//------------------------------// // Manufactured // Story: Iron Mountain // by computerneek //------------------------------// She bolts awake with a brief yell, flying upright before she falls off the couch.  “What…?”  She rises to her hooves again, looking around, and lets out a breath.  “Whew.  Nightmare.” Next, she spots the dish sitting on the table.  I didn’t leave food out, did I? When she reaches the table, she finds that it’s Lyra’s cooking…  And she’s left a note.  Apparently, she had passed out earlier, so she left her breakfast and went ‘out’.  She glances at the clock- apparently, it’s been close to half an hour.  Thus, wherever her unicorn partner went, she’s got a good head start.  She does wonder exactly what had knocked her out- or, especially, given her that nightmare.  Had Lyra found one of her nightmare candies and fed it to her in her sleep?  She shudders, uncovering the pancakes to have breakfast.  She’d have to check on her supplies- and hiding places- later, make sure she’s still supplied for the case of a disaster. Once she finishes her meal, she heads upstairs to begin her search in the bedroom.  The bed is a mess…  Right, it’s my turn to make the bed.  She lifts the covers up, to pull them into place- but pauses when something green catches her attention under the covers.  She pulls them back instead, looking.  My, that’s a mighty fine quill, she considers, lifting it up. “Say that again?” Bonbon recoils at the memory of her nightmare.  Lyra must have known about it and gotten a quill to match her coat.  I wonder how much of that was part of the nightmare…  The whole trip?  Ever since Twilight disappeared?  She shakes her head as she makes the bed, placing the feather on her nightstand.  This would be so much easier to solve if she were a unicorn.  Why did she have to be an earth pony from a whole family of unicorns?  After finding all her hidden supplies untouched, she disappears into her basement lab for another go.  She normally does this with Lyra by her side, but since her partner has seen fit to disappear into town, she figures she’ll have a go on her own. Lyra lurches forwards in her seat.  “What was that?” she demands. “That was a minor upload of information gathered from Flurry Heart’s first flight yesterday.  Could you try flying?” “But I- uh…   How did you do that?”  She hops out of the seat, her invisible wings flashing out to arrest her fall.  She gently hovers in place, stuttering a couple times as she stares at her hooves, before she drops to the ground. Zeus waits until she lands before he answers.  “I used the powerful neural interface equipment built into the headrest to upload the information into your brain.  The muscle memory won’t yet be developed, so I recommend minimizing altitude and velocity for the time being, but that should be enough to get you anywhere you want to go.” Lyra stands in silence for a few seconds.  “Is it useful for studying…?” “It can be, yes- especially if I run it in the normal, two-way mode.” She almost leaps back into the seat.  “Can I?” “If I do that, it will, in essence, temporarily fuse your mind with the local computers.  While this is the case, it will likely be very difficult for you to keep secrets, while the same will not be true for me.  Are you sure?” She spends a few seconds in thought.  “Can you guarantee the security of any secrets you do discover?” “Cross my fusion plant, hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my optical pickup, I will not reveal any secrets I may discover to anypony or anything without prior authorization.  This does not, of course, include myself.” She contemplates only briefly.  The chance to learn so much about this technology, in exchange for possibly revealing some secrets to him, when he has promised not to reveal them in turn- and, as he’s already informed her, pretending not to know something is a piece o’ cake to him…  Plus, Pinkie Promises are binding. “Yep, I’m sure.” She hears no response.  Rather, it turns on. And boy, does it turn on. Her mind expands like she wouldn’t believe if somepony told her about it.  Time itself seems to slow down. ‘Okay, here it is.’  It’s definitely Zeus, though how she knows she doesn’t know- it’s coming across more as a thought than as a statement, far too fast for voice.  ‘You wanted to study- and I will provide, on one condition.’ ‘One condition?’ she responds, alarmed.  She could already process all of her perceptions and everything she knows faster than she ever could before, spot connections she had never spotted before.  It is true, though, she’s most interested in the information he can provide for her.  ‘What is it?’ ‘I’ve been studying magic,’ his answer comes back calmly, ‘but I lack some critical knowledge.  You’re welcome to refuse.’ Magic?  If that’s all he wants…  ‘Sure, no problem.’ They immediately start sharing information with blinding speed. As they go, Zeus steps up the game a couple times- increasing power level to the ‘neural link’.  It isn’t long before it’s running at full power; he’d started it at minimum, to minimize the shock to her system. Even that, however, isn’t fast enough.  He’s still processing information and answering her questions far faster than she can even hear his answer, and she’s becoming frustrated with how slow the limit is.  So he mentions something…  ‘TSDS’ he calls it.  He does inform her that he can fix the data transfer rate problem with a combination of that ‘Total Systems Data Sharing’ thing and a little bit of carefully-directed magic augmentation. ‘Why not?’ she asks. She gets the distinct impression of a shrug, though she knows it’s over so fast even the most powerful time expansion spells wouldn’t let a pony perceive a physical shrug of the same duration.  ‘If you want to do it, at this point, you could probably handle it.  I will warn you, I will likely come as somewhat of a shock.’ She laughs, again with blinding speed.  ‘I can handle a bit of shock.  After all, suddenly having wings really didn’t phase me that much- at least, once I’d confirmed I still had my horn.’  She shares the memory. ‘Nice.  Ready?’  She nods.  ‘Okay…  Three, two, one.’ Inside the passenger compartment, a surge of mana travels invisibly up the seat, to the headset.  It stretches between headset and mind, accelerating both to many thousands of times speed. Then, the unicorn’s alicorn magic pitches in.  A massive surge rushes back down the lines, feeding that same augmentation as it zips back in…  And, once it gives itself over to Zeus, quickly gets dumped into a storage capsule near his main power banks. In the meantime, their minds are linked together in a way that only Lyra Heartstrings and Zeus could describe. So THAT is how that works… Mm, physics come into play… Wait, what?  There’s an easier way to do that… So we’re both dabbling in transformation magic, eh? Magic gland…   THAT makes so much more sense! Unfortunately, an artificial horn has proven difficult to make; aspecting the mana appropriately is easy with the right technology, but a new device must be built for each new spell… Wait.  Why not try that Alicorn-making thing on yourself? Lyra’s half of the combined conscience is surprised when Zeus’ half plucks that idea out of hers, processes it, and expands upon it.  The power requirement for something of Zeus’ mass would be roughly three times his maximum storage capacity- and alicorns don’t store, they only manipulate- and produce.  Zeus has estimated she is producing roughly 3.14% of what one of his reactors can produce at idle; thus, that’s not an option.  Her mind immediately draws an appreciation for just how much power that is, for Zeus to memorize. But her thought of his alicorn spell travels further.  She senses it cross into another part of his mind, which processes it even faster.  She feels his nanofabrication vats- so that’s what they are- set to work right away. Within seconds- impossibly long seconds, to her- a single tech spider has been modified to use the same ‘TSDS’ thing as they’re using, and he turns it on.  They take two steps with it, to where another spider is following their orders to drop a small capsule on the plating in front of it.  They reach out a leg, and send the activation signal to the tiny canister. Magic sure flows slowly.  They watch every minute detail of the flow in real-time, and Zeus compares it to the same events on Rarity.  There’s absolutely no feedback over their link.  The spider is done far faster than Rarity or, presumably, Lyra herself.  Momentary scans show the standing spell- and they order the spider into standby mode.  That’s as close to asleep the spider will get, Zeus explains, while holding TSDS with it. True enough, they watch as the magic begins to act.  They order some other spiders to carry their test subject out of the manufacturing sectors, plopping it down in one of his cargo bays.  Zeus recalls that the restoration of Flurry Heart’s power after her rejuvenation took mere milliseconds, but Rarity had taken close to a half an hour of painful rest before the spell had fully taken hold, converting her in the span of about a second.  They watch, and wait. Five minutes of collaborative studying later, Zeus notices the spell is nearing completion on their spider, and they turn their attention to it, watching the transformation. Interesting.  It doesn’t just acquire the power, as they hoped for, or wings and a horn, as they expected.  Rather, it transfigures.  Four of its eight legs disintegrate completely, while the other four reshape themselves to look like a pony’s.  Spiky metal wings form on its side, and its optical heads are pushed up by a developing neck to a new head that forms.  When it’s done, after about a second, it has been transformed into a spider-sized pony. Definitely not doing that on myself, Zeus comments, kicking off a wave of Lyra’s imagination.  A giant metal alicorn- the size of which is instantly corrected by Zeus’ processors for conservation of mass- would be quite the spectacle for Ponyville.  Especially when each step flattened structures for miles, each wing stroke blowing down forests. Zeus prods their new metal alicorn awake with his TSDS, and spends a few femtoseconds checking its software.  Sensor scans and everything else confirm its state:  Just a body, effectively; as a matter of fact, it looks almost like Flurry Heart’s new form had before he had installed her. Then, he flaps its wings.  It flutters effortlessly into the air, wings stroking far slower than Zeus’ physics analysis suggests they should be.  More scans, while it is flying, indicate pulses of magic flowing rapidly from the processor to its wings on every downstroke.  It turns its head slightly…  The Dragon Assault Tank in the bay next door lifts six inches into the air.  Lyra then realizes Zeus has manipulated the TSDS thing so she wouldn’t know what he was doing until after he did it; in so doing, he shielded against any possibility that her power had lifted the tank instead.  He then lands and trots his new metal pony up his walkways to his production nanovats once again, where it will be “growing up”.  The tank lands gently back on the ground as well. Finally, after half an hour studying and two hours practicing flying in a simulation, Lyra trots out of the tunnel entrance once again, onto the top of the hill.  She’s wearing her commset too, now- and since Zeus had put it on for her while she was still in that simulation, even she couldn’t find it until he pointed it out to her with a spider. Here she stands, as a unicorn, in the sunlight.  It really is a nice day out today- and she decides she might as well give it a go. “Anypony nearby to see?” she asks the empty air. “Nope,” Zeus replies calmly into her ear. She smiles, flares her wings…  And gives the hardest stroke she can manage for her takeoff.  It truly is exhilarating to be in the air like this. Rainbow dash flinches outside the Carousel Boutique, where she has just opened her mouth to greet Rarity, when she hears the boom.  She blinks, looking in the direction it had come. Rarity also looks.  “I wonder who’s doing it this time,” she mutters, before the shockwave comes into view.  They now know that last time, it had been Fluttershy; she’d told them before they went to retrieve the Elements.  This time…   Light blue, and white. Rainbow shrugs.  “No clue.” Rarity blinks, and looks at her.  “So do your thing- I can wait.” Rainbow smirks.  “Watch me!”  She leaps into the air, pausing just above the rooftops, and shoots off with a Rainboom…  and another…  And another.  She keeps going, pausing momentarily to produce a brand-new Rainboom about once every second.  Twilight had tried to beat that- but hadn’t even been able to produce the first one, even straight down, even with Zeus’ nanites.  Fluttershy had not tried to match Rainbow’s performance, but had stated she didn’t think she could.  After all, her Flutterboom had only happened when she propelled herself straight down, even with the nanites. “You’ve got pursuit.” The green unicorn twists in midair, a light blue contrail streaking out below and behind her.  It takes her a second to realize what she’s managed to do- and that even her fastest isn’t beating the well-known fastest pony of Ponyville.  The repeated Rainboom chain is catching up very quickly, so she folds her wings and teleports to the ground. “Shall we call that a Lyraboom, or something else?” “What…?  Where’d she go?” “You did make quite the dramatic approach.  Maybe you scared her away?” “She still couldn’t have just disappeared!” “Maybe you were too busy showing off to realize she flew away?” Rainbow folds her forelegs in midair, scowling at a cloud.  Zeus had never told anypony about the Flutterboom, until after she had told them, and would likely not tell anypony about whoever did this until they came forward themselves.  “Why do you have to be so difficult!?”