you mean to tell me the planet is populated?”             “No,” said Twilight. “Nor can it sustain any form of sentient life. All signs show that pony civilization collapsed shortly after the Exodus. I’m actually underground, in a ruin of it. There is nopony alive here.”             “Then what are those things standing behind you? Silken?”             “They are an anomaly,” said Silken. She spoke in the ancient language, but it was clear that she was multiplexing her signal; the one she was sending the captain was fully intelligible to her, while the sound she made on Equestria was understandable to those that required a language spoken with more than two vowels. “Their origin remains unclear.”             “But they are ponies.”             “Yes, according to my current scans. I have not yet performed an in-depth medical analysis; I have not been equipped for any sort of medical procedures or imaging.”             “Wait,” said Twilight. “What?”             “Silken,” said Applejack. “We can’t understand what they’re saying!”             The captain winced. “Was that speech? It sounded horrible. But it does confirm what I suspected.”             “It confirms an anomaly, yes,” said Twilight, still in the proper language. “But one that is trivial- -”             “It is not an anomaly, Goddess.”             Twilight frowned. “You should be a little more careful with your tone.”             “Not when I’m speaking the truth. You’ve completed your mission. You can now return to the ship.”             “I told you, I haven’t- -”             “Look right there!” cried the captain, her voice causing even Twilight to jump. “We came here for a cure to the Mortality Virus. I thought it would take you years, even centuries to find it- -but it is right there! I don’t know what you were intending to find here, but as I see it, they are the solution.”             “Stop interrupting me. They are NOT what I came here to find.”             The captain’s eyes narrowed. “Then you had something particular in mind.”             “I may have.”             “So the mission was never about curing the plague, was it?”             “No. It was. That’s what it was always for. What I always wanted.”             “Well then somepony is lying to me, or not giving me the information I need to do my job!” One of her hooves pointed toward the other ponies. In the real world, she was not capable of moving them any more than a few centimeters at most, but as a hologram her choice of motions was her own. “The Virus makes us mortal. But they are ALREADY mortal.”             “And they will die!” cried Twilight, perhaps too loudly. “It won’t even take very long! Thirty, forty, a hundred years? A trivial amount of time! Yes, the Mortality Virus won’t affect them, but what’s the point? They’re doomed anyway!”             “Because they can do something we cannot.”             “Which is what?”             “Then can breed.”             “BREED?!” cried Twilight, which came out as an extended shriek of an inflected “i” sound. This caused the others to jump in surprise, as if they too knew what the captain was implying. “You- -you can’t be serious!”             “I don’t mean by coercion,” growled the captain. “Look at them. They’re small, colorful, soft. Adorable.  Are they mares or stallions?”             “Mares, but- -”             “Mares like that would have their pick of every stallion in the Empire. Or pick of mares, if they desire.”             “But they can’t- -the genetic divergence, it wouldn’t- -you couldn’t- -”             “Silken?”             This time, Silken only spoke in the modern language. “Technically, yes,” she said. “Despite the variance in physiology, the chromosome number is still equal. Hybridization would be possible.”             “How did you know the chromosome number if you didn’t- -never mind! Captain! You’re being ridiculous! Even if we did that, then what? Even if each and every one of them had ten children- -if you can even get that many out of Fluttershy- -that would only be fifty!”             “Goddess,” said the captain, slowly. “I do not know my exact age. The records were destroyed when my megastructure went dark. But I know that I am well over four thousand years old. At the far edge of my life. I have few friends remaining from my youth. Most departed us without bearing children, and not from lack of trying. Those that did had one. None bore two.”             “But that has nothing to do with curing the Mortality Virus!”             “In my lifespan,” continued the captain, both ignoring Twilight and arguing with her directly, “how many ponies could those fifty have made?”             “Given unlimited resources and producing ten children every twenty years, five times ten to the two hundred,” said Silken.             “Silken, don’t be ridiculous,” said Twilight. “That’s not how a birth rate works, it would be- -wait, why am I debating this? That doesn’t do anything for the Virus! We’d still all be infected! The entire population would still be mortal!”             “And is that a bad thing?” asked the captain.             “YES!” screamed Twilight, this time reverting to the ancient language and forcing Silken to translate. “That’s why I came out her to this alicorn-forsaken rock in the first place!”             “That was NOT our mission!” exclaimed the captain. Her raised voice sounded almost musical, not panicked like Twilight’s did. “Our mission was to save ponykind! So what if we’re mortal? So what if we have to die? I don’t care. I’ve come to accept that fact.”             “I haven’t.”             The captain glared at her. “And decisions on the nature of mortality are not yours to make. You are the last pony who can comment on what it means to live AND die.”             “What do you mean by that?”             “I mean that we were never meant to live forever. Silken?”             Silken shook her head. “I am already dead,” she said. “And it…it did not feel like anything. It is just like living. But I cannot reach a conclusion either way. I am sorry.”             “You have no reason to apologize.” The captain turned to Twilight. “I am sending a rendezvous point to Silken Dream near your position. We will send you a landing vehicle. Those ponies, they cannot survive on that planet. You know that. I will take them, and we will leave with them. You can return with us and watch as your Empire returns to glory. Or you can stay on that empty planet, trying to find whatever pointless thing you refuse to inform me about.”             Twilight looked up at her, dumbfounded at how a pony would dare speak to her like that. She was about to respond- -or retort, or protest, or maybe even scream- -when a different voice identical to her own spoke.             “Warning,” said the dead-eyed hologram that had appeared on the side of the room. “Heuristic analysis has indicated that this channel is parsed. Do you wish to continue transmitting?”             “Parsed?” said Twilight, looking at the hologram version of herself. The captain looked at it too, and her eyes momentarily widened with emotion. Not surprise at the presence of hologram, exactly. To Twilight, it looked more like anger. “What do you mean parsed?”             “I think it means that somepony else is listening to the signal,” said Silken.             Twilight turned sharply to the captain.             “It must be Inky Nebula’s scanning equipment falling out of sync with the ship’s system,” said the captain. “A clerical error, but one that needs to be addressed quickly if we are to continue to communicate. I need to go. Take them to the rendezvous point. If you value them and us at all, let me take them. If you don’t, none of us will survive.”             And with that, her hologram flickered and vanished. The transmission had ended.