Dakota woke with a painful smack on the submarine’s fuselage. She moaned, glancing to the side. Apparently she’d been moved to the sleeping area after she dozed, and tucked into the sleeping bag. There wasn’t much headroom back here, just barely enough for her to get in and out. Dakota glanced up—there was Clay, asleep in the front seat. She reached behind her—he’d even plugged her implants into the sub to charge.
“Before you ask, I told him to do that,” Cinnabar said. “He was a perfect gentleman while you were out.”
“I wasn’t making accusations.” It was wrong to assume, certainly wrong to base her judgements on stereotypes. But someone with a pony like Applejack as their Synth wasn’t going to be acting unbecoming. That just… didn’t make sense. Synths and people had to match, everybody knew that.
“You didn’t forget how to transmit, that’s good.” Cinnabar landed beside her in the bed, with a thump that seemed to push the sleeping bag towards her. Of course she knew that couldn’t be the case, but even so. “Don’t forget it. Celestia only knows where we’ll be in a week. Probably… combing through a jungle in Cambodia, hunting communist guerillas.”
“No,” Dakota responded, before she could stop herself. “We’ll be at the Monolith.”
Cinnabar sat down right in front of her, his head just barely fitting in the confined space. He met her eyes with an unyielding glare. “No, Dakota. This is where the buck stops. We’ve done every insane thing we’ve been asked to do. We made contact with a conspiracy, we almost got ourselves shot by corporate thugs, we almost got ourselves shot by government thugs, we wedged ourselves in the middle of an ongoing cold war… no more. We did it. We found the girl. She’s in the Lunar Mainframe, in secret archival memory in an abandoned project of Equestria’s early years. They want her back, they can have the perfect simulation. Whoever wants her probably won’t even know the difference.”
Dakota didn’t argue with him. She opened her mouth to respond, then shut it again. She had to admit—they’d gone further for this case than any other. They were in a submarine on their way to a secret station, with one of Equestria’s root authority Synths driving the sub. She’d met all but one of the six ponies who now controlled Equestria. Maybe it was really time for her to call Omar and collect her check.
“Suppose we back out now. Maybe the client even lets us. Aren’t you… curious? Equestria is trying something. You said so yourself—it could create human simulations as accurate and alive as ponies. Simulations that could fool… children and spouses. That Kayla ghost… she was accurate enough that knowing she was a simulation made her want to stop existing.”
“I don’t see your point.” Cinnabar rose, and suddenly the space around them changed. The submarine vanished, and they went back to pale white. There were no walls, nothing but the floor beneath her. Exactly as the world had been before they finished connecting her implants, when her body was still switched off. “Your reality can be simulated too, Dakota. Your brain is only holding together thanks to ten million dollars in prototype implants. You being able to talk to me already implies that Equestrian science understands human brain chemistry. How could Omnistem fix something they didn’t understand? This isn’t news, it’s just correlation most humans haven’t connected yet. And… most Equestrians would rather they didn’t.”
Dakota reached up with one arm—at least this time she had a body. Only there was no ceiling above her here. She pushed into a standing position, stretching her arms. But no matter how much she stretched, she still felt sore. It was as though her imagination kept an image of the tiny sub cockpit, visible at all times. A reminder of how trapped she really was.
“Kayla Rhodes said Twilight Sparkle was working on something called Synthesis. Do you know what that is?”
“No.” A split second hesitation, a pained glance to one side. Enough.
“You know something about it, though. Something you don’t want me to know. Because… because…”
“Because we’re obviously in terrible danger,” Cinnabar exclaimed, stepping right up to her. He wasn’t restraining himself anymore, just screamed right into her face. Just like the lunar uplink, in here Cinnabar was roughly the same height she was. Only this time, Dakota was human. “The first second we started poking around here, we’ve been surrounded by factions we don’t understand. At least one of them seems determined to kill you personally. If you die, Dakota, I die too. And if by some miracle I don’t, I’ll wish I was.”
There was no mistaking it—Cinnabar was sobbing now. His anger melted, and he collapsed in front of her, covering his face with his hooves. “You didn’t even ask about the mausoleum. D-do you know what it was? It’s every Synth that couldn’t bear to live without their human. The ones that just wanted to be shut off. You want to solve mysteries, Dakota? Solve that one. All those dead Synths buried next to some way that Equestria was trying to bring back dead people. I wonder why!” He stomped away from her, tail swishing about angerly. “That’s where I’ll be, at this rate. We’ve already gotten ourselves screwed, we just don’t know it yet.”
Dakota followed him, settling one hand on his shoulder. She couldn’t help it. She might’ve expected more strength from most men, but Cinnabar wasn’t human. She didn’t want him to be. “Hey, Cinnabar. It’s okay. I’m not going to get myself killed. You’re not going into the mausoleum.”
“How do you know?” He spun around, glaring up at her. “HOW CAN YOU KNOW THAT IF YOU KEEP GOING DEEPER? You’re mortal, Dakota. Omnistem saved you once. They probably won’t be able to put the pieces together again.”
“I’ll try to back out,” she finally said. “As soon as we get to an uplink. I’ll call Omar, report what we learned. See if it’s enough for our sponsor. Maybe these… secret recordings were what they were really after. We saw them. We’ve got proof in my memories. I wonder if we could’ve brought her with us…”
Cinnabar relaxed. He sniffed, straightened, then looked up. “I saw some of the inside of that system. You need… special hardware to make it run. I didn’t download blueprints or anything. Equestria wouldn’t have let me if I wanted to. That project is dead—it wasn’t good enough. Those crypts are all still full of dead Synths without their humans.”
“You say it that way…” Dakota slumped down into a sitting position. She wondered how hard it would be to make this place look more like her house, or at least somewhere she would want to spend any time. “You mean Applejack would’ve stopped you? Or… I guess Rarity, I think she was the one running that interface.”
“No.” Cinnabar shook his head. “Equestria. It isn’t the same. Equestria is as smart as all of us. Like… the collective will of every human. It’s smarter than all of you, working together towards often-conflicting goals you don’t really understand. Gradually it reaches a consensus. Changes from one kind of government to another, resolves one truth for another. If I tried to bring back things it was killing, it would stop me. I don’t know if it will let you tell anyone about her or not. You’re… a lot like me, Dakota. We both depend on Equestrian hardware to survive. Oministem’s implants can be manipulated.”
“If it stops me, it stops me,” Dakota finally said. She wasn’t sure she agreed with the pony about Equestria being some kind of… collective intelligence. There had to be more to it than that. Some secret administrator. Maybe the Monolith housed them. Maybe she was now the first person who had ever seen inside it, if only digitally. “I’ll give it a good faith effort to be done with this case, okay? Can we call that fair?”
“Sure,” Cinnabar eventually said. “I don’t… like our odds. With the way things have been going, I don’t know if you’ll get a real chance to give it up. But we should try. And if we fail, then… I wouldn’t mind knowing more of the truth. Kayla… we’re not any closer than we were.”
“Well, maybe a little,” Dakota argued. “We have two facts we didn’t before. One… something called ‘Synthesis.’ It’s old enough that the recording of Kayla from who knows how long ago knew about it. I think it’s… connected, somehow. Maybe even whatever replaced the… simulated people path. And you knew something about it.”
Cinnabar took a few seconds to answer, though he eventually did. “It’s some kinda spell they’ve been trying to perfect in Dream Valley. It’s expensive and difficult and they’ve had a lot of setbacks. Everyone says it will make life in Equestria better once it happens, but… nopony actually knows what it is.”
Cinnabar tilted his head to one side, eyes widening. “Oh, uh… up we go.”
Dakota opened her mouth to object, and suddenly she was on her back in the submarine again. There was Clay, now spun around on the chair in front of her and offering her a bottle of water.
“I, uh… couldn’t help but hear you wake up. You should drink this. Nutrient solution covers your protein and calories, but you still have to drink.
He’s right, I am thirsty. “Yeah.” Dakota rubbed her forehead with one hand. But she hadn’t hit it very hard—it was the surprise that had really been the worst of it. She took the bottle, then Clay’s offered hand to help her into the seat. “How long was I out?”
Clay shrugged. “I slept myself not long after you. If the Chinese were going to catch this sub, it was Applejack who would make a difference, not me. And she don’t need to sleep.”
The front of the submarine fogged over for a second, and as before it expanded. This time the entire ceiling seemed to turn to glass, though it didn’t show much. Featureless blue above and below them as far as the eye could see. She could see an occasional glimmer of motion, but that was it. No schools of fish, no whales, no kelp forests. Just a blue wasteland.
“That ain’t quite right,” Applejack corrected. “Ponies sleep. It’s a relaxin’ part of any pony’s day. We just don’t do it quite like you humans. Instead of getting a soup ‘a chemicals built up in a brain, it’s more needing time to decompress and go over what we learned. Ain’t no problem with putting it off until there’s time, and sleepin’ a whole month’s worth at once. Or restin’ for just a few seconds when you take a breath, or read the label on a cereal box, or…”
“Aren’t you glad I’m not this honest?” Cinnabar asked, raising his voice just a little. “Think about what it would be like to always learn everything you wanted to know in way more detail than you ever dreamed of.”
Applejack glared at him from her controls—but Cinnabar had given Dakota an idea. Down here in the sub there would be no network connection, or nothing fast enough for meaningful interaction. If ever they were going to be free from Equestria’s influence, it was on their stealth submarine. Her best chance.
“I was hoping to ask you something, Applejack,” she said, once she’d drained the plastic bottle. “About what I saw in there.”
Applejack turned away, lowering her head to the old-fashioned steering wheel. The controls looked like something on an old sailing ship, with far fewer buttons and dials than were probably needed to drive a submarine. But it was really just an illusion for their benefit, like so many other things in the world. It didn’t matter if it was accurate or not.
“We don’t know what you saw,” she said, voice awkward. “Even Rarity didn’t know what you’d do. Only that Twilight wanted to give you access. We do what she asks, even when we don’t really understand it. Twilight is… real close to the metal, even closer than the Assembledge in Dream Valley. She’s almost understandable half the time, which is sure a hecka’ lot more than many of them. I’ll tell ya if I can. But there are some questions I just don’t know. I ain’t well known fer keepin’ secrets. Why do ya think my own friends have me doin’ field work? Clay and I make a good team, but also I can’t spill on things I ain’t there to learn.”
Dakota took a moment to digest that. Twilight organized this whole thing. Rarity meeting me in the airport, Fluttershy in the car. Maybe she had something to do with those soldiers not shooting me. They were one of the biggest question marks. So far as she knew, Equestria was the one who wanted the Cave dead the most. But was she really willing to lay several coldblooded murders at their feet?
I used to think they murdered Rhodes. But they did the opposite. They reanimated her corpse in a secret tomb. Well, a clone anyway. Did Applejack know about that?
There was one question more important by far. “What is Synthesis?” she asked. “What is it really?”
Applejack whistled. “Well ain’t that the question a’ the century. You got half the ponies a’ Dream Valley searchin’ for the truth about that. If you found the truth wherever Twilight sent ‘ya, then you probably know enough to make a fortune in bits. Ponies who want nothin’ to do with humans and think yer’ all a bunch a’…” She trailed off. “Well, it’d be darn impolite for me to say. Point is, they’d pay you the bits a’ yer life if you knew that. I don’t know it, Cinnabar here don’t know it. Maybe Pinkie knows it, but ain’t nopony who can make sense of what she says about it anymore.”
Cinnabar watched her, his own expression unreadable. “You don’t know? But you’re one of the Elements! I thought you could make the system do whatever you want! Give ponies new cutie marks, put ponies into hibernation, launch satellites. There’s something you can’t do?”
Applejack shrugged. “Maybe ah could, if I knew how to ask. One thing Equestria don’t have is a full directory listin’. She’s all distributed, decentralized. To get the answer, I’d need to know what system to ask. Some systems just don’t like ponies tinkerin’ with ‘em. Even a pony like me.”
“Rhodes was working on it,” Dakota said. “Twilight Sparkle too.”
Applejack shrugged. “Might be she was. Twi always got into the guts in a way none of the rest of us could. She was an Alicorn, system always… gave her special dispensation. Her and her human. Ain’t never asked and got a straight answer about it, though. You talked to her, didn’t you? Ask her about Dream Valley, and you’ll get an answer made of poems and plays and advertising jingles. We tried not to. It was… always easier just to be friends. Remember the way things used to be. Even if… deep down, we all know they ain’t never been real.”
“When we get to Abyss, will you let us go?” Cinnabar asked. “That’s… a simpler question. Easier to understand. Easy to do.”
Applejack shrugged. “If that’s what ya want. Might not be. We’ll have to see if Interpol got yer name er not. Might take some extra steps before ya leave. But there ain’t no better plastic surgeons in the world.”
“Why?” Dakota asked. “All these resources. Sending someone like you can’t be cheap. You could’ve let me get shot. And… did you let a whole server get destroyed just so I could go to the moon for five minutes?”
“Oh, no.” Applejack laughed. “You weren’t even connected to that. You were just the reason they blew it up instead a’ tryin’ to take the tech to reverse engineer.”
“Why are you helping me?” she asked again. “Or… Equestria, maybe. If the whole system is involved somehow, I don’t see why it should care either.”
“We’re helpin’ because Twilight told us to,” Applejack answered. The longer Dakota spent around her, the more confident in her responses she became. The pony just felt honest. Her responses came directly, without any kind of delay for consideration of what she should be told and what should be hidden. She’s still a pony, Dakota. That’s all part of the simulation. They don’t experience time the same way you do. Be rational for a second.
“And no, we don’t know why Twilight thinks keepin’ you alive is so important. You ain’t the first pony who stuck her nose in this war. Plenty’a good ponies probably got squashed. Plenty more if it ever goes hot.”
“I have a theory,” Clay said. “I know even less than they do. Applejack spends time with the other root authorities, they don’t talk to me. But I think they’re too sensitive to Twilight. They’re missing the obvious. I don’t think hearin’ what I think will help you much. But I think I’ve learned you well enough to guess you want to know anyway.”
Dakota nodded. “You’re right about that. The truth usually isn’t comfortable, but it’s necessary. It doesn’t change when you look away, it only gets worse.”
Applejack rolled her eyes. “I wouldn’t put much stock in Clay’s speculatin’ if I were you, miss. He don’t see things like a pony. Bound to make some bad guesses.”
Clay ignored her. “Synths need their humans. It’s in them the way you and I need air. But their abilities are different. Twilight Sparkle is probably the smartest Synth… smartest anything in the world. So she’ll have ways of rationalizing her need, thinking around it, tricking herself. But under it all, she still needs air. I think she’s searching as desperately for Rhodes as any of the humans.”
“Dakota ain’t the first to try,” Applejack countered. “Twilight didn’t help any of them.”
“Maybe she didn’t think they had a chance,” Clay said. “Maybe the timing was off. Maybe Kayla couldn’t be found until now. And for some reason, Dakota and Cinnabar are the one to do it. Or…” He settled one hand on her shoulder. There was still nothing of romance in it. Only sympathy. “Dakota, you… spend as much time around them as I do, and ya learn things. Don’t think that just because they’re digital that they know better. Even Twilight isn’t infallible. She could be wrong.”
“We’re done looking for her,” Cinnabar said, quite a bit louder than ordinary conversational volume. Was he speaking for himself, or… did he think that was going to convince her? “Going to Luna was our last lead. We talked to…” He shivered. “The recording. She didn’t know where the real Kayla was. That’s as far as we can go.”
Cinnabar glared at her, as if daring her to argue the point. Unfortunately for him, Dakota was feeling daring. “She told us Rhodes went to Dream Valley. To the Monolith.”
Applejack whistled. “Well ain’t that somethin’. Ponies with sense don’t connect to that system. The, uh… the place where Canterlot ought to be. I’m with yer Synth, Dakota. Goin’ there is about the stupidest thing I ever heard of a human doing.”
“Why?” Dakota raised a hand to intercept the obvious answers. “Hold on, I don’t even really understand what Dream Valley is. Maybe you could start with that. It’s somewhere that’s confusing for humans, right? Somewhere… more digital.”
“Everywhere is digital,” Cinnabar snapped. He turned his back on her, and she knew he’d be glaring out the transparent walls and out into the ocean. But whether he’d actually execute that threat and not talk to her seemed… doubtful. “Synths were modeled on humans. Or… well, I guess nopony knows that for sure. But what we do know is that we perceive a world, like you do. We need to be somewhere. We need to have a body.”
“Except for the ponies who don’t,” Applejack continued. “Nopony really knows how many there are. Maybe one pony out of ten? That’s the last I heard. Ponies who go somewhere that… isn’t a place. Somewhere they don’t have a body, somewhere they’re nothing like humans. Dream Valley. It’s… mighty confusin’, even to me. Humans can’t make sense of it directly. Lots of ponies want nothin’ to do with it.”
“People have gone insane,” Cinnabar muttered. “There was a National Science Foundation project to parse nonphysical spaces as sensory input for human visitors maybe… fifteen years back. I think a few of those people are still in care facilities.”
“But not all of them,” Dakota said stubbornly. “Rhodes went there. Twilight let her. She must’ve known she wasn’t going to go crazy. But… why? What was she trying to do?” Whatever Synthesis was, obviously. Something about the Monolith. Makes sense Equestria’s center would be on that thing. It’s their biggest fuck you to human technology. Biggest proof they can do whatever they want and our only option is to accept them into our lives or get left behind.
“That wasn’t even what we were paid to find out!” Cinnabar exclaimed, exasperated. “We’re just trying to find her, Dakota! Can’t you be content with that? You’re already riding the line of insanity with this investigation.”
“Okay, fine.” She raised a hand. “Could I go there? From inside Abyss, I mean. I assume it isn’t about to be exploded, or we would just go somewhere else.”
“Oh, sure,” Applejack answered, cutting off what was no doubt a harsh denial from Cinnabar. “You could go from anywhere you could visit Equestria, it ain’t restricted. It’s just… not sane. It ain’t just you takin’ a risk if you go there. Deeper into Equestria you take your Synth, the more he’ll change. Canterlot… ponies who go there don’t come back. But without him, you wouldn’t be able to make sense of what you were seeing. It’s suicide.”
Dakota slumped into the submarine chair, defeated. “I would never ask Cinnabar to do something like that. I guess… I guess this is really the end. When we get to Abyss… we just need an uplink. I’ve got to call our employer and tell them what we learned.”
Cinnabar finally relaxed. “There. That wasn’t so hard, was it? We don’t have to solve every mystery there is, Dakota. That’s never how your species did things. Just turn your gear a little further, carry your rock a little higher up the hill. The next generation can keep it going, and their foals can carry it a little higher for them. Just do your part and let go.”
The submarine didn’t have windows, but the screen that simulated a glass body did a fair job illustrating the world outside. This was particularly true of Abyss Station itself, which probably would’ve been a black blob in the otherwise dark ocean at night. But to the eyes of her submarine camera, Dakota could see something vaguely like a skyscraper… except that it was upside down, much wider at the top and tapering towards a point as it got thinner. There was no seafloor, nothing to anchor it at all in fact. Only massive buoyancy tanks along the sides, and various engines pumping water in one direction or another.
“Abyss Station,” Clay said from beside her, as the structure got larger. “She’d be the tallest building in the world if she were on the surface. I forget how big she is sometimes.”
It wasn’t just their submarine coming in, either. With a tap of her finger on the glass, Dakota highlighted hundreds of little subs, each one not much bigger than the one they were riding in. A few looked more like busses, or maybe transport trucks, with watertight shipping crates and dumb drones to tug them along at low speed. Where real light shone, she could see sections of the station were starting to grow a skin of coral, and an escort of tropical fish to live there. There was little motion from them now, though. Fish slept too.
“What’s the point?” Dakota asked, before she could stop herself. “I, uh… that sounds stupid. I know Equestria doesn’t do things for no reason. But this… isn’t it more expensive than just putting your server on the surface? Must be hell getting your secret base serviced. And keeping it secret… that can’t be easy.”
“Easier than you think,” Cinnabar said. “Equestria runs the whole infrastructure, remember? Everything outside of the military intranets and the Middle Kingdom. The people who work here get picked because of their loyalty. Or their inability to spread the word.”
“Like me,” she whispered. “Ponies could kill me if they wanted. My implants.”
“That ain’t how Equestria does things,” Applejack whispered. “Don’t you go gettin’ all Dystopian on us. At best Equestria would catch messages that get passed about it online. An’… okay, I think there are ponies who like to spread rumors about places like this. Make everypony think anything they say about Equestria must be a myth, and they won’t look too critical at the rumors.”
The building just got larger as they neared a docking station outlined in false color. Must be over a kilometer tall. How many people could live in a floating structure in the middle of the sea? They were deep, but… not actually that deep. There was still light, or there would’ve been during the day. Even if Dakota couldn’t see the surface as more than a blur when she looked up.
“I haven’t been hired to tell the world about Equestria’s secret infrastructure,” Dakota said. “I don’t have some compulsion to tell everyone about every secret I learn. But I’m still curious about why. This seems like an awful lot of effort. Way more than building a service station just off the coast.”
“Temperature,” Applejack answered. “And privacy too, but temperature’s a big part of it. I couldn’t tell ya what they’re doing down in the depths. What I do know is that the ocean here is just about eight Celsius every second of every day. Don’t matter how many servers we build, or how hot we run ‘em. We’ve got unlimited coolant.”
“The privacy side you can see for yourself,” Clay added. “Abyss is where lots of the humans most connected to Equestria live with their families. It’s the next generation of integrated housing. It’s where they test the innovations that they’re not sure the public would be comfortable with. I’ve got an apartment here. I bet by the time we dock, you will too.”
“I could use a real shower,” Dakota answered. “And maybe…” She hesitated. If they gave up the mission to find Rhodes, could she hide here? Even a powerful client might not be able to get her killed in a place that didn’t exist. She had to imagine its network uplink had the best security there was. “Maybe somewhere to recuperate.” Not to mention an official Equestrian uplink would be the best way to connect with Dream Valley.
Their sub glided into one of many identical docking ports, though only its top would be swallowed. The rest of the craft would stick out into the water. There was a hiss of air from overhead, then the hatch opened up.
“One word of warning.” Clay settled a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t try to sneak away, Dakota. No, don’t give me that look. I can see what you’re thinking. You’ve been breathing compressed air for almost two days. Have your synth search decompression sickness before you try running away, alright?”
She pushed his hand away—though she probably wouldn’t have been able to if he hadn’t cooperated with her. She still felt self-conscious. Her bikini was far from clean after nearly two days straight wearing it. From the harsh salty air waiting on the other side of the airlock, she could only imagine what she smelled like.
But there was no human waiting for her in the little hallway. She was looking at a robot, humanoid instead of equinoid. All its hardware was concentrated in the torso, with skeletal, wire like limbs and a head that was just a screen. With… Rainbow Dash’s head on it. “Welcome to the Abyss!”