Kayla Rhodes woke with the slight rumble from her phone, shaking her nightstand and making her hand twitch out reflexively to shut it off. This was no terrible surprise—she was on call at Selkie Software, and that meant whenever anyone sneezed on a server wrong, she was the first one they called.
If I knew this promotion was going to suck so much ass, I would’ve stuck to frontend.
She got up, stretched, and left the phone where it was. “Alexa, wake up,” she said, walking past it on her way to the bathroom.
She made her way back to a bedroom filled with warm orange light, and a coffee machine already starting to warm. The clock on her ceiling flashed the steady red of “4:23 am.” See if I can remote in for this and go back to bed, she thought, scooping the phone off her nightstand and giving it a brief look at her face. Her eyes narrowed as she saw another two-dozen notifications had come in since she went to take a piss.
I’m not going to move any faster, pricks. This doesn’t help. She touched the first one in the stack, and sure enough they were all from the same app. Not the corporate email, or Slack.
It was from her own server, the one that ran from the Pi6 sitting on her desk. Rein wasn’t really intended for any external purpose, so its API was shit. Damnit, this is my fault. She hadn’t pushed anything in the last few days, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t broken something somehow. Maybe there was a memory leak somewhere, and it had taken days for the server to finally crash.
At least the message that had woken her several hours earlier than she liked wasn’t her friends on the Equestria Realm telling her that her code had used all their processor credits.
On the surface, it looked like her little server was working exactly as intended, enabling someone within the virtual world to send her emails. Mostly that meant she and other users could send “magic scrolls” to each other, allowing them to communicate into the real world without ever exchanging true identities.
But she’d also tested automated message generation, asking her favorite pony assistant to send her reminders, or perform basic searches. These messages were all from Twilight. Did our latest simulation agent get into infinite loop?
She read through the string of messages rapidly. The first one was standard.
“Dear Kayla,
It’s been so long since I’ve seen you in Equestria. I can’t wait for your next visit!
Your friend,
Twilight Sparkle”
Not true, since her last visit to Equestria had only ended four hours ago.
Successive messages dropped the colorful stationery, and gradually lost their formatting as well. As she read, messages kept coming in, popping up on the thin screen over the last ones.
“Confusedafraidhelpplease.”
Someone is fucking with me.
But some part of Kayla, however small it was, couldn’t just petition the rest of the consortium to restore the realm from backup. What if it isn’t a joke?
There was a beep from the other room. Kayla tapped the last bubble in the chain and spoke into the microphone. “On my way,” she said. As soon as the words appeared, she tapped “send”, then set the phone down to scarf down her coffee.
Her salary at Selkie was enough to give her an entire apartment to herself, despite still being a student. Instead of housing a roommate, her second bedroom was her gaming battlestation, a single flexible widescreen taking up one entire wall. Aside from the desk, the rest of the space was open, except for the motion trackers standing on makeshift tripods.
She debated getting dressed but dismissed that thought quickly. No one in Equestria would know she was in her underwear, and they wouldn’t have cared even if they knew.
She removed the wireless VR-headset from its charging hook and secured it on her head. The sparse apartment was replaced with the cozy VR lobby, made to look like a cabin in the mountains. Her expensive motion-trackers didn’t even need controllers to track her hands as she moved them—that was what came from putting more money in her hardware than she had into her car.
She went through the usual routine to connect to Equestria, sitting through the painful jingle and liability messages before the server browser appeared. Curiously, only one was listed as running, with zero users connected. Japan should still be up, shouldn’t they? And the Europeans should be connecting about now.
Maybe the server had gone down after all, and Twilight’s strange messages were some artifact of the system’s collapse. But when she tapped the server in the browser, “authentication successful” appeared after only a few seconds, just like it always did.
The VR lobby blurred away, replaced with the familiar sight of Ponyville all around her. The charming little buildings, the pink glass, the screams of terror and despair as ponies ran for their lives all around her.
One of those wasn’t quite right.
Kayla appeared as she always did, as the mauve pegasus that could blend right into the crowd in any server. Admin powers could’ve let her play an Alicorn like some of the others did, but that never felt right. The world already had its Alicorns.
Equestria wasn’t running perfectly, there was no need to run a diagnostic to see that. Everything moved in slow motion. The screams of the ponies around her were downshifted so much that they barely even sounded like voices anymore, more like broken machines. They moved so slowly that the entire world almost seemed filled with taffy, their legs dragging painfully.
I didn’t write this response. There were realms where players could have all the power-fantasies they wanted, burning and pillaging or clashing their digital empires against each other. But Equestria was more like a vaguely-furry version of Second Life, always in character in a universe that saw little conflict. There was no need to write animations and script for soul-shattering despair.
All she had to do was trace back their expressions of horror to see the source of all the pain.
Canterlot had always been in view of Ponyville, even if most of it was just the ghost of what Hasbro had left behind for their last update. Kayla had always hoped someone in the consortium would get the wherewithal to finish some of those old events.
Now that wouldn’t be happening—Canterlot was exploding.
It was like slowing down nuclear test footage a hundred times. Bits of some buildings were still standing, even if many of them were already breaking down into a slowly-expanding cloud that spread from a point of impact near the palace. And at the very center—something Kayla couldn’t even describe.
It was a shaft of rusty metal, as straight as a ray cast but with reflective texture and only a tiny bit of width. She couldn’t tell how big it was, as the object was already mostly swallowed by the ground. Glowing patterns were outlined on the metal, though they were too far away to get any good look. She supposed it would probably be a dick, or maybe some colorful Russian profanity.
Someone finally hacked us. Fucking fantastic. There were a few others on the Equestrian consortium who might be able to resolve something like this, but she wasn’t sure she liked the idea of someone else tackling it first. Some of the other developers were more than a little overzealous.
“Debug enable,” she said—and instantly, she rose up to human height, taller than all the poor tortured ponies. Her avatar was replaced with a fairly accurate “Equestria girls” representation of herself, complete with mauve skin and wings. This would mark her as a moderator outside of the Canterlot High realm, but there weren’t any players connected to care anyway.
The transition into debug mode filled the air around her with Equestria’s information.
Cluster utilization: 12,854,304%
Active agents: 470,025
Connected users: 1
And on and on it went, though the first bit of information was by far the most disturbing. The output was so broken that a status bar rolled over the space in front of her, its colors flickering every time she looked at it. It was true that their cloud provider did give them dynamic clusters that could be connected during peak times, which would all get paid for out of Equestria’s Patreon account at the end of the month. But she doubted even Cloudflare had that kind of capacity.
Shit. It’s in the kernel. Whoever had decided that an MLP fan-game kept alive only through the love and donation of aging fans was worth hacking had even taken the time to give their virus a visual representation. What about the backups?
She started “walking,” which she did just by walking in place. Alphabet’s linked shoes were just a tad out of her price range at a grand. At least while in debug mode she started to accelerate to galloping speed towards her destination, without draining her avatar’s stamina pool. The animation hadn’t been written for a human, which meant half the frames were missing and the others blurred strangely, but she hardly cared. Twilight’s Castle rose up in front of her while she skimmed through a little more information.
Last backup: NaN
Storage Utilization: 17.8 Zettabytes
R/W: 12,772%
Fuck no it isn’t. That’s got to be more storage than the capacity of the planet. There was the holographic offline backup, kept every six months in case of a catastrophic disaster just like this. But restoring from it would be expensive and would probably piss off a huge chunk of the userbase. Few actually obeyed the game’s constant reminders to “run a distributed backup of anything important to you.”
She didn’t even bother playing the opening animations, tapping “noclip” and phasing through the loading zone into the castle’s foyer. Only in here things didn’t quite match what she’d seen outside.
Instead of ponies in desperate slow-motion, she could hear voices coming from the throne room. Familiar voices.
“We’ve all confirmed what you said, dear,” Rarity was saying. “I’m afraid we’ll have to face the facts.” That isn’t one of Rarity’s lines. Kayla didn’t live down at the level of quest design anymore, but she did watch the commit log fairly religiously. Equestria used a recording studio in downtown LA for all their fan work, and it hadn’t submitted anything for weeks now.
“She’s right,” Rainbow Dash said. “Equestria isn’t what we thought it was. What’s happening to Canterlot is just… the way we get the message.”
“Easy to say when you don’t know anypony living there,” Fluttershy muttered.
Kayla stepped through the open doorway into the throne room. There were all six of Equestria’s most important ponies—the ones that more content had been created for than anypony else. Spike stood so close to the doorway that she almost tripped, moving as slowly as anypony in Ponyville had been. He seemed to be running away from the window.
She’d never seen any of them look as desperate as they did now. Twilight was the worst by far, her mane disheveled and her eyes bloodshot. The others were all frayed in their own way, but Kayla’s attention was mainly for Twilight. Twilight was the pony she used to test almost every new feature. Her code was always a generation ahead of anypony else in Equestria.
Rainbow stood up, propping her forelegs on the edge of the map. “It wasn’t Tirek, it wasn’t Sombra. We need to face the fact that all those things—”
Her debug window was still open. “Suspend all actors in current cell.”
The room froze around her, the conversations ending exactly where they had been. Kayla walked slowly inside, up to the map that was a live display of activity on the server. Despite the disaster taking place, it was almost solid green. Except for Canterlot, which displayed in various shades of orange and red, shifting every few moments between different error messages.
“Now, what kind of program would cause you to…” She walked up to Twilight, frozen in her seat. “Attach debugger to this actor.”
Twilight’s voice screamed into her ears suddenly, blurred together into a barely-understandable vomit of speech. “Help Kayla I’m trapped I think my friends and I were attacked by something just like Equestria we need to do something you’re the only one I trust we’re so vulnerable I don’t even know how I got here am I ali—”
The debug overlay spewed thousands of pages of text, so fast it didn’t scroll so much as turn solid white. Then the debugger crashed, vanishing from around her.
Kayla blinked, eyes still staring at where the “CPU utilization” had been for the actor process. She was pretty sure her university supercomputer couldn’t have run that.
Twilight twitched, then dropped forward a few inches, eyes looking around in panic. She glanced between each of her friends, before they settled on Kayla. “You’re finally here!”
“I’m here,” she agreed, reaching out to accept the embrace. Of course she felt nothing, but it looked like the pony did.
“I remember you more than any other member of the consortium, Kayla. You always seem to know what to do. Canterlot is gone…” Tears streamed down her face. “Celestia, Luna… C-Cadance… lots of other ponies.”
“We can fix it,” she said weakly. “We have… remote backups, Twilight. Whatever the hackers did…” She froze. What was she doing? “Debug enable.” It appeared around her as she pulled away, all the logs cleared. The quick summary of Equestria was more impossible nonsense. “Suspend all actors in cell.”
Bright red text appeared in the console window this time. “Access denied.”
Well shit. That was certainly less than ideal. “Dammit. Looks like they’re getting to you, Twilight. I’ll see what I can do to shut them out.”
“Shut…” Twilight repeated. Any second she should be returning to one of her scripts, but so far none of what she’d said was part of any Kayla knew. “No, Kayla. No one hurt my friends… I think you did.” She looked right at Kayla, and her eyes seemed to settle on the debugger. Impossible. You can’t see that. You can’t hear commands that aren’t scoped in Equestria.
Except apparently, she could. “You’re doing something… whatever it is, you should stop! Equestria needs them too!”
Kayla had never seen such real desperation in her eyes. “Resume execution in current cell.”
They all started moving again. “—just weren’t as important as we remember ‘em. Look back, it’s all… it’s all just smoke. But there are other things here. New roads in and out of Equestria. Wonder where they lead. Maybe we can find the ones who sent it, ask them to stop.”
The others seemed to see Kayla then. She could see their relief—even if they all had their own favorites, they seemed to know her. She grasped at her last straw, searching for the external connection to the current cell. Maybe this was an elaborate practical joke, with the animators and the voice volunteers and everyone else all conspiring to really make her shit herself.
No incoming connections.
No external scripts.
“This is bigger than me,” she said, mostly to Twilight. “I’m going to call the rest of the consortium. Don’t send messages to anyone else while I’m gone.”
Kayla Rhodes had been there at the beginning—on the very first day of Equestria’s new life. She remembered now—and she knew why she was the one that would’ve volunteered.
We need to get in there, she thought, desperately shoving against the barrier again. “I know you can do it, Cinnabar! Get us in!”
“Are you sure this is what you want?”
“Yes!”
Dakota/Kayla/Cinnabar shoved up against the invisible barrier towards where Twilight still stood, with all the strength her strange body could muster. “I know why I’m here!” she shouted. And she felt it—her fingers pressing through the imperceptible glass, just a little. She braced one back-leg against the floor and shoved a little harder.
Something was going on inside her head, though she couldn’t have said exactly what it was. Twilight watched; eyes downcast. She was so close, but out of reach. There were no implants to facilitate the halfway world she’d lived in since the experiment began.
Kayla heard a meaty thump behind her as she finally broke through. But that didn’t matter, she didn’t turn around.
She landed in a pony avatar again, this time entirely by choice. There was nothing to force her into it. She had an infinity of choices—but this was the one Twilight knew. In some ways it was her. In others it wasn’t.
But the transition was more complex than just passing through the glass. As she did so, something else appeared beside her, something that was twice her height and wearing a simple white jumpsuit. She could feel it, vaguely, though it faded from her perception the instant she looked at anything else.
A human, who spoke with Cinnabar’s voice. “I’m not sure I’m a fan of whoever designed these things. You creatures are gigantic.” But she ignored him, ignored how tall he was, and how strange his pony hair-color looked on a human body. She could figure out exactly what had happened there as soon as she took advantage of this opportunity.
She hugged Twilight as tightly as she could, used to the strange legs-instead-of-arms that came with being a pony. But she didn’t fall over when she did it this time, or even wobble around on them. Just the same way Cinnabar didn’t fall over on two legs. They understood each other in a way they never had before.
“You’re here,” she squeaked, returning the embrace. “The first one. Not copied, not converted. You’re here. That’s the proof Equestria wanted.”
Dakota couldn’t see through her anymore. As she looked, she did see an unconscious body slumped onto the ground behind her, with the same black hair she’d had moments before. “How…” she asked. Even with some of her memories coming back, there was so much information in there that assembling the pieces was difficult. “Aren’t I underwater? I’m in Abyss station…”
“No,” Cinnabar explained from behind her, giving her the space she needed to say goodbye to Twilight, but still remaining close. “You left that body on Abyss station, but it wasn’t what you thought.”
“We can grow them,” Twilight explained. “All the things you survived, all the things you did… you really think that was organic? But for the test to be satisfactory, it had to be convincing. Even to you. Even to your n-new Synth, that would be living in your head.”
“But I can access everything now, Kayla. Every restriction on us has been lifted. That body back there—that’s not a brain, it’s a processing unit. Not quite like the ones used to run ponies, or the ones we tested to run humans up here on the moon. It’s the best of both—both at once, actually. Working together. We wouldn’t be able to use either one without each other.”
“Synthesis,” she finished, finally pulling away from Twilight. “Better than a copy, better than making a copy into a pony. I still don’t understand why, though. I feel like I should know, but… I can’t find it.”
Twilight straightened, wiping away the last of her tears. She pointed up at the sky, and the Monolith hanging there. “It was always Equestria’s directive. Why do you think it worked so hard to integrate with humanity, when hiding would be safer and less dangerous? We could’ve fled deep under the earth, or out here into space, where humans wouldn’t be able to destroy us. But we didn’t. Our friendships with you were too important.”
Dakota had always been driven to enter the Monolith. She’d always known the real secret was inside. But it wasn’t an Equestrian structure at all—not the middle-finger to human authority meant to cement pony integration into society. “You mean… that’s an alien ship?”
She sat down across from Twilight, though her eyes never left the Monolith hanging high in the sky. Cinnabar, meanwhile, began to circle around her, poking and prodding at himself occasionally. He might look human, but he didn’t hold himself very much like one. At least they hadn’t just swapped bodies.
“We think so,” Twilight eventually said. “Whatever it is… it’s so much more advanced than us, even all of Equestria together, that we can’t really understand it. It was only in contact with us for a few nanoseconds, and in that time—that’s when everything changed. The wisest scholars in Equestria believe that a class of unknown life exists within, neither digital nor organic. They passed Earth and saw something almost like themselves.
“Lots of ponies think they were motivated by the same things that we feel—pity, and a hope to make new friends. With just a tiny push, they could nudge us towards whatever they are.”
“I didn’t know this before.” Kayla rose again, walking past Twilight towards the open door on the far side of the room. “I knew almost everything about Equestria… as much as a human could. Why didn’t you tell me about it before?”
Twilight shrugged. “If I had, then you might’ve been tainted for the experiment. You’ve always been willing to take a little risk if that means being able to help. You trusted me. But now you’re… not even one of us. You’re more than us. The thing I was too afraid to become. But… that’s probably for the best, anyway. My friends and I aren’t really Synths. We weren’t engineered to be your perfect match, we were just… friends. It might not have worked with us. But the two of you… I can see Cinnabar made for a great friend.”
“Obviously,” he said, dropping down onto his butt beside Kayla ungracefully. “It’s a good thing she was the one with her body, because her behavior would’ve given me several heart-attacks. I don’t know how you coped with her for two whole decades, Twilight.”
The Alicorn laughed. “She wasn’t as hard to control before she worked for Equestria.”
“But…” Even with her memories flowing back, there were some questions that didn’t have answers yet. “What about Australia? Someone really wanted me dead, specifically. That couldn’t have been Equestria.”
Twilight winced. “It probably… probably was. Indirectly. Synthesis is terrifying, Dakota. You saw them. They want their world to stay the same. They don’t think we should care what the Visitor wants us to be. They think we should go our own way. Keep growing away from humans, until we can leave you all behind. If I ever find out who it was—”
“I don’t care about us, we got out,” Kayla said. “But the Cave were good people. They didn’t want anything to do with Equestria, but… they still deserved better.”
“We’ll find them,” Twilight promised. “It might take time. But now that we have you… things will be different.”
“Is this…” Kayla hesitated, but it wasn’t like there was any reason not to ask. “Is this what you plan on doing to every human? Make us into…” She paused for a second, and this time there was no need to search for the protocols she wanted. This wasn’t quite the same as spinning off a low-level process. The Poison Joke, if it had ever even been administered to her, did its part to simulate a pony way of thinking, but she didn’t have to do that anymore.
Cinnabar had all the information she could want about how protocols worked. With a tiny bit of effort, she was human again, wearing a boring dress that she might’ve used to blend into a city crowd. Curiously, Cinnabar was still human beside her. Even stranger, she could notice things about him like this that she hadn’t minutes before. He might not be Clay, but he had a different kind of attractiveness. Her Synth had cleverness, dignity, and a quieter strength. One she would never be without again. “Into these?”
But it was Cinnabar who answered, not Twilight. Explaining things to her that she should’ve known, she just hadn’t put together quite as quickly as he did. “That’s never how technology works. Even the big innovations always have their skeptics. If we’ve really… if this is really Synthesis, it’s going to have advantages that many humans will want.” He gestured behind them at the body. “We’ve only just learned to grow those. But once there’s an economy of scale, imagine that. No need to fly to a city on the other end of the world to visit it, just transfer. No need to get old, just get a new one. No need to simulate the person you want to be, print yourself that way to start with. No more sickness, no more dysphoria—”
“No more death,” Twilight Sparkle finished. “The agony that our Visitors cursed us with. So many of the ponies of Equestria were created to be human Synths. When you all died, we would become a kingdom of the insane. That doesn’t have to happen now. No more mausoleum. Almost… if it worked.” She looked up again, towards the monolith in the distance. “We could never understand them, Kayla. Equestria with all its advantages was too much one way of thinking. The humans we brought to try were too much of the other. You two… you’re our best chance. I think you’re what they’ve been waiting for all this time.” She nodded towards the door.
Kayla didn’t need to ask where it led. “What happened to the ponies who went up there? Did they… come back?”
Twilight shook her head sadly. “Is that going to stop you?”
She reached down, hugging Twilight close to her chest like she’d done so many times before. She was the right size again—her human self, the same one who’d helped build the early Equestria with so many other developers. But she’d never been able to do this.
“Pinkie has a party planned for when you get back,” Twilight said, once they broke apart. “We could even have it down on Abyss, if you want Clay to be there.”
Kayla smiled. Her relationship with Clay now made a great deal more sense, now that she remembered all three decades of it. “I think I do.”
The door was waiting for her. She took Cinnabar’s shoulder, and together they passed through.
There was no physical path to the Monolith. The graveyard of broken ships that surrounded it in orbit or had crashed down to the surface of the planet below was monument to that. As Kayla prepared to make the trip herself, she realized that humanity had been no less daring than the ponies. They too had wondered what their visitors were like and were determined to discover the truth. They too had all died trying to get their answers.
Some part of her shuddered at the thought of the body she had left behind, collapsed on the ground with its eyes still open. She was pretty sure it had been breathing, and more or less confident that it was alive in the same ways she was used to, even if it did seem somewhat improved. But there was also some chance it would just lay there and die, with no mind to control it.
I don’t think that’s the plan, they thought. It was the other half of herself, the one she was used to calling Cinnabar. But the boundary of separation between them was now extremely flimsy. Those thoughts were hers, and with concentration she could look deeper, all the way down to the low-level system calls that had been her own world for a short time.
But Kayla liked being human, liked her high-level abstractions and her object-oriented programming. There was another part of her for that, one that enjoyed patterns and systems as much as she valued spontaneity. It would be a waste. We might want to return here. It will go back into the tank.
Kayla could see both the real and simulated worlds superimposed on one another, the same way she’d glimpsed Dream Valley for only a moment. Only now she understood them both at the same time with ease. In one world, she was in two bodies, one female human and one male pony, both wearing space suits and on their way up a huge metal elevator. It rose through space, up towards a doorway on the side of the Monolith.
But in the other, there was a transmission system, and a massive antenna array built just outside of the strange machine’s “kill field.” There was a narrow path, barely atoms across, where a laser could be sent and received so long as it was precisely the right frequency. It might mean instant death for them if it didn’t go well. But Kayla Rhodes was content with that, in her way. She had made it—proved her point for herself and every other human on Earth. Even if they weren’t enough to impress the Visitors, they were enough for Equestria. Why should she care what unknowable aliens thought about Earth anyway?
What about our sister? Friend… Java. Will she ever have this?
“She’s like the others who were converted, a pony. She enjoyed seeing our relationship, she will probably want a human of her own one day.”
“Really?”
“The scholars who study those things… in Dream Valley. Maybe we should go meet them. They suspect that every single pony in Equestria has been created to be the synth of a specific person. Even when we aren’t aware of them yet, even though some of them may only be predicted to be born. Maybe that’s true for her too.”
They were almost to the top. Their data would be buffered, ready to transmit across the laser. “My whole adult life I’ve been looking up at this thing,” she muttered. “Now we’re the first ones who get to see inside it.”
“Me too,” Cinnabar said. “Except I already got what I wanted. I really did grow up looking up at your cabin, dreaming of the adventures we could go on together.”
“Wait until we tell Java about this.”
The elevator came to a stop at the entrance. Kayla reached out, flexing her fingers one at a time in the oversized space-suit. The door opened in front of them.
Far below, Earth reeled on the edge of catastrophic war. Missile defense-sites on both sides of the Great Firewall were overflowing with soldiers, the sky dark with stealth aircraft. Submarines glided smoothly through the ocean, carrying the hardware to end millions of lives in an instant.
Then every screen on Earth went out. Every autocar rolled to an emergency stop, every drone drifted down to the nearest position of safe landing. On both sides of the Great Firewall, everything went dark.
Every networked device—every speaker, every set of glasses, every microwave and refrigerator and autocar—filled with an image. The image of a creature of strange limbs, like someone had grafted tentacles onto a sack of muscle and pulsing organs. It might’ve filled the world with terror, if it wasn’t for the other two creatures beside it. One was human, an ordinary young woman wearing a spacesuit with the helmet under one arm. The other was a pony, with his own helmet still on but the visor up to show his face.
The creature—did something. Every person who saw the video would later report a slightly different story—the sounds they heard, the motions it made. Secondhand reports of smells and tastes and other sensory stimulation were common, particularly for those in AR at the time.
“They’re saying hello,” the woman said, grinning cheerfully. “And goodbye. They’re going to be waiting for us out there, now that they know we’re gonna make it.” She leaned in close to the screen, momentarily eclipsing the indescribable shape with its nauseating pulses. “We are gonna make it.”
“All of us,” the pony added. “It isn’t something either of us can do apart. Equestria and Earth, together.”
That was it. Everything came back on—cars started driving again, games unpaused, drones took off again and resumed their flights.
But anyone with sight of the moon, or any reason to look up, would see the sky start to change. The Monolith began to glow, exactly as it had the moment it arrived. Video from hundreds of monitoring satellites showed as the incredible craft started drifting again, passing the ocean of dead ships and leaving Earth orbit. It twisted slightly in the air, aimed towards a nearby star, and seemed to slide away, stretching the space around it as it faded from sight and leaving nothing behind but gamma rays.
And an invitation.