Dakota stepped off the bottom of the lift and into an area that obviously saw humans more often. Here there were real control surfaces, albeit most of them were reconfigurable touchpads with only sonic feedback. If anything, the space looked more like an advanced hospital than somewhere for computer maintenance. There were shelves of mylar-sealed medical implants, a pair of operating tables with articulating robotic mounts above, and a polished white floor kept free of dirt or debris.
Strangest of all was what looked like a shallow diving pool at the end of the medical bay, with a towel-rack and little filter masks hanging on a hook overhead. The steps leading into it were all the evidence Dakota needed that the pool was used.
“Oh, hello there darling. Pleasure to see you made it.” A pony sat beside the pool, one she’d seen before. The one who gave me the ticket.
“Rarity, we don’t have time for the theatrics. She wants to go all the way to the moon. We’ve got… what, ten minutes?”
The white pony turned up her nose at Rainbow’s attitude. “Perhaps close to… eight? Yes, well. Seven by the time we get her into the system. Best make them count.”
“You mean this?” Dakota stopped at the edge of the tank, resting one bare foot on the polished stainless steel platform. “It looks just like the server behind us.” Thousands and thousands of tiny, glowing objects, each one smaller than her thumb. “What… are they, anyway?”
“I’m afraid you picked a real ignorant lot a’ ponies to ask. We ain’t too knowledgeable as to the real workings ta how it all fits together. It just sorta…”
“Now now, Applejack, no need to apologize. It’s not like miss Dakota here knows how her own brain works. We’re all songs in the same cosmic dance.”
“Don’t talk like Pinkie to me,” Applejack muttered.
“My human is in danger,” Cinnabar said, loud enough that the ponies all turned to stare at him. “We worked very hard to be here. You haven’t told us what that time limit meant, or what would happen when it ran out. Whatever it is, I know it means we can’t sit here arguing. I’m guessing we don’t want to be here when it does. So explain what this is, so we can move.”
“I know a little.” Clay reached past her, removing a single one of the glowing beads in one hand. He held it in front of her, where she could see the incredibly intricate etchings and little metal lines inside it. “Equestria’s real hardware… think the word they use is ‘amorphous.’ It’s a cluster a’ some kind, swarm intelligence. Instead of a big central processor, there’s all these little… neurons, that work together to make thoughts. Like human brains, kinda. Only… well, bigger.”
“I don’t think that’s what she was asking anyway,” the white pony called Rarity cut in. She walked along the edge of the way down, the only one who could. “You want to go find Kayla Rhodes. Twilight told you she’s waiting on Luna. If you’re going to go, this is the place.” She nodded towards the pool. “Put on a mask and get in. Fortunate for you, you’re already equipped to use this hardware. You’re one of less than a dozen who could.”
“It’s… going to interface with my brain,” Dakota guessed. She hadn’t lived this long because she stopped to question. Already she was past Rarity, securing the mask over her face. Strangely, it wasn’t attached to anything. There were no air pumps, no tubes, just a mesh filter that would fit between her teeth. “What’s the mask for?”
“So you don’t swallow anything.” Rarity said. “Don’t worry, the micro nodes are non-toxic. But your lungs are rather particular about only accepting fluids.”
It wasn’t even a snorkel. But Dakota saved that question—obviously it had an answer she’d discover soon enough. There was something more urgent. “What happens in seven minutes?”
“Oh.” Rarity shuffled uneasily. “There’s a submarine on its way here. If it reaches this facility while you’re still here, the soldiers aboard will either kill or capture both of you. But Clay and Applejack are resourceful ponies, they’ll be preparing your escape while you’re down there.”
“Ain’t a pony,” Clay muttered. “But yeah, we’ll get right on it. We already got a plan, don’t we Applejack?”
She tipped her hat. “Sure do. An’ good luck down there, Dakota. Word of advice—stay outta Dream Valley. Just cuz you’ve got the hardware don’t mean you’re one of us. Humans just… ain’t suited for it. Stay on the path.”
Dakota waded down into the water. Except—she could tell instantly that it wasn’t water. Bubbles condensed on her skin, frothing around her for a few seconds while the salt and other dirt was scrubbed away. While she expected it to be cold or at least the cool of the tropical ocean, it felt instead as though it had been set perfectly to her body temperature. She could barely feel the liquid at all, except for the bubbles against her skin. It was the little nodes she felt floating around. Down the steps, and into a pool quite a bit deeper than it looked. She couldn’t reach the bottom with one leg.
Cinnabar seemed to be climbing in beside her, though of course he didn’t have a mask and wouldn’t need one. “You can lay on your back if you want,” he said. “They let me look at the operations manual for this thing. You’re going to be fully immersed, and breathing the hyper oxygenated fluid. Says here that respiratory irritation and vomiting fade after the first few times.”
“Delightful.” Dakota closed her eyes, then stepped off into the liquid. She felt it rushing up around her, then…
Immersion interface activated. Welcome Dakota Tyler.
The tank vanished from around her, as did her own bikini-clad body and her skin full of scars. She blinked, and found she was a pony again. The pegasus, in the same mauve and paler feathers near the tips of her wings. She stretched, and nearly fell onto her face.
“Hello beautiful,” Cinnabar said from beside her. First she saw his face—then the whole world came into focus.
Dakota was standing on the clouds, as she’d seen ponies do thousands of times before. A brilliant, milky glow radiated from above her, and she looked up to see the moon. Well, the moon if it was still small enough to see in a single glance, with a radius perhaps as far across as a single football field. “Woah.”
It was a little like her visit to Equestria on her second day out of the hospital, except that she couldn’t feel her fingers. The mapping onto this virtual body was apparently more complete than that. Cinnabar was now taller than she was. Worse, she could smell him. Well maybe worse wasn’t quite the word. “Cinnabar, can you please help me be human?”
“I could,” he said. “But it would take some of our seven minutes. How many do you want to spend on that?”
She sighed, finding that she showed her frustration with her wings as well as her voice. “Fine. But record everything. I want to be a person if we use something like this again.” She reached up towards her throat with one hoof, expecting to be feeling the urge to vomit and cough, but there was nothing. Guess that Easter egg is waiting for me when I unplug from this thing.
“This is the Lunar Mainframe?” She strode forward along the clouds, towards a distant structure in the shadow of the Moon. It had the look of a government building, or maybe a religious temple. Massive granite pillars, polished flat and covered with intricate stonework. The ground gave slightly with each step, feeling damp to the touch, but at least it didn’t give way. Which was a good thing, since what she could see over the edge suggested she might actually be next to the moon. There was nothing around her but blackness.
“This is… an internal representation of one part of it,” Cinnabar answered. “The mainframe runs much of Equestria’s backbone. Basically, as much as the system can afford to keep away from Earth. Humans are… unpredictable, and right now there’s some debate over when you’ll go to war with each other. We want as few ponies as possible caught in that when it happens.”
“Right.” Dakota slowed as she approached the building. Definitely more religious than government. The huge pillars held up a marble roof with a roman-style dome bigger than anything that might be built on Earth, with only sky on its many sides. A harsh wind blew in between those pillars, thick with lunar dust. “So how do we find Rhodes if we’re inside the system? Twilight says she’s here, so… she’s out in the base. Hostage, or… maybe staff, if we’re going with your theory.”
“She would be,” Cinnabar agreed. “This is the authoritative directory. We have her Equestrian Identifier, and now we’re internal. It should tell us exactly what system she’s connected to.”
“Simple enough.” They stepped into the temple. There wasn’t a single pony inside, at least not that she could see. There in the very center of the room was a brilliant spotlight, shining down on a pedestal. And on the pedestal was an old-fashioned yellow phone book. She flicked a wing at it. “You’re a faster reader than I am. Find her.”
Cinnabar galloped over to it, and the pages started turning themselves before his eyes. Dakota used the few seconds to try and get a better sense of her own body, flexing her wings one after another, trying a short hover. It didn’t work. Her brain might have the implants to let Equestria give her sensations directly, but she did not know how to make sense of much of what she was seeing. Her ears twitched, and her tail moved on its own, and she couldn’t tell if she was really in her own body or if she was only a passenger.
“Got it,” Cinnabar said. “She’s… that can’t be right.”
“Transfer us,” Dakota said, moving close to him. “Tell me on the way. Took us at least two minutes to get this far. Only five to go.”
The world turned to fog all around her, except for Cinnabar’s body beside her. She could still smell him, even mixed with the ozone and sparks probably meant to simulate a teleport. “It’s cold archival storage,” Cinnabar said. “That doesn’t make sense. I’ve triggered a recall, but…” He shook his head.
The fog dissolved from around them, and they were somewhere else. It seemed more like a mausoleum now, with a polished marble floor and coffin-sized cubbies along each one. Names and dates were set into the stone in metal letters. Dakota leaned in close to inspect the nearest one.
Starsong
June 2019 - December 2024
Eiliyah Kendall
She could see the same pattern repeated in each square. A pony, a human, and a date. “These are…”
“Dead ponies,” Cinnabar finished. “And their humans. Come on.” He spoke barely above a whisper, his head down and ears flat.
It was a good thing this place had cast Dakota as a pony, because the path they had to travel would’ve been too small for her at human height. Cinnabar approached one memorial panel much like the others, touching it with a hoof. It slid back, revealing a tight corridor beyond. Even on all fours, she had to crawl.
“How much time does it take to disconnect from this interface?” Dakota asked, feeling her mane brush up against a stone ceiling of gray rock. I wonder if this is actually somewhere in their base. Or maybe they just chose to use the same materials by coincidence.
“Not long,” Cinnabar said. “I’ll start the process when we hit our cutoff. I’ll try to warn you if I can, but… might or might not be feasible.”
The passage opened above them, and Dakota crawled up behind Cinnabar through the trapdoor. She kept her eyes on the passage, not wanting to see just how accurate the simulation of ponies was when she was one of them. No thank you.
The room she emerged into was spherical, with the entrance at almost the exact bottom of the space. The walls were occupied with an intricate mechanical rack, its various joints and articulated segments clanking. And hanging from it were…
Thousands of little plastic boxes. Each one had a cutie mark on the side, and perhaps five or six little spheres inside. Exactly like the ones she was floating in at this precise moment. A console stood just beside the passage, and Cinnabar glanced at it. Kayla Rhode’s Equestrian Identifier appeared in the space above it, and all the racks started to slide and clank. Marks blurred past — a rocket ship, a pair of soundwaves, a rose… They started moving faster than she could see, though she could assume that their target was on its way down.
“These aren’t cutie marks. They’re… EIs.”
“Yes.” Cinnabar kept his head down, both hooves on the console even though he didn’t need to do anything.
“What are human EIs doing in long-term storage like this?”
“I don’t know,” he lied.
Dakota’s eyebrow went up. “Come on, Cinnabar. What do you know that I don’t?”
One of the plastic containers reached them. This seemed to have almost twice as many of the spheres as many others. It slid into place beside the console. Then it tilted, pouring its contents down into a receptacle. The whole thing started glowing bright blue. “I didn’t know about this before we got here, I swear. I don’t keep secrets from you, Dakota. You know that.”
“Yeah…” She nudged up beside him, slipping her head right next to his and lowering her voice. Her wing wrapped over his shoulder without meaning to. It felt almost like something she might’ve done while human. Almost. “Go on, Cinnabar. You didn’t know until we got here. What do you know now?”
Three spotlights came on at that exact moment, each one mounted securely to the ceiling over their heads. They slid and pivoted, aiming at the space in front of her. In their light an image formed—the picture of a human girl Dakota had seen standing on a Bodhisattva stage. She wasn’t to scale—she was about the same size as a pony here, obviously transparent and washed out. Her voice had a strange, echoing quality about it, and her eyes were unconfused.
“Twilight? I thought we agreed you wouldn’t call me again. Did Synthesis fail?”
She looked up, eyes settling on Dakota. “You aren’t Twilight.”
“What is this?” Dakota took a step back from the projection, glaring at Cinnabar. “What is this thing?”
“Thing?” the girl answered before Cinnabar could. She spoke in exactly the same voice Dakota had heard on that stage. She’d aged quite gracefully… or maybe not much time had passed when this recording was taken. “You don’t know what this is.”
“Cinnabar?” Her voice cracked, and she could feel moisture in her eyes. It was almost the same kind of magical attack she’d felt around Twilight Sparkle—an inexplicable pain in her gut, fracturing her confidence into a confused mess. “What is this?”
“It’s really not that complicated when you think about it,” Kayla Rhodes said. “The system watches everything we do, every second of the day. It knows our habits, our preferences. It has our medical records, our DNA, our test scores. Blend all that together, and what do you have?”
“It’s a… snapshot,” Cinnabar said. “Equestria takes everything it ever records about a person, and… tries to recreate them.”
“Tries is the operative word,” Kayla said. She barely seemed to notice Cinnabar—all her attention was for Dakota. “We can fool a person. I think some of the polaroid’s here even fooled spouses, children. But we’re not good enough to fool a Synth. And if we can’t do that, there’s no point. Wasted effort.”
“You’re…” Dakota choked back a fearful noise, then collected herself. She swallowed, shaking the moisture from her eyes. “Are you alive?”
“We’re all figments of the Brahma Dream, Dakota,” Rhodes said. “Imaginations of his consciousness. When he wakes, we will all fade.”
“Are these people all dead?” she asked, gesturing out and around the room. “These marks…”
“No,” Cinnabar said. “Most of these humans have active records elsewhere. I can’t access most of it, though. We’ve been… restricted. This is the only one we can activate.”
“They’re all dead, currently,” Kayla said. “Inactive. It is deeper than the deepest sleep. Oblivion, where there are no dreams unfulfilled.”
“When we switched you on, you expected Twilight. You told her you didn’t want to be woken up again. Why… don’t you want to be alive?”
“Because I know I’m not Kayla Rhodes. Because I’m an accurate… prediction, I don’t want to be alive when I know I’m not real. Twilight deserves more than a shallow imitation. She deserves Synthesis.”
Second time you said that name.
“We have sixty seconds,” Cinnabar said, voice nervous. “We still have to get you out of the facility. Submarine is here. Soldiers unloading.”
“That’s who I’m looking for,” Dakota said. “Where is the real Kayla Rhodes? The living human? If you have her memories… you know where she went after she disappeared.”
The woman grinned at her. “Her memories,” she repeated. “No, not exactly. I have all the memories the system thinks I should have. And I’m pretty sure this isn’t the way humans remember things. After talking to Twilight, I think my brain is closer to a pony’s than to a person’s. More reason not to exist. Nirvana waits when you flip that switch. I can escape the cycle of reincarnation.”
“Thirty more seconds,” Cinnabar said, voice urgent, “until I have to start pulling us out.”
Not much time. “Where is the real Kayla Rhodes?”
There was no way to dodge around that question.
“I wanted… she wanted… to know the secret of the Monolith. Where did it come from? Who sent it, why? I needed to find the answer.” She folded her arms across her chest, expression smug. “Synthesis. I presume this means I must have reached my goal, or else how would this knowledge have returned to Equestria? Curious.”
“Ten seconds.”
Kayla reached out, and one of her transparent fingers passed through Dakota’s shoulder. “Shut me off before you go, please. Don’t leave me surrounded by the dead, alone.”
“Do it,” she said to Cinnabar. Then, “You went to the Monolith, didn’t you?”
Rhodes nodded. “Its presence exists in Dream Valley, an echo of what it was. And tell Twilight I lo—”
Glowing spheres lifted from the console, their light going out. They slid up into their plastic receptacle, then it whirred up to the ceiling to join the others. Mist and static surrounded Dakota, fog that blasted up her nose and down her throat and burned everything it touched. It was drowning her!
Dakota kicked and spluttered, emerging from the interface. The mask dropped from her mouth, and she leaned just over the edge, vomiting up a mouthful of slimy fluid onto the perforated metal steps. She felt a firm hand on her skin—distinctly human skin now, complete with her surgical scars and the worn bikini.
“Get it out,” Clay said. “I hate that damn thing. It doesn’t get easier the more times you do it. We’ve got a few seconds for you to catch your breath.”
Her insides burned. She could feel her stomach rebelling too, the other side-effect Cinnabar had warned her of. But there was nothing for it but to push through. After a few more seconds, Dakota’s watery eyes cleared enough that she could see again. She was still up to her knees in the fluid, and every little sphere close to her was glowing. A little imprint of light floated in the water behind her, like a ghostly snow-angel in her general outline.
“Alright, that about does it for time,” Applejack said. “Come on, sugarcube. You got some swimmin’ to do.”
Clay gripped her by the arm, then lifted her into a standing position. “It’s okay, Dakota. I’ve got you, walk with me.”
She could do that. Firm, human muscle, sturdy enough to hold her up despite her faltering footsteps.
Somewhere not too far away, the facility shook and rumbled. There was a distant roar of water, and everything loose around them began to shake. Trays emptied their priceless implants onto the table, and one of the robotic mountings tore free of the stone ceiling.
“The hell was that?” Cinnabar asked. “I thought you said we had time!”
“Not much!” Applejack said. She was the only pony still here—the rest of Twilight’s friends were all gone now. “Guess they didn’t want to take the tech intact after all. They’re flooding us out.”
“It’s fine,” Clay added. “We’re behind an airlock. We’re prepared for this kind of attack. It won’t stop us from getting out.” Clay wasn’t taking her to the lift back up. Instead they were headed straight ahead, towards the base of the massive tank. There was a hatch there, with a metal walkway leading down.
“I don’t…” Her voice was thin and ragged. “Are attacks like this common? You’d think it would be… all over the news. If there was violence like this going on. People could’ve died down here.”
“Oh, they’re nice and polite about it all. We had three whole hours warning that they’d be comin’, enough time to get the regular staff out. They, uh… probably figured you all were down here, though. Seems like they’re willing to make an exception to get you dead, Dakota.” Applejack hurried ahead of them, though she didn’t actually touch anything. Just stood beside the trapdoor as its own motors opened it. The space beyond was barely tall enough for them to walk, and Clay would have to stoop.
“I went up to grab our gear while you were in,” he said. “It’s really… not all that far to where we’re going.”
“I’m not sure where that could be.” She was feeling a little better with every step. As much as the strange fluid had left her insides scraped raw, it didn’t seem like they had actually hurt her. If anything, they’d cleaned the smoke out of her lungs. She was breathing a little better now. A narrow passage of stone was visible beyond, and at the end…”
Dakota swore under her breath. The walkway ended in a round opening, and a hatch poked just above the water. The hatch of a submarine. “You had this thing parked here the whole time?”
“It ain’t a luxury yacht ‘er nothin’,” Applejack said, urging them forward. “Gonna be real tight with two humans at the same time. But the tolerances on air are good enough. Get in and we’re gone.”
“I have… questions.” Dakota reached the end of the platform, just as the facility above them shook again. Metal tore, water rushed in. How long did they have? Had the trapdoor closed behind them?
“Sure you do,” Applejack muttered. “Funny thing about questions, can’t ask ‘em if yer dead. Get in.”
Clay hopped down—it wasn’t a ladder leading down the boarding tube of a WW2 style submarine, big enough for sixty men. He only sunk to his waist. At least he was strong enough to lift her down easily into the sub.
It was about the size of a compact car inside, with two seats closely packed together and a projection screen on the interior surface. There were no controls, and the only window was on the airlock as it twisted closed behind them. But no sooner was it closed then the space inside seemed to stretch, accommodating a sheet of rounded glass ahead of her, two pony-sized seats, and a view of the outside. There were controls there too. Cinnabar sat beside Applejack, who had her hooves on the controls. “I ain’t no expert at this,” she muttered, and they jerked downward. Dakota couldn’t see any of the mechanical parts operating this thing—behind their seats was a sleeping area with a single oversized sleeping bag, a chemical toilet, and their own scuba gear piled haphazardly next to a box labeled “RATIONS.”
“You’ll do great, Applejack,” Clay said, confidently. “It ain’t you I’m worried about, it’s our friends. You think they’ll see the sub?”
“Not if we’re slow,” the pony answered. “We’ve got camouflage on this thing they never dreamed of. You humans were already makin’ these things so good they could bump into each other on accident. She’s small for a reason. Ain’t nothing that can see her, unless I bump her into one a’ their divers. Don’t tempt me, now. Right unkind a’ them flooding a place while we’re still in it.”
Dakota slumped back into the seat, her shoulder resting against Clay’s side. She didn’t even care anymore. “W-where… where are we going?” she asked. She was drained, overwhelmed. The task ahead of her seemed even more impossible than what she’d done so far. I was so close. I need time to take this all in.
“Abyss Station,” Applejack answered. “I ain’t supposed to say where she’s hidden, on account of her bein’ one of the few that nopony knows about. But… since yer so polite, I guess I’ll tell you she’s about halfway between New Zealand and Japan. Do yer’ own figurin’ from there.”
“Abyss Station,” Cinnabar repeated, grinning at her. “That place isn’t real. Secret servers in the deepest part of the ocean, with all of Equestria’s darkest secrets?”
“Hey now.” Applejack raised a hoof. “Only the pipes go down deep. The station ain’t even a mile down.” Her eyes widened, and she looked away. “Err… just pretend I didn’t say nothin’.”
Dakota nodded. She was tired enough that she could pretend whatever Applejack wanted her to. She stretched, closed her eyes, and dreamed of digital ghosts.