Ponyville’s silence was more complete than Canterlot’s. Spike slogged the final paces of the journey within collapsing distance of Twilight. If he fell, he mused, at least he’d be able to grab onto her tail and save himself a bruised chin.
The short length of cobblestone before them and the golden steps of the Castle of Friendship glittered under a coat of midnight dewfall. Somewhere outside the harsh glow surrounding Twilight’s horn, a breeze rustled the treetops, but otherwise the two of them may as well have been walking the path of stars and memories that she would sometimes speak of seeing before destiny had granted her her wings, and new life. The morning glories, untouched poison to the pony folk, seemed to turn their hooded faces away as they passed.
Twilight stopped, and the long journey home was finished. She stared as if trying to convince herself the crystalline walls were real, like a dreamwalker seeing something other than the blank face of the door standing between them and the surrender to their blissful blankets and pillows. Spike was eyeing the stacks of boxes that had been dropped on either side of the water-studded staircase when the moths appeared. Powdery wings fluttered around them, wheeling in and out of the dark with no pattern or plan.
“The extra supplies I had Balsam Dust order arrived. Good,” said Twilight. “The positioner and detector components. I’ll get them.” She yawned as her magic hoisted the haphazard crates into the air. “Here we go, Spike. Last leg.” The castle doors gave a brief squeal as they swung open.
Inside, Twilight lit the glow-lamps as she proceeded to the far end of the receiving hall, her packages revolving in eccentric orbits around her. Spike followed. His struggle to accept that sleep was still a distant prize, and was yet to be earned, was fierce, but short. There was no quitting now.
He almost lost track of her when she turned down a narrow side passage. He sped up, ignoring the burning in his legs, and tipped around the corner. A floating sack of nails greeted him, scraping and spinning on its way forward in service to a waiting cause, but Twilight was nowhere to be seen.
The floor of the hallway was worn a milky white from daily excursions to the staircase at its end, the one Spike knew led down to the laboratory. He allowed himself a smile. Laboratories were where experiments happened. When the experiment was finished, he could sleep.
Down the helical tunnel he tripped, the hind-most of the fleet of packaged tools and equipment suspended behind Twilight bearing the promise of good news; loads of new information that science needed to win out against whatever foes of ponykind the Princess of Friendship had rooted out of their hidey holes. Tonight, blood would come clean with its secret, and the whole world would change.
Above the echoes of their tapping claws and hooves, and the shuffling of the supplies, Twilight was humming a merry melody. She kept repeating the same few notes with each turn of the spiral. Spike had heard it before, but couldn’t place where. He did know that when Twilight had a song stuck in her head, it usually went hoof-in-paw with a long battle with the books and chalkboards.
When he reached the bottom, he found that Twilight had already set her burdens down and had begun unpacking them. The bags and boxes and crates were opening around him, blossoming into metal trunks trailing fronds of wires and leaves of tissue paper. The light at the workbench where a purple-coated back was already tensed in concentration dimmed behind the tangle of the growing forest, electric yellow to vague orange. Spike ducked under a long iron tube as it shot out of a foam-padded crate, and zigzagged his way to Twilight’s side.
“Hey Twilight, where do you want these?” he asked, letting his bulging bags slide down.
The calibration ruler rotated in precise arcs above a clean swept space a few steps away from the wall. “You can leave them there,” she answered, looking back and forth between a notebook and the ruler. Thin pieces of wood floated into place to form a model of something that resembled the magazine table in Twilight Velvet’s living room.
Spike sat down. The way her magic tugged and eased the ruler just enough to turn it without overshooting her mark amazed him. He could still remember her, stomping the floor of the Golden Oaks Library and snorting over a failed teleportation spell, complaining how all the time she’d been spending on her new friends had taken her away from her studies. Now she looked like she could fight an army of undead centaurs with just that pointy piece of metal.
“That’s the base,” she breathed. “I almost can’t believe it, even though it’s right here in front of me. I bet this is how Coltsman felt, towards the end. Can you believe it?”
Spike suppressed a yawn. “Sorry, did you say Coltsman? I’ve heard some weird names, but …”
Twilight resumed taking notes. “Coltsman was a very important philosopher. Almost as much of an inspiration to me as Starswirl. Worked his entire life to determine the value of a special number. Ruined his health over it, actually. Spent so long bent over his equations and postulates that his back grew crooked. It eventually got so bad that he had to walk on his hooftips. If he were here today to see how much has been built on his work, though, he’d agree it was worth every second.”
She dropped her notebook onto the floor and slid a bag of nails to within reach of her hoof. A hammer floated to her from a nearby shelf.
“He’s highly honored for his devotion to finding the number. Over the centuries, scholars came to attach his name to it, once they realized how important it is. Coltsman’s Constant, they call it. That’s how he’s remembered.”
The structure of wooden pieces toppled into a pile. Twilight stood on one of them to steady it, and began nailing it to a second.
“That’s a funny way to remember a pony,” said Spike.
“It is, isn’t it?” Twilight giggled around the hammer’s haft. “Even funnier is Oiler the Great. He’s known in the present day for deriving an equation that links together some of the most important concepts in mathematics. Some of the most important constants, coincidentally. Numbers, as I may have mentioned, like names and words, are meaningless unless you compare them to others. But some numbers: they refer to something fixed. Something real that never changes.” With a final tap of her hammer, the first two wooden slats came together into a perfect joint.
Spike got up and handed her another pair of nails. “Is … is there a joke there? I think I missed it.”
“No, Spike. What’s funny is that Oiler didn’t derive it first. Coats the Obscure did.”
“Coats the Obscure? Never heard of him either.”
“I wouldn’t expect that you had,” said Twilight. She selected another piece from the pile. “He’s unknown outside of academia, and even then you’d have to go out of your way to learn about him. History of Equestrian Science is not a popular subject. Oh, and by the way: Coltsman didn’t discover Coltsman’s Constant either. It was actually somepony a bit later by the name of Lax Flank.”
“But you just said—”
“I did, and you trusted me. Just like every pony trusts the historians.”
“Well … yeah. You’re my friend.”
“Friend …” she drifted off. She bit her lip, shaking her head. “To be fair, I didn’t claim anything of what I just said was true. I told you before, and it’s worth repeating, that I can’t claim anything to be true. Just good enough to serve its purpose.” She nudged the waiting pile of slats. “This positioner will be good enough. I was thinking … it needs a name. ‘Positioner’ is too vague. Any ideas?”
Spike shrugged. He knew better than to pipe up when Twilight was at full gallop.
“Let’s call it a throne,” Twilight continued. “That will distinguish it from a normal chair or stool. Technical words should always be employed to avoid confusion, and delineate instruments of science from commonplace objects. If we wanted, we could convert the name to a number. It might be the same name or number as the throne Celestia sits on, but in the context of this experiment, it’s going to mean something else entirely.” She laughed, and calling the nails out of their bag like a cloud of moths, made them dance and rearrange into an ever-changing string of digits and letters.
Spike clapped, and laughed with her. “Cool, a throne! What else for Princess Twilight?” He arranged the joint at her hooves to give her a better angle from which to swing her hammer. “But what if ponies forget you’re the one who did this experiment? What if they give the credit to some pony else? Or what if,” he blurted, “what if no pony understands how important it is until a thousand years from now, and you never get to see how much it helps ponies?”
Twilight grinned. “Oh, I’m sure they won’t forget me. And as far as anypony can tell,”—she looked back at her wings— “I’ll always be around.”
She set to work, and with all the zeal of a runner spying the finish line after a hard-fought race, remained in her laboratory deep into the night and beyond into the following morning. When she needed sandpaper, or nails, or reference guides from the library, she gave instructions to Spike to fetch them. She passed the hours without saying much more, sawing and sanding, hammering and lashing the wooden planks together, truing them until they all seemed to blend into a single, seamless whole. When the L of the throne was finished, she began on the legs. Cut, observe, measure … cut, observe, measure: on it went with no effort spared until, covered in sawdust and sweat and humming her cheerful melody, she sat back, turned to Spike and dismissed him.
It took Spike only a few minutes to realize that he was staring at the inside of his eyelids. The spirals and checkered patterns that whirled in the darkness had covered over his dream, where, maybe, he’d been sharing an ice cream cone with Rarity. That was it. Pure white vanilla, like her coat, and sweet. He’d been laughing as he held it between them so they could take turns, and they’d accidentally licked at the same time, and …
He could try to force his brain back to sleep, he figured, but that never worked.
He rolled over in his bed instead, craning his neck to look out the window. Dawn had not yet come. There was a sound. A rusty machine of some kind, its big, slow wheel squealing at the same spot over and over as it turned. Robots, of course. Just like Ahuizotl had turned out to be real, the Machine Heads of the fourth generation Power Ponies comics had found him at last.
They were in the room with him, creeping up to his bedside to plug their brain drain wires into his ears and suck his memories dry. He brought his claws to the ready and waited. No, the noise was something else, coming from the floor. It was the vents. Some pony was crying, and the sound was drifting up from below.
“Twilight’s in trouble!” he yelped. The blankets almost caught his foot as he hopped down off of his mattress and scrambled downstairs.
Slap went his feet against the smooth crystal tiles. The hall was quiet, insulated from anything going on above or below. Two glow-lamps remained lit, high on the walls, but other than their flickering light there was nothing to suggest that anypony was around. It might have been day. Maybe he’d imagined the crying, he thought. Maybe his dream had changed before he’d awoken, and he’d only heard it in the tail end of something his mind preferred not to remember.
He stopped at the end of the hallway that led to the laboratory and looked to the jadeite arch above the staircase. It had been no trick of his fuzzy, sleep-addled dragon brain: there was light reflecting from the descending walls beyond, and the echo of a lone pony’s weeping. His friend needed help.
He crossed beneath the arch at a dead sprint. “Don’t worry, Twilight!” he called out to the passage ahead, “Spike to the rescue!”
The shallow steps dropped away in twos and threes as he hurtled downward, not bothering to stop as the staircase curved right. He slammed into the wall to slow down. After taking a moment to stare at himself rubbing his forehead in the shimmering surface of the stone, he hustled on toward the growing light, already scanning the part of the laboratory he could see for signs of Twilight.
He descended into the laboratory and saw that she’d been busy. Packing paper was scattered between stacks of empty boxes, hiding scraps of wood and metal that looked as if they had been thrown aside as soon as they’d been cut. The back of the throne stood across the room where the light was focused.
The crying was quieter now, hushed to an uneven sniffling and a few half-hearted whimpers. Spike guessed Twilight must have heard him coming. He began winding his way through the labyrinth of unstable crate towers, dusty chalkboards and cabinets, his ears perked as he homed in on the sound. After a wrong turn chasing an echo into a dead end, he broke through into the clear space where he’d left her.
There she was, draped over the seat of the throne, hugging her face with her forelegs over a dirty puddle of tears.
Spike could tell that she had almost completed building the apparatus. The projector stood at the left side of the throne, its long flared tube pointing at the wall where hundreds of tiny squares had been arranged in a grid. The grid, he reasoned, would be the detector. A tangle of wires connected all three components, and converged on a humming metal box attached to a thick pipe that led to the ceiling.
He kicked through the last of the packing paper and into the lamplight, ready with a joke he knew would chase Twilight’s storm clouds away like an all-star pegasus. When she didn’t look up to greet him, he thought better of it and stopped short, bending low to get her attention. “What happened, Twilight? Are you hurt? Did something go wrong with the experiment?”
Twilight sighed and sniffed hard. “I ruined her life, Spike,” she whispered. “I ruined her entire life. She didn’t deserve that. And I did it without knowing. There was no way to know.”
Spike wrung his paws together, casting about the room as if he’d find the words his friend needed to hear on one of the chalkboards. “Who, Twilight?” he asked, still keeping his distance. “Whose life did you ruin?”
“Moon Dancer. You were there. I destroyed her. I destroyed everything.”
“Moon Dancer?” Spike asked. He scratched at his chin. “Is that what this is about? Aww, come on, Twi. You’re being too hard on yourself. It’s OK. Twinkleshine tells me she and Lemonhearts hang out with her around Canterlot all the time. She’s fine now. And like you said, you didn’t know. It’s not like you abandoned her on purpose or something.”
Twilight shook her head. “But that’s now, Spike. She was miserable for six years. I made her miserable for six years. That’s forever when you’re a filly. Think of all the good she could have done in that time. Think of the discoveries she could have made, or the ponies’ lives she could have touched, and the good they could have done in turn because of it. The friendships. She’s brilliant, and kindhearted, and I ruined her. All because I had to run off and bury my face in some silly book. There was no way to know.” She dropped her head back down onto her forelegs. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t honestly exclude this line of reasoning in my calculations. Maybe I don’t deserve to go through with this. Maybe I should just give it up, go upstairs and sit on my crystal princess throne and think about how much of a failure I am.”
Spike shuffled closer, reaching out and laying his paw on her shoulder. “We don’t always know, Twilight. Everypony makes mistakes. It’s what we do to fix them that counts. Going back to help Moon Dancer was one of the bravest, most responsible things I’ve ever seen anypony do. You really showed everypony that day that you’re a princess.”
Twilight gazed at him through her tears, her words tumbling out “… just wanted to hold her, and tell her that even though all our studies have gained for us is the knowledge that the sun will burn out, and the moon will drift away, that it’s OK, because for now we’re together. Isn’t that true friendship? Isn’t that who I am? Isn’t that …”
She buried her face under her hooves, and the word was lost.
With the same gentleness he would show an injured phoenix, Spike touched her other shoulder. “I don’t understand half the stuff we’ve been doing,” he continued, “but because of things like helping Moon Dancer and all of the other ponies we’ve met, I believe you when you say it’s all going to pan out. You’re going to change the world, even more than you already have.” He wrapped his arms around her head and drew it to his chest.
She was trembling. He pressed his cheek into her tangled mane. “Didn’t you say that numbers only mean something when you have other numbers to compare them to?” he spoke toward her drooping ear. “Maybe that’s the way it is with ponies and dragons too.”
For a while, Twilight didn’t respond. Spike held her tighter, feeling her breathing slow to a calmer pace. He murmured as he traced the pink streak in her mane. “Just think about it. It’s OK.”
She eased out of his grip, smiling at him. Brushing her bangs aside, she looked him up and down, searching all of his little purple frame before finding his eyes. Without looking away, she ran the tip of her hoof up the length of her horn, then down the side of his face and neck, to his heart.
“Just like numbers,” she laughed. ‘’You’re right. It is OK. It’s OK, because I’m going to make up for it right now, with the results of this experiment.”
She stood and appraised what remained of her work. “I can do this!”
“ ’Attagirl, Twilight! You’ve got this!” cheered Spike.
Twilight’s horn lit, and her magic swept away the debris that had accumulated in the work area. “I worked out a closed form expression for the average velocity. It has to be an average, since the agglomerate will be discrete. I’ll explain as we go.”
She climbed up onto the throne and positioned her rump on the seat, letting her hind legs dangle against two vertical slats that had been fixed to the base, while resting her forelegs on the arms.
“There should be four member alignment cords on the second shelf of the cabinet behind you. Yes, right there. Excellent. Bolt them to the arms and legs of the throne. I already bored the holes. You start with the basic … the basic quantities being measured. Distance and time, as we’ve discussed. Call them x and t.”
Spike slipped the broad-headed bolts through the loops at the ends of the cords that Twilight had pointed out. A wrench had been left in the cabinet with them. He began to thread the bolts and tighten them as Twilight spoke over the clicking of metal on metal.
“Each subunit of the agglomerate will be traveling at its own rate, and at its own angle with respect to the line of the projector, which is perpendicular to the plane of the detector and intersects it at its center. We therefore have to index the subunits for summation in the average. We assign subscripts i equal to one through N, with N being the number of subunits.” She cast a spell to snare a quill and one end of the checklist they had been following. The quill dipped and fluttered as she wrote.
Spike strained at the last bolt until he was satisfied it was as tight as it could be. “Uh huh,” he said, “subunits. Got it. All set with the bolts. What’s next?”
Twilight nodded. “Great. Wrap the member alignment cords around my legs and buckle them so that they can’t budge. As I was saying, each of the subunits will travel its own distance xi. One can calculate these distances using simple trigonometry. Remember the Bit Tackorean Theorem?”
“Yeah, uh, that one … that’s when a triangle grows legs, and the legs are square, and … uh …”
“Close,” giggled Twilight. “The sum of the squares of the perpendicular legs of a right triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse. So. In our case, a right triangle is formed for each subunit, with the hypotenuse equal to xi. As for the legs, one is the radial distance from the center of the detector to the terminus of the subunit—let’s call that di—and the other is … Spike, are you paying attention?”
Spike had been teetering on his feet, snoring and murmuring about not letting the ice cream drip down the cone. He twitched when he heard Twilight’s shout. “Sorry. You lost me at … what were you saying?”
“Triangles,” Twilight growled. “The second leg is what I’m naming delta x0, the distance from my … the distance from the origin to the center of the detector. Check the cords. Are they tight enough?”
Spike worked his claw under the buckles, testing for gaps. “Tight as a tambourine.”
“Good! Now do the same with my forelegs up here. Tie them to the arms of the throne.” Her quill scratched faster, never pausing. When Spike had finished lashing her hooves in place, she sent the ink-stained feather and scroll to rest on a crate top.
“One more. Secure my head to the back of the throne. Don’t … don’t worry. It’s fine.”
Once more Spike obeyed, winding the final length of rope behind the throne’s headrest, and up and back against the base of Twilight’s horn. She tried working the cord loose by turning her head, but all that yielded was the pinched skin of her forehead.
“Now I know exactly where I am,” she said.
A minute passed, or so Spike guessed. He thought Twilight might have slipped away into sleep when she spoke again. “It’s happening. It’s finally happening, Spike! Load the cavitation sphere. There’s a slot in the projector.”
He didn’t need to be reminded where the sphere was, it having weighed him down since he’d carved it out of its ingot. It slid into the hole bored into the back of the projector with a quiet click.
Twilight began to twist her forelegs. “OK. OK, last part. Attach the electrocardio sensor—that thin wire there, with the square of tape at the end—to my chest. You can use your claws to remove the hair so that it sticks.”
Spike drew his pinky claw up Twilight’s breastbone, shaving away a patch just big enough to accommodate the sensor’s adhesive flap. “Is this the part that measures the velocity?” he asked.
“Uh … well … yes,” said Twilight. “It measures my heart rate. When the, uh, right signal is sent through this electrode, it initializes the time. That’s how we define zero time.”
She breathed deep, faster and faster. “The difference between zero time and the respective times at which each subunit contacts the detector will be the delta ti, the divisor in each indexed subunit velocity, xi over delta ti.”
Between swallowed chuckles, she hummed bars of her song. Spike wasn’t worried. Twilight was just being Twilight. A Twilight that hadn’t slept in forever.
“The average velocity—the number we’ve worked so long and so hard to find—is the sum of the subunit velocities, divided … hee hee … divided by the total number of subunits. And the uncertainty, which should be zero, oh, I don’t know. Let’s define that as three standard deviations.”
She was wheezing now, huffing and squirming like she wanted to jump out of the seat and dance in mid-air. She called her quill and scroll to her once more, and scrawled something into the last empty margin. Satisfied, she smiled an exhausted, ecstatic smile.
“And that, my dear Spike, is everything.”
Her bloodshot eyes turned sidelong to watch him as she shoved the scroll in his face.
{\overline v} = \frac{1}{N} \sum_{i=1}^N \frac{\sqrt{d_i^2 + {\Delta}x_0^2}} {\Delta t_i}
“That is the velocity of blood.”
Spike peered at the equation, doing his best to understand. The letters and symbols refused to explain themselves no matter how hard he squinted. “I see it, Twi, but it’s all Old High Griffish to me. I’ll take your word for it, though. I trust you.”
Twilight somehow gathered the breath to laugh again. “I know you do. Oh Spike,” she quavered. The light cast an odd sheen on her watery eyes. “I never could have done any of this without you. Are you ready to continue with the final phase of the experiment?”
“I was born ready!” he answered, giving a sharp salute.
Twilight tried to nod. “Lock the magic inhibitor band on my horn. That’s crucial. See, even princesses can get skittish. I might be tempted to interfere with the operation of the apparatus. If I were to … if I were to free myself, to move even the slightest bit to change my destiny, the whole thing would be thrown off. The data would be invalid. And experiments can’t be … there’s no way to do it over.”
Spike was rummaging in the shrunken bag that was all that was left of Twilight’s supplies. “Yup, wouldn’t want that … uh, wait … found it!” He clambered up onto Twilight’s lap and, after fidgeting with the clasp, locked the ring onto her horn. The carved silver band glowed red, then faded.
Twilight tested a spell, letting the thwarted energy spit and fizzle at the tip of her horn. Nothing happened. “This is the magic moment!” she said. “This is living! What do you think it will be, Spike? Star roads and dreams? Or the other thing. The thing no pony can imagine.”
Spike had hopped down, and stood facing her. “I’m not followin’ you, Twi. Must be more of those technical terms, right?”
“Yes. Yes, that’s right. Spike? Before we complete the, uh, the experiment, I just wanted to say that I … I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed spending the last couple of days with you. You really are the best assistant anypony could ask for. No matter how this turns out, I know for sure that … that what we’re doing is good. We’re going to change the world, for the better.”
“Just a dragon-shaped pile of proteins, calcium and water, doing his best!” Spike cheered. He dabbed at Twilight’s cheeks with a ball of tissue paper.
She sniffled. “OK. I can do this. I can do this. You’ll find the procedure on the table over there. No! Right there!”
A stack of books fell from the crate Spike was searching. “Got it!”
“Excellent,” said Twilight. “The data collection will be pretty straightforward. There will be a printout—an automatic scroll—with the velocity and the associated uncertainty. But listen: the printout will be of absolute importance. It will be the only evidence we have of the results. You have to promise me that no matter what, you won’t let it out of your sight until it’s safely filed.”
“Dragon’s Honor,” said Spike. “You know you can count on me.”
“I know …” Twilight whispered to herself. “I know for absolute certain.”
“Hey, that’s the …” Spike began to say when he took notice of the look on Twilight’s face. She sat on her throne, gazing at the far wall. Spike folded his paws and waited, thinking better of interrupting her thoughts. At least, he thought, she hadn’t fallen asleep right before the grand finale.
After a time, she spoke. “Spike, when you’re finished with the procedure, why don’t you leave me down here for a while? I’ve … I’ve got some analysis to do. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s going to take at least an hour. Go on ahead and visit with Princess Celestia and Princess Luna. I’ll try to catch up later. Tell them that I figured it out. It really is all a matter of perspective. We decide what the meaning is. Tell them …” She smiled, blinking hard and fast, “tell them friendship is magic.”
“Locked in my memory banks. Consider it done!” said Spike. “Anything else?”
“No, that’s all,” Twilight replied.
Without waiting for a further cue, Spike ducked back into the heaps of gutted boxes and packing paper. It was harder going, heading away from the lighted workspace. His shadow moved over the remains of the delivered freight, tricking him into thinking some pony was following him. Twilight, maybe, come up with one more idea to perfect her apparatus.
Her voice, made more distant by the interceding refuse, dispelled the illusion. “Hurry please.”
He pushed on, using the top of the stairwell as a guide. Twilight kept talking, her words growing fainter as he went. He couldn’t tell whether she was still speaking to him, or to herself.
“I learned all my lessons. Just proteins, calcium and water.”
Unable to find an exit, he plowed through a pile of crumpled newspapers and found himself at the foot of the stairs. A quick check revealed that hadn’t lost the procedure. He thought he heard an echo as he started to climb.
“Everything’s going to be just fine.”
There were other words too, and laughter, and curt exclamations that brought memories of Twilight’s fillyhood triumphs in Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. Hey, that would be something, he thought. What if Twilight opened a school? Like, a school of friendship. Came full circle. He tucked the idea away for later.
Right now, she’s on top of the world, he considered as he crossed below the arch on the floor above. No time for tangents.
He slapped the checklist to flatten it and took a closer look. “OK, let’s see. Step one. Acquire checklist. Oh Twilight! Never change. Um, step two. Turn off laboratory lights to prevent photon interaction with cavitation sphere trajectory.”
He flicked the light switch. “And done.”
Down below he heard Twilight let free a wild sound, like she was straining to reach the highest note of her favorite song.
“Wow, Twilight sure is excited about this experiment,” he wagered. “I guess I’d feel like singing and dancing too if I were about to change the world. Good thing she’s not scared of the dark. Step three. Locate Data Retrieval Slot and Action Lever.”
There was no map drawn on the checklist. He had no idea what either of those things would look like.
He rapped his skull. Think Spike, think! Where would Twilight have put a Data Retrieval Slot? Her bedroom? No, she’d trip over it every morning. She’s a bigger sleepyhead than I am. Someplace more out-of-the-way.
The cavernous hall resounded with the smacking of his feet as he paced. The Data Retrieval Slot had to be connected to the apparatus somehow, he reasoned. There were wires connecting everything. The detector to the throne and the projector. The electrocardio sensor. And there was something else …
“That’s it!” he cried. “The tube where all the wires went! How could I forget? I mean, it literally just missed giving me a black eye. Now I just have to figure out where it ends up on this floor.”
He started walking in a circle, mimicking his ascent up the spiral staircase. “One, two , three,” he said to himself, marking the turns. “And … thataway!” The checklist trailed behind him as he darted off into the receiving hall.
Three doors later he turned, and found himself in a long, well-lit room, lined with bookshelves and pillow-backed chairs. Twilight’s private reading room, he knew well. Nothing technical was kept here; just books of lore, and fairy tales and fantasies she favored. Most days he’d stop by to return the stories she’d finished to their shelves.
“OK. Data … Retrieval … oh, that must be it, right next to that big lever labelled ‘Action Lever’. Step four. Throw Action Lever from position 0 1 to position 1 0.”
After a second read he found step four no less a mystery. “Well, that’s a little confusing. She must have changed her mind.” He padded over to the brass-handled lever and set the checklist down.
“Looks like it’s in position 1 now, so I guess I’m supposed to …”
He grabbed the lever with both paws and pulled. There was a sharp noise from below, followed by a tremor that jarred the floor. A window buzzed.
A few moments later, a length of scroll snaked upward from the Data Retrieval Slot. Spike tore it free with a quick swipe of his claws.