None of them understood what the hologram had meant when it alluded to the consequences of Rainbow Dash’s condition. The only one among them who had even the slightest idea was Silken, but she refused to speak about it. The others knew it was bad, though, and they had done their best.
Whether they had managed to be successful or not was still uncertain, but they had done what the hologram had requested. They had managed to return Rainbow Dash back into the deep chamber, and now she sat in the tube she had been born from, floating in the translucent fluid. Every part of her body was linked to thin tendrils of machinery that kept her alive and had begun the repair process. Parts of her flesh had been stripped away, revealing the chitinous creature beneath. Dark colored bones were already reforming, and the machines were slowly correcting the organic metal in her bones to make them straight and strong again.
“She looks like she’s sleeping,” said Fluttershy, who had not once left her best friend’s side.
“She is,” said Silken. Her eyes scanned past a list of vital signs. Her initial scans had indicated that Rainbow Dash had a pony physiology, but she had been mistaken. The scanning device she had used was not optimized for medical analysis, and even then no pony or remnus had seen a Pegasus in hundreds of thousands of years. Looking at the results now, though, it was quite apparent that Rainbow Dash- -and the others for that matter- -were something quite a bit more unusual than ponies.
“Silken,” said Applejack. Her face was bandaged, and Silken had administered drugs to reduce the swelling. “Is she going to be okay?”
“And…are we going to be okay?” asked Rarity. Her shoulder had also been bandaged, and although she could walk she was resistant to putting pressure on her right front leg. “And is it going to leave a scar?”
“I do not think so,” said Silken. “And if it does, we can correct it later. According to the programs I have been given, your differentiation and fallout levels are within normal parameters. You will heal quickly and be fine.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” said Applejack.
“No,” said Silken. “I did not.”
“She’ll be fine,” laughed Pinkie Pie, even if her laughter was nervous. “After all, look at her! She’s in a tube of goo! Nothing bad ever happened to a pony in goo! I bet it’s all squish and warm.”
“You were in a tube of your own,” said Silken. “Not too long ago.”
“We were,” said Fluttershy, as if this was the first time she had considered it. “But…I don’t remember much.”
“I remember that one time somepony knocked,” said Pinkie Pie out of nowhere.
They all fell silent. None of them wanted to follow that course of reasoning to its conclusion, and Silken did not want to push them.
“What was that thing?” said Applejack at last. “That creature…”
“I don’t want to know,” said Fluttershy. “And we don’t need to know. Not right now. Not ever. We’re safe here. We’re all safe.”
“Only barely,” said Applejack, angrily. “No thanks to Twilight.”
“Applejack!” gasped Rarity. “Don’t say things like that! Twilight did her very best, she just- -”
“Gave up on us?” said Pinkie Pie. “Yeah. I don’t know if that’s what you saw. But that’s what I saw.”
“You did not see incorrectly,” said a voice behind them.
They all jumped. Twilight was standing behind them, staring at them with a peculiar expression. Her face overall was neutral, but her eyes were piercing. She moved them across the group, but seemed to be looking past them. It was apparent that she had been crying.
Applejack stepped forward angrily. Fluttershy tried to hold her back, but Applejack firmly pushed her out of the way.
“I have something to say,” she said.
“I’m sure you do.”
“You left us there!”
“I did.” Twilight said it with no emotion. Silken immediately began to grow concerned.
Applejack looked taken aback by Twilight’s honesty. Twilight’s eyes had now taken to focusing directly on Applejack’s. “You know, we barely made it back. We almost…I don’t even want to say. No, darn it, I have to! We almost lost her! You ran out on us, and we almost lost Rainbow Dash!”
“She’s not Rainbow Dash.”
Applejack looked furious. “How can you say- -”
“And you’re not Applejack,” snapped Twilight, her tone so icy that Applejack was silenced instantly. She looked at the rest of them. “None of you are my friends.”
“Twilight,” said Rarity, “you can’t mean that- -”
“Look at her!” boomed Twilight, pointing. “Look. At. HER! I’ve checked over Silken’s data. I checked it again and again. Genetically manipulated flesh grafted onto Celestia knows what kind of mixture of foreign tissue and organic machinery. You’re not ponies! None of you are!”
“Twilight,” protested Fluttershy. “Please calm down. We can talk this out. We can have some tea and- -”
Twilight charged her horn, and a spell erupted from it, expanding outward in a circle. The other ponies cried out and attempted to cover themselves in defense, but the spell was not meant to harm them. As it crossed over each of them, their appearance changed. Twilight remained the same, although her aetherite collar and bracings vanished as the light crossed her. The others changed vastly, though. Silken appeared as she did without her armored carapace, as a metallic skeleton covered in machinery and robotics. Her face stared forward through a pair of electronic eyes and smaller unblinking sensory units built around a silvery brain that had long ago been organic and alive.
The other ponies changed as well. The spell showed them as they truly were. With their skin made transparent, they appeared as bizarre black creatures. They were in the shape of ponies, but were clearly not. Their bodies were black in nature, made of plates of black chitin linked by thin elements of silver organic machinery. Their faces each had six eyes, the two largest of which were pony-like with yellow sclera. The only part of them that stayed the same were their cutie marks, which were etched in full color into each of their hard armored flanks.
Rarity screamed when she saw herself, and Fluttershy nearly fainted. Even Pinkie Pie looked as though she were about to be sick.
“What did you do to us?!” cried Rarity, trying to cover herself in morphiplasm.
“The spell shows us for what we are,” said Twilight. “It breaks down illusions. Like the illusion of you pretending to be my friends.”
The spell began to fade, and the original appearances of the various ponies began to return. Pinkie Pie stepped forward, though, as her pink and squishy nature returned to her. “Oh yeah? Well I think it’s broken! Because if it had shown you for what you are inside, it would have shown a BIG MEANIE!”
“Pinkie!” gasped Fluttershy.
“Mean?” Twilight was barely whispering. “I’M the mean one? After you impersonated my friends? I thought you were real. I thought I had them back. And you let me think that. You all lied to me. I was happy. And do you know what it was like to lose that? To lose all of my friends again?”
“You didn’t lose us,” said Applejack. She took a step forward. “Twilight, it’s us. It really is us. I don’t…I don’t know about all that stuff that’s going on, I have no idea, but it really is me. Applejack. Remember how we used to go to the spa with Rarity? Or when you helped me fix up my farm, or when you accidentally turned Fluttershy into a vampire fruit bat?”
“I remember that,” said Fluttershy.
“So do I,” said Rarity. “Or when you came all the way to Manehattan with me, and helped me make a second line of dresses all in one night…”
“We ALL helped with that one,” said Applejack.
“Well, yes, of course. Oh! Or on your birthday, when I couldn’t bring myself to tell you that I had a scheduling conflict and tried to be at two parties at once!”
“Or your coming to Ponyville party? You know, when I first met you? Or any of your birthdays? Or when you accidentally gave me food poisoning from those terrible cupcakes?”
“And when you got frozen by a cockatrice in the forest,” said Fluttershy. “I screamed so loud…”
“We all remember, Twilight,” said Applejack. “All of it. It’s us. It really is us! Come on, Twilight, you know you can trust me!”
Twilight paused for a moment. Her expression did not change. “I trusted Applejack,” she finally said. “But I do not trust you.”
“But- -”
“Do you know what you are?” asked Twilight, slowly. “You are copies. Clones, maybe, but bad ones. You weren’t stored in those tanks. You were GROWN in them. Celestia knows why, but I don’t even care anymore. Your memories were PROGRAMED.”
“Twilight,” said Rarity. “You’re saying a lot of hurtful things, and I don’t know if this is the time or the place, what with Rainbow Dash- -”
Twilight reached out and touched Rarity’s white-clad shoulder. The morphiplasm reacted instantly, and Rarity cried out as it disconnected from her body and pulled itself onto Twilight’s. Twilight took it back from her and reassembled it around herself, forming thick black armor that covered every inch of her flesh. This time, she did not keep the helmet transparent. She left it opaque, relying on an HUD that represented the world mathematically, insulating herself from any true perception of the outside world entirely.
“This is mine,” she said, her voice amplified by the suit. “You don’t deserve it.”
Rarity stood there, covering her chest with one hoof in modesty as she started to cry.
“Now look what you did,” said Fluttershy, moving to Rarity’s side. “Twilight, that’s too far!”
“I don’t care,” said Twilight. She turned away from the ponies. “Silken.”
Silken looked at her friends- -who were still her friends, regardless of what type of strange alien life they were- -and followed Twilight.
“Yes, Goddess?”
“Take them to the ship.”
“But we already attempted- -”
“Signal for them to send a contingent of remni. Do whatever it takes. Just get them off this planet.”
“But what about you?”
“I will remain to complete my mission. But I never want to see any of those- -THINGS- -ever again.”
“I can attempt that, but you would be left alone.”
“I was born to be alone. It is my sole purpose in life. I’ve wasted too much time chasing impossible dreams of friendship. I have to find Cadence and finish this. You are just a distraction.”
“M…me?”
“I don’t care if you were at one time my grand-niece. Take them, and return to the ship. Go back to the Empire. Do whatever it is Remni do. I don’t care. That is an order.”
“I do not know if I can obey it.”
“Then let me rephrase. Take them. Give them to the captain, even if they won’t work at all for her goal. Leave this planet. And if I ever see you again, I will pull out your central processor and deactivate you.”
“But that would kill- -”
“You’re already dead, Silken. You have been for a long time. You’re just a piece of equipment now, even if you’ve managed to convince yourself that those things are your friends.”
“But they are my friends.” Even Silken could hear the sound of uncertainty in her voice.
Twilight paused for a long moment, but did not turn around. “Just go, Silken. Just go.”
Silken stood up straight. “Yes, my Goddess. But before I do.” She extended her hoof. A blue cube sat atop the tiny point of it.
“What is this?”
“The translation you asked for. Of the recording we found when we first came here. I have removed the interference, although I have not looked at it. I had hoped we could together.”
“I will see it later,” said Twilight, even though she had no intention to ever look. “You stay here. You have until Rainb- -the damaged one is healed. Then get out.”
She started to walk away, leaving Silken behind. Pinkie Pie suddenly ran forward.
“Twilight!” she cried. “Wait- -oof!”
Pinkie Pie had run headlong into a pink-violet wall, a construct that Twilight had projected to seal off the hallway she had taken. Pinkie Pie pounded on it, but Twilight did not turn around. She faded into the darkness, and was gone.
Time passed, but Twilight did not know how long. Simple units like hours or days were meaningless to her. Even centuries had become infinitesimal units of time, but she was sure that she had not passed any of those. She just wandered, alone, with no view of the world except for the orange text on the inside of her screen. A cold, sterile, isolated existence. It was this type of existence, she knew, that Celestia had given her wings for. Every other pony would leave her, to believe that her greatest friends had returned to her had been a deadly foray into excessive optimism.
It had been a long time since Twilight had been happy. For the first time, she had felt like there was some meaning to her existence. Her role had become mechanical: she was a Princess, existing solely for the Empire until there was nothing left of her for herself. There was no joy in such an existence. Seeing her friends again- -or things that she thought had been her friends- -had given her back something that she had forgotten she had ever lost. And then they had taken it away. For that, she hated them.
So she wandered deeper and deeper into the ancient facility. Somepony had built it, maybe, or perhaps planted it long ago. It might have been the same madmare who had created the five clones, but there was no way to know that for sure. What Twilight knew is that it was quiet and empty.
Over time, she reached places that were quite a bit deeper than the rest. They seemed to have been abandoned. The living material that grew along the walls had faded and calcified, bleaching into dead metal that overwhelmed obsolete machinery. Everything useful had been picked clean, and what remained behind had been long-since forgotten.
What was strange, though, was that these rooms were oddly organized. The machinery had not dug deep, but rather seemed to have grown upward over time from these deep chambers. Twilight began to consider whether this was actually something that had existed on Equestria for eons before the birth of ponies, buried deep in the mantle of the planet and only forced upward by the geological upheaval that ponies had wrought on the surface.
It was while she was considering these thoughts that the oxidized metal of the floor suddenly cracked and gave way.
Twilight screamed as she fell into darkness. With her wings covered, she could not fly. Instead, she just fell into darkness- -and then, after what seemed like forever, struck something hard.
It took time for Twilight to fully regain consciousness. When she did, she stood up and lit her horn. Pink-violet light filled the room, but did not land on any walls. Twilight could only see a floor made of massive, perfectly hexagonal tiles. The room was simply too large for her light to illuminate.
Then something whined in the distance. Twilight gasped, wondering if she was going to need to defend herself. Then she heard a large relay click, and several lights overhead sparked to life, humming as they did. At first, their glow was limited and only showed the thin bands of ancient, old-growth machinery that had somehow managed to cling to life.
The light grew. As it did, Twilight was able to see the scale of the room. It was as large as the type of hanger where frigates were manufactured, but longer. The walls, though, were strange, made out of identical repeating units.
Then, suddenly, Twilight realized what the walls were covered in. She did not gasp, or make any sound. The emotion they elucidated was not fear, but something different that was far more difficult to name.
They were tanks. Most of them were identical to the very ones that the five ponies upstairs had come from, but farther back in the room they began to take on different shapes. Older shapes. Those looked more like prototypes.
There were thousands of them, perhaps tens of thousands, all lined up on a system of racks that lined the walls. They were stacked several pods thick, and due to disrepair some of them had fallen to the floor and burst open. Twilight approached them- -both the fallen ones, and the dusty tanks that were still linked to the walls- -but stopped when she saw what was inside. These tanks contained no fluid, and the machinery that had once supported the lives within hung dry and limp, connected only to skeletons.
Each tank was filled, or had been filled at one point. All looked like pale, gray versions of what the others were underneath their pony surfaces, but a few had gleaming white pony bones. They were in various stages of development: some were quite clearly adults, but others were smaller. Some even appears to have been fetuses.
Then there were the others. Ones that did not look like ponies. Their bones were overgrown and asymmetrical, as though they had expanded to the very confines of the tanks that they sat in. The results were twisted and mutated, their jaws stuck open in eternal screams.
And then there were the pods that were empty.
Twilight stepped back in horror, but as she did, some of the ancient machinery hummed to life once more. A long needle protruded from a trunk of fungoid metal, and an orange hologram flickered to life.
It was distorted, but Twilight could immediately tell that the shape it represented was supposed to be a pony. She was tall and thin, and her skin was marked with subtle linear patters that shone brightly in the darkness. Those crossed over tidy and well-hidden surgical scars and connected to innocuous but still quite apparent implants that, like the lines over parts of the pony’s body, glowed with internal light.
This pony seemed strange, as though even in life she had been deathly pale and almost ghostly. One of her eyes had been fully covered with a plate of metal, and her silver hair had been cropped short against her skull. Despite this, she showed no signs of age- -and Twilight was able to recognize the unicorn instantly.
“S…Starlight?”
The hologram of Starlight took a deep breath. Then she spoke. “One of them was born today,” she said, her voice shaking. “Eight thousand one hundred sixty four years of work, and one of them finally emerged alive. And I…I…” She shook her head. There was great pain in her one remaining eye. She kept flicking her front left hoof, turning the wrist over again and again. Twilight noticed that the limb was a different hue than the rest of her body.
“It…she was a Fluttershy,” said Starlight, her voice wavering. “But she…it…came out wrong. The physiology wasn’t stable. All…all it could do was scream. By Celestia…when I saw it, it wasn’t even a pony. But it was…it was her. I saw her eyes. And she saw me.” She shook her head again. “I had to…” There was a long pause, and Starlight took a deep breath that indicated quite clearly that she had artificial lungs. “I did what I had to do.”
“Starlight…” whispered Twilight.
Starlight continued. “I can’t bear to do that again. I just can’t. But I had an idea. I can predict the failures before they happen. I know which ones are going to be born wrong. I can’t save them, not as ponies, but if I remove all locks on their differentiation some part of them will survive. They won’t just survive, they’ll be indestructible. But not ponies. Not the Elements of Harmony.” She paused. “But still useful. I can teach them to use machines. I can let them help me save the world.”
The hologram flickered out, and Twilight found herself reaching for it, as though she could pull Starlight back to her. Such was impossible, though. There was no way to reach her friend. Not if she was as old as these abandoned, dead incubation tanks.
That was when Twilight remembered the cube that Silken had given her, and in her mind things suddenly clicked into place. She hoped she was wrong, but she suddenly realized who had built this facility.
With shaking hooves, Twilight produced the cube and connected a blue thread from her helmet to it. She did not initially run it, but rather examined what Silken had done. As she had initially suspected, the signal had decayed very badly- -but that was not the main cause of its distortion. Silken had taken so long to translate it because it was not just one signal. There were two. One had been written over the other to save space, and in order to make them readable Silken had separated the two.
Twilight paused, not knowing if she should proceed. Then, hesitantly, she entered the necessary code to run the first recording.
An image flashed onto the inside of her HUD, representing itself like the other holograms had. It was cast in blue light, but was very clearly Starlight. She had aged substantially, and looked much older than she had in the recording before. Her body had none of the cybernetic enhancements, though, which led Twilight to believe that this one had been taken long before Starlight had stretched her skin over a metal frame.
This version of Starlight appeared to have lived a hard life. Her mane, streaked with gray, was ragged and long. One of her eyes was covered with a patch, and her front left leg had been replaced entirely by a primitive looking robotic one. She wore a cloak that covered her scarred body, and stared with steely determination.
“I don’t know how long I’ve been here,” said Starlight, her voice gruff but clearly coming from lungs that were still organic. “It’s hard to tell. The planet doesn’t turn at the right rate. As if something shoved it badly out of course.” She paused. “And I think something did. Something very, very bad happened her. I don’t know the exact time, but my guess is I’ve been wandering for twenty years now. Maybe thirty. Forty, even, I don’t know. There are no signs of pony life. Not one. Nopony is here. They’re all gone. Every last one.
“I don’t know how far ahead I am. I’m not sure I want to. But I know that I’m the last one who can fix this.”
“No,” said Twilight, as though the image could hear her. “You can’t. Starlight, you just can’t. I already tried.”
“At first, I considered a time spell. The initial attempts failed.” She rubbed her robotic front leg with the other one. “The Map just doesn’t have enough power to send me back. And even if it did…I don’t think it’s a good idea. My returning could be what caused all this.” She shook her head in the same way she would on recording eight thousand years later. “Time spells…they just make things worse. I can’t get back home. I’m trapped here. But I can help.” She looked up at what Twilight supposed was a camera, or at this era in Starlight’s life probably a crystal that would later be transcribed into a digital format. “In all that wandering, I came up with a theory. An idea. A hope, even. I can’t fix this problem myself, but I’m ninety percent sure- -no. I’m completely sure that the Elements of Harmony could fix this.
“This planet underwent an apocalyptic event, but they could reverse it. I don’t know how much, but I have to try.” She laughed suddenly. “The Map, the Map stores a backup. I can use it as a template. I can built artificial cutie marks, identical copies. I’ve observed them enough…even if I can only rebuild their memories to the moment I left, it will be enough.
“The technology here was vastly more advanced than it was in my time. I’ve found pieces of it, put things together. I’ve started building an underground facility.” She paused. “I’ve also found a source of genetic material. There are beings here. Their culture is primitive, barely stone age. Insectoid. Possibly the remnants of changelings, or an offshoot of their species. They know me. They build stones around the castle. Perhaps they worship it. Perhaps they worship me. Or maybe I’m their devil. I don’t know. But I will use their genetic material as a starting point.
“The Elements of Harmony will return. And they will save us all.”
The recording terminated. Twilight quickly shifted to the next one.
A new image appeared. This one, though newer, was far more badly distorted. It was cast in a dim orange glow, but clearer than it had been before. When Twilight saw it, her heart ached. Now she knew that the mechanical abomination before her, with its asymmetrical and flailing limbs and armor-plated body, was all that had remained of Starlight after a lifetime of age and damage. There was nothing left of her that was pony.
Starlight’s remains spoke. The voice was low and distorted, both by the decay of the recording and by the limitations to her body. It was spoken in a language that Twilight had to translate.
“This…is my last recording,” said Starlight. “And I have failed. Time has passed. Much time. Too much time. I have completed five of them. Five units. My…friends. I remember they were my friends. But when I see them, I can’t recognize them anymore. I don’t remember who they were. And now, I know that I will never meet them again.”
“No,” said Twilight. “Don’t say that Starlight, don’t…”
Starlight took a gurgling, mechanical breath. Her body heaved as though it were damaged. “Yet the Sixth always eluded me. Initially, I thought it was foolish optimism. That I was limited by her biology. Now I know that is not the case. Eighteen times she has been born, and eighteen times I have created new queens for the Builders…or what used to be the Builders. But the cutie mark never takes. It is perfect, but it never takes.
“My only conclusion is that Twilight Sparkle is still alive. Somewhere, out there. I don’t know where. Not on this planet, but elsewhere. How far? How long? I don’t blame her. I don’t blame…you.” A wheezing sound indicated that Starlight was trying to laugh. “Am I being foolish? Why can’t a dying mare hope? Twilight, I address this to you. Maybe someday you will return, and find it. I have set this facility to play this recording if it detects you, and I have created an AI to help you if you need it. I made her look like you.
“I tried to write it in our journal, but I couldn’t remember how to make the letters. The journal. How many times I read it. To rebuild their stories in their minds, and so that I could remember my life.
“Twilight. Please. Help them. When they wake up, they will be confused, and I will not be here to show them the way. I can’t…I can’t remember why I build them. They have consumed my life for over eighty thousand years, but I do not remember why I made them. Or who they are.” She gave a long pause. “I do not remember who I was. I am not like Xyuka, my body did not accept the modifications as hers did.”
“Starlight, no, it’s going to be okay…”
“Everything is gone. The civilizations I lived amongst, that I helped rise and watched fall…they are long gone. Even my Builders no longer follow my orders. Not that I would ask them to. If I can receive any consolation, it is that they remain. They have no minds, but they have begun to build their own machines. Their own armor. My greatest hope is that they will rise in my place. Who knows. Some day they may find this recording before you do, and understand it. I wish them well.
“But there is one last thing I can do.” She lifted a narrow robotic claw and pointed to what was supposed to be her head. The machinery split, revealing a long and pointed horn, the base of which was linked to a number of glowing wires that led deeper into Starlight’s body. “I have enough horn marrow left for one more spell. You’ll hate me for it, Twilight, but I know which one it has to be. The greatest curse I know.”
Twilight’s eyes widened. “Sombra’s Bane,” she whispered. She jumped forward as though she could reach the image projected on the inside of her mask. “No! Starlight, no, you can’t!”
“Goodbye, Twilight. They will be waiting for you. I’m sorry I did not last long enough to see you again. Please forgive me.” The image suddenly distorted, but did not go out. Starlight sighed deeply. “The Elements of Harmony will return. And they will save us.”
Starlight’s horn began to glow, and her body erupted with blue light as the recording stopped, leaving nothing but static. Twilight stared for it for a long time before shutting it off.
The last sentence she had said had been spoken in her distorted, broken language. In that language, it had been “Vortog’plath idena’thanthakta”. Starlight’s last hope, and her last wish, carried on by her children without them understanding its meaning. Twilight had understood, though. And she knew what she needed to do. �g?!^�4