Sometimes, ponies claimed that the eternal clank, clank, clank, of the Mesh was too soothing. More often than not, these claims were little more than childish excuses to explain tardiness. Nopony ever got away with that sort of hogwash, and Applejack was glad the idea was ground out of ponies while they were young; it taught them to wake up at the exact clank everypony else did. It wasn’t even that hard: the elder ponies woke up automatically and their rustling and groaning should be more than enough to shake anypony out of their sleep.
However, Applejack had to admit: the perfectly precise and ever-present noise of the Mesh was soothing. With every step of her day, there was an accompanying clank, reminding her that she was part of something larger, something that depended on her to do her best. As the Mesh continued to turn, the ponies within turned with it.
Long ago, Applejack had stopped relying on the noises of the elders to wake herself up – they were imprecise and inconsistent. Rare was the pony who woke up in the exact same way every time, and those that had lived long enough to essentially become part of the Mesh rarely had much time left in it.
Instead, Applejack had turned her ear to the Mesh itself. In her personal stall, the noises of the Mesh were always the same every cycle. The endless ever-present clank would mix with a distant bell, a spooling spring, and a hiss of steam from the level below. The moment she discovered this was the right noise, she had fixated on it until it meant one thing and one thing only: wake up.
Clank, ting, whir-k, pshhhh…
Applejack’s eyes shot open and she took a step out of her stall. Currently, she was trying to train herself to always step out with her left-front leg first, but today it was her right-front. Disappointing, but nothing that hindered her efficiency for the day.
Early on when she had trained herself to awaken with the sound, she had yelled “giddyup!” to help her friends, but she eventually realized that doing so was a hindrance to their own connection to the Mesh, so these days all she did was make a soft grunt. She had yet to remove the noise entirely from her automatic response but it was quiet enough to be sufficient now.
As she did every day, she looked herself over. All her legs were in good health – a bit stiff from standing in the same place for half a cycle, but that was how it was every time she woke. She stretched the parts that felt the stiffest, mildly annoyed that they were never the same spots as the previous day. How was she supposed to create a proper routine if it was never the same? The elders always said they just did the same thing regardless of how they felt, but she couldn’t help but find that inefficient. Why stretch more or less than you needed to?
Her coat was as orange as usual, brighter than most ponies, but not the brightest. It lacked the usual oil and grime that coated it most of her waking hours, a benefit of the cleaning last cycle. Her mane was still tied back into its proper braid and tucked into the back of her cloak. Her saddlebags were as she left them: on her back and secure. Lastly, she checked her boots – all four made of pristine metal and fabric, handed down through generations of her family. The front ones had elastic straps that Applejack had replaced numerous times, while the back ones were thicker and more supportive to her figure. Since her stretches had gone well, she knew the boots were positioned properly so as to not chafe her knees.
The final part of her morning routine was to put on the one thing she didn’t sleep with – her hat. A pair of industrial goggles were latched to the front, where she would easily be able to slip them over her eyes were she in an area of the Mesh where such protection was required. Being made of glass, they were fragile, and she couldn’t risk breaking them in her sleep.
With a smile on her face, she set out. A few others had set out before her – mostly elders or overexcited youngsters – but most were far behind her, struggling to put on their things or, in the case of the mothers in the group, trying to decide if they should wake their children up or let them suffer the indignity of being late.
Applejack could never imagine becoming one of the mothers. She understood how necessary it was to perpetuate the lineage of Mesh mechanics, but she was a mare devoted to becoming one with the gears around them. She couldn’t do that and have a child. The domains were separate.
With every clank of the Mesh, one of Applejack’s hooves hit the tarnished bronze ground, resonating with a clank of her own. All the experienced mechanics moved as she did, walking in perfect time with the Mesh unless they saw reason to stop, talk, or fix something. As always, moving with the Mesh was secondary to keeping the Mesh. Applejack herself noticed a loose steam valve not seven steps down the hall.
She lifted a hoof behind her head and pulled a wrench out from her saddlebags, affixing the tool to the elastic band on her boot. It was a simple matter of grabbing the bolt and twisting it – Applejack predicted two and a half turns, though it could easily be three. Didn’t overly matter – she prepared for as little as two, as many as four.
“Heeeey, Applejack!”
Applejack didn’t miss a beat as she twisted the bolt. “Good morning Spanner.”
To her left was a white stallion slightly shorter than she was. His boots were not well kept, his cloak twisted slightly to the side, and his blue mane was decidedly uneven and messy. “Man, already working?”
“It’ll do you good if you take your charge a little more seriously.” Two and three-fourths turns. Applejack put the wrench away, careful not to get it caught in the elastic. Throwing it right now would only validate Spanner’s ‘theory’ that moving with the Mesh didn’t really provide any benefits. She took off in time, forcing Spanner to scramble after her to continue the conversation.
“But we’re not even on the clock yet. We’re just moving to the food tubes!"
To the tubes indeed. They were in the compartment adjacent to the sleeping area, but they still had to cross one of the scaffoldings to get there. Luckily the immense pony traffic over this particular scaffolding had resulted in it getting reinforced with thick guardrails and numerous supports snaking from the underside to the ground below.
Applejack always liked looking at the ground when she passed over it. She had grown so familiar with it, it was as if she could look through the wireframe scaffolds and see the dirt alone. Endless brown, the surface on which the entire Mesh rested on top of. Sometimes she wondered why something that existed to be a foundation was so soft and malleable, but no mechanic she had ever spoken to knew the exact purpose of the dirt. They suspected it was lost information, or perhaps the dirt wasn’t the foundation, merely the advanced form of dust. There was no need to clean the base after all.
Today, though, Applejack took her gaze off the dirt below and looked at the gears above. With every clank of the Mesh, every one of the largest gears moved, turning the entire scenery into a living, breathing entity if just for a moment. Motion, and then motionlessness, like the beating of a heart - exactly like Applejack’s, since hers was currently in-time, a fact of which she was proud. There were a few gears that never stopped moving, constantly whirring, but Applejack thought of those like nerves – or did she think of her nerves as the eternal gears? In her mind, they were synonymous. She noticed this fact a few times a week and decided it was a good correlation every time.
“You’ve been quiet today,” Spanner pointed out.
“Enjoying the world we find ourselves in,” Applejack said, a genuine smile on her face. “Look at how intricate it all is. It is our job to keep this machine running. Can you think of anything greater?”
“No,” Spanner admitted. “Doesn’t mean it’s worth a big dopey grin.”
“If you don’t find peace with your place, Spanner, your life is going to be miserable.”
“You’re a great encourager.”
“I try,” Applejack said with a chuckle.
“Ooh! Is Spanner trying to think outside the Mesh again?” a young mare said, jumping in line with them. Her gear was on precisely and she herself was clean – though the way she moved was definitely not in time with the Mesh. Way too fast. Applejack was surprised she didn’t burn herself out every day before sleeping moving at that rate.
“Good thinkers make good managers, Dust,” Spanner huffed.
“Then why are you basically at the bottom of the managers’ care while both AJ and I have gotten personally commended?”
“You got lucky.”
Dust nodded vigorously, though it wasn’t unreasonable to say she did everything with vigor. “Yeah, me? Definitely. AJ here’s not lucky though; she deserves every minute of it. What do you think you’ll do if you get asked to be a manager?”
“Refuse,” Applejack answered. “Managers don’t get to move with the Mesh. I’d rather move with it.”
“Then when I get promoted to manager, I’ll be sure to give you lots of commendations!”
“I can’t imagine you being a manager,” Spanner muttered.
“That’s because you see the age of ponies instead of their spirits,” Applejack said. “If Dust really can keep this energy of hers up years down the line, she’s exactly the pony for a managerial position. I wouldn’t mind taking orders from her now, at any rate.”
“Hmph.” Spanner pretended to be studying the guardrail for a minute. “…Not like the managers really give many orders these days beyond ‘keep working in your sectors’. When was the last time a sector was completely fixed?”
“Nine-hundred and thirty-two cycles ago,” Applejack recited. “Locally. You’d have to ask Ingot for larger statistics.”
“But they’ve been slowing down too!” Spanner said. “It’s like the Mesh is working against us!”
Applejack shook her head. “We’re working against the Mesh by thinking of ourselves as separate from it. We are the Mesh’s greatest asset – but also its biggest weakness.”
At this point they arrived at the food tubes. It was an enclosed area, so they were no longer witness to the massive gearboxes above or the dirt below. Instead, they saw to a few dozen bronze tables connected to large tubes lit by bright white lights that occasionally flickered. Already the Mesh had started pumping the food bricks out of the tubes and onto the tables – one portion for every seat. There were fewer ponies working in this area than seats, so there would always be extra. Nominally the remaining food would be divided up equally, but the children always ended up fighting over it. Applejack excused the behavior because younger, developing bodies needed more energy, just as replacement parts of the Mesh needed to be oiled up more often than not.
The food bricks themselves were more cylinders of gelatin that flattened on one side where they touched the table. They were mostly colorless with white specks of nutrient suspended inside. As Applejack ate, she was barely aware enough of the food to assign the word ‘flavorless’ to it. It wasn’t like she’d eaten anything else her entire life, and all the other things that had ended up in her mouth tasted disgusting. Compared to oil, the food bricks were absolutely delicious.
After food was eaten, it was free time. There were three of those a day, after each meal. At first, Applejack had not seen the purpose of being awake and not working, but as she had aged, she understood that they were working. The Mesh needed constant attention and care from the mechanics within. The mechanics themselves needed regular attention and care from each other. Talking to each other, joking, playing little games by scratching marks in the tables… all of that was part of their upkeep. It sharpened their minds, improved their spirits, and helped facilitate the birth of new mechanics. Even if she herself would never take part in the perpetuation of her kind directly, she would certainly make use of free time for the sake of the others.
As much as it pained her to admit it, not everypony could walk as one with the Mesh. It would be like trying to build a gearbox with only gears, trying to avoid the spring that gave it energy.
So she smiled, laughed, and played with the kids. She always moved with the clank, clank, clank whenever possible, but she didn’t snap at anypony who interrupted her. That was foolish and counterproductive.
Here, being a friend was her job. There was nothing else. And the day she had realized that she had become a much happier mare.
“You always see it,” Spanner told her after she’d finished wrestling with one of the stallions. “Their joy. …Don’t you see it leave them as they get older?”
Smiling at him, Applejack nodded. “Yeah. I see it. It’s unfortunate. I hope that one day they’ll see what I see.”
“The problem with that is you’re a few gears short of a junction.”
Applejack rolled her eyes. “If I have any problem, it’s that I have too many gears. And that’s not really a problem.” She reached down to pat one of the children on the head. “Because we need variety to provide the Mesh with everything we can.”
“Even mine?”
“Yes, Spanner, even yours.”
~~~
Applejack pulled her goggles over her eyes the moment she saw the smoke billowing out of the ground-level furnace. Most of the time smoke was harmless, if annoying, but she had seen a few cases where it dissolved ponies. Best be safe rather than sorry. “Spanner, we got a spark blowout!”
“I see, I see,” he muttered, adjusting his goggles. They had paired up on the outing for the morning. Usually, Spanner would be with her the first part of the cycle, Dust on the second. Applejack was open to working with anypony but the two of them were the ponies she had formed the closest bond with, so she worked with them more often. The teeth of their gears were well suited for each other.
Even when he was complaining about life, Spanner still knew how to work properly.
Applejack latched a rope to one side of the scaffold. This particular one was nothing like the reinforced bridge ponies walked across every day to go eat – this one was narrow, rickety, and was missing guardrails in several locations. Bad for general safety, but good for Applejack when she needed to get down to the dirt below. It was a simple as jumping and trusting the catcher to stop her before she hit bottom. The small, cylindrical device affixed to the rope activated once a certain length had let out and gradually applied pressure, slowing Applejack down until she landed gently on the dirt.
Spanner grunted. “Why do we even have things that make smoke outside the furnace districts?” He latched himself to the railing and slid down as well. His device wasn’t calibrated properly, so he ended up flattened like a pancake on the ground. “Ow…”
“Don’t know,” Applejack admitted, narrowing her eyes, trying to see through the smoke. “All I know is we have to fix it. Or at least stop the mess.” She could make out a dome-shaped structure four and a half ponies tall, and nine wide. Almost a perfect hemisphere, though there was a slight dent in the curvature at the base. It had a large smokestack that led to the churning gears above, though clearly that smokestack wasn’t working properly.
Applejack processed the situation for a few seconds before reaching a decision. “We’re goin’ in. You check the smokestack’s inlet for blockage; I’ll check the rest of the place. If anything looks off, get out of there. These places can explode.”
“Gee, that makes me feel great…”
“And don’t open your big mouth. Swallowing smoke, even the nice kind, will make you feel like molten lead is being poured down your esophagus.”
“…I do know what inhaling smoke feels like.”
“Good, then you won’t mind being reminded.”
They trotted toward the burning hemisphere. Spanner moved with uncertainty and wariness, the dirt feeling unnatural beneath his feet. For Applejack it was quite the opposite – she loved the feel of the substance on her hooves. It was so different from everything else in the Mesh. Not that she let it ruin her timing, for she would always step with the clank.
They pulled up their cloaks over their mouths and entered the structure to find a small, lit furnace burning the gaseous fuel that ran through much of the Mesh. It seemed to be working properly from a glance, though the fact that it was releasing this much smoke was concerning. Applejack was aware dust and dirt could char, though the gas itself usually didn’t. Regardless, it looked safe enough, if suffocating.
Spanner went to grab a nearby ladder – conveniently placed next to the outlet. Evidentally, they had not been the first mechanics to deal with this area of the Mesh.
Applejack looked around for anything else. The furnace was already checked off her initial cursory inspection, so she looked for loose pipes. She saw something odd – a water pipe, poking out of the ground and leaking near the edge of the wall, lit by a long, white, glowing bulb. Applejack wondered for a moment why there’d be a lightbulb in a furnace room, but she quickly reasoned that the furnace could go out and the bulb would provide needed light in case of an emergency. The water pipe was likely just here since it was an optimum path from one area to another, poking up out of the dirt because it had been relocated at one point. The pipe was leaking, though, enough to keep stagnant water in the heat of the furnace room. Stagnant water next to a…
…green…
…thing.
Applejack had no idea what this thing was. She had no words. It was green and smaller than her hoof. It had two flat parts on top sprouting out of the ground, pointing directly at the lightbulb. She poked it with her hoof, and it felt like… nothing she had ever felt before. It was somewhere between rubber and the raw flesh of an injured pony.
It’s like me.
Carefully, she removed a small cup-like container from her saddlebags. She set it down next to the thing and affixed a tweezer tool to the elastic on her boot. Carefully, she prodded the part of the thing where it touched the dirt, finding that it went a short way into the brown substance. It was surprisingly easy to pull the thing all the way out, revealing a tangled mess of brown that had lain hidden beneath the ground. The underground section glistened with water and dirt.
At first, Applejack placed it in the container like this. But… it looked weak. It couldn’t support itself.
It needs the dirt.
Carefully, she pulled some dirt from the ground and placed it in the cup, giving the thing the support it had once had. As an afterthought, she sprinkled some of the water into it before sealing the container’s lid. She pulled some adhesive tape out of her kit and repaired the water pipe – the green thing wouldn’t need that anymore, why leave the leak?
She turned, proud of having fixed something and uncovered a possibly forgotten aspect of the Mesh, but she was mildly annoyed she hadn’t found anything to solve the problem with the furnace. Sure, she had given the obvious answer to Spanner so he would have a chance at fixing it himself, but since he hadn’t fixed it already she suspected that wasn’t it either.
Then she noticed he was precariously standing on the ladder with one hoof… dangerously close to falling off as he poked the clogged smokestack with a stick.
He was coordinated. He could probably do that without a care in the world. Applejack wouldn’t have been worried if he was just performing a balancing act.
Unfortunately, he was dumping massive amounts of soot out of the smokestack and onto the furnace, aggravating it. It was already old and needed replacing, and he was just covering it directly with its own noxious product.
She needed to call out to him. But that wasn’t an option in here, especially now that he’d littered the entire place in black dust. She just needed to hope he would get it done without causing a disaster.
Her hopes of this were shot when he poked his stick and several pounds of soot came pouring out all at once, hitting the furnace below hard enough to dent it.
She leaped into action. Jumping into the air, she tackled the middle of the ladder at such an angle that it would pull Spanner away from the furnace. As he fell, she affixed a grappling hook tool to her hoof and shot the spring-loaded mechanism at the top of the entrance’s doorframe, easily puncturing a hole in the thin metal casing. The grappling hook retracted as fast as it as able, pulling the two of them through the air as the furnace exploded.
The shockwave carried them faster than the hook could retract its rope, resulting in an uncontrolled flight through the air and into the dirt. Luckily, they had been moving just fast enough to avoid burns.
Spanner picked himself up first, looking back at the flaming wreckage with a haunted expression. “What did I do?”
“Poked it,” Applejack said, grimacing. “It bit back.”
“It isn’t a pony!”
Applejack didn’t feel like going into her Mesh-pony metaphor. “Doesn’t matter. Fixing it is our project for the next few cycles.”
“…We’re going to rebuild a furnace?”
“Yes. Yes we are. Now let’s start by putting the fire out.”
~~~
“So, Spanner totally blew up a furnace, huh? What’s the story behind that? Come on you gotta tell me tell me – HOLY GEARS OF THE GROUND WHAT IS THAT!?”
Applejack didn’t even look at Dust as she took the lid off the green thing’s container and put it underneath the lights next to a food tube. “I have no idea. I found it. Rescued it, I guess you could say, from a fiery death.”
“Death?”
Applejack nodded, grabbing a small cup and giving the green thing a little water. It was having its own lunchtime, in a way. “Yeah. I think it’s like us.”
“Woooow…” Dust’s eyes sparkled. “What are we gonna call it?”
“We ask Ingot what it is. Hey! Ingot!”
The manager of their group was a muscular stallion with a rust coat and a metal peg instead of a hoof. “What is it Applejack?”
“Found this today. No idea what it is.”
Ingot looked at the green thing with a scrutinizing gaze. “Strange. I’ve never seen anything in the Mesh quite like this.”
“See? He has no idea!” Dust rubbed her hooves together. “We get to name it!”
“Why not name it after the mare who found it?” Ingot suggested.
“…Having two Applejacks in the room will be confusing,” Applejack pointed out.
“Not Applejack. Everypony knows who that is, and most know what a jack is. But I have never, ever been able to figure out what an apple is.”
“Apple…” Applejack said, mulling the title over in her mouth. “Well, until an upper manager comes down and identifies this thing, that’s what we’ll call it. Seems right.”
“…I wonder what its purpose is…” Ingot said, scratching his chin.
“I think it’s like us,” Applejack said. “Drinks. Needs the dirt for some reason, and light. That’s all I know right now. I think it’s just a child, no telling what it might turn into.”
“Well, as long as it doesn’t take away from your work…”
“I don’t really see myself doing much more than leaving it here. Just make sure everypony knows not to mess with the apple. It’s fragile.”
Ingot nodded. “I’ll make an announcement before we go out again. If this ‘apple’ really does use the dirt… you may have just discovered a lost purpose, Applejack. That’s something to be proud of.”
Applejack beamed. “I’ll take the praise. Just don’t promote me.”
“I know where you stand,” Ingot said, walking away to talk to some other ponies.
Dust gingerly poked the apple. “So soft… so delicate… cute.”
“I can see you and the apple are going to be good friends.”
“We will be best buds,” Dust declared with a grin.
~~~
Applejack found herself thinking about the apple more and more. Unlike everything else in the Mesh, it was a huge unknown; the idea that it might be the secret to uncovering lost knowledge was beyond exciting, to the point that she felt herself drifting from her rigid routine, spending a bit too long wondering how best to care for the thing. At first she beat herself up over it, but then she realized that was silly. The apple was as much a part of the Mesh as she or any of the other ponies. As far as she knew, it was the only one of its kind. Because it was unknown, it was more important than the mechanisms that were known.
As she worked for the next few cycles, she kept a careful eye out for any other green things. Anywhere there was light or water pipes, she looked. She found nothing. The dirt was devoid of greenery. If there had been any others around the furnace area, they had been vaporized by the explosion.
The apple was alone.
But it was definitely alive. It grew, drinking in the water and taking something from the dirt around it. Applejack wasn’t sure what, and at first she had tried changing out the dirt every other cycle, but it had responded badly to that. She had been afraid she’d killed it… but it was stronger than that. It recovered, acclimating to the new dirt, and rising strong. To start, there were only two of the green plates, but it did not take long for more to appear, pointing up at the light.
The ponies of the Mesh were fascinated by its color. They heeded Ingot’s warning - the children weren’t let anywhere near it and nopony touched it – but they all looked at it continually. It was something new. Something that may have been lost. It was a sign of progress in a world that seemed to be slowing down as the cycles wore on.
Ingot had even gotten ponies from the alternate cycle shift to watch after the apple. They didn’t do any of the special caring or watering Applejack did, but they stood like guards during the alternate meal times and would report anything they noticed to Applejack.
Forty or so cycles after the apple had been initially discovered, a higher manager came down to inspect things. The replaced furnace impressed him, though he chided Spanner for requiring it to be rebuilt in the first place. As for the apple, he had no idea what it was. He promised to mention it to the higher levels, but he didn’t seem to care all that much about it. He encouraged Applejack to keep caring for it regardless, so long as it didn’t interfere with her regular work.
Not long after that Applejack realized it needed a bigger container. She carefully got a larger crate full of dirt and moved the apple. She was delicate with it, careful that it kept all its old dirt but also had new dirt to expand the invisible brown tangles into. Applejack didn’t pretend to know how it drank with those things, but it did.
Hundreds of cycles passed. The lower part of the apple strengthened, changing from delicate green to hard brown. The handful of green plates became a small globe of them, branching out in all directions. It was a stark color contrast to the harsh bronze of the Mesh. A calming, brilliant green.
And one day, it got too big for the crate.
“I think we need to move it to the ground,” Applejack said.
Dust put a hoof to her chin. “That’ll be difficult… There’s not enough lights down there, and apple here is pretty heavy…”
“And ponies like it here when they eat,” Spanner added. “Gives them something to look at that isn’t endless churning gears!”
“There is dirt right below us,” Applejack pointed out. “We’d just have to make an easy way to get down there… hook up some lights… get water flowing…” she grimaced. “That’d take more than a few meal times to hook up.”
Dust furrowed her brow. “So… That’s it? We just leave apple like… this?”
“I really don’t want to,” Applejack said. “But we can’t let the apple harm our work on the Mesh. It has to help in some way. Right now it’s improving morale and being mysterious. Doesn’t warrant spending a few work cycles on it. The higher managers would throw fits.”
“Screw them,” Spanner muttered.
“Spanner!” Dust gasped. “For shame!”
Spanner rolled his eyes. “We should do it anyway.”
“I’m not risking my perfect record,” Applejack retorted. “I might have nothing to lose, but Dust here is looking for managerial positions. It would reflect badly on her.”
“Can I make a suggestion?” Ingot asked, butting into the conversation, scaring Dust and Spanner considerably.
“Er… yeah?” Spanner said, nervously.
“Just ask everypony to give up one lunch hour.” He stepped back, gesturing toward the huge sea of workers who had been watching the apple grow for hundreds of cycles. “I’m sure they’d be willing to give up one to give our green little friend the life it deserves.”
Applejack looked at everypony among the food tubes. All of them, from child to elder, were nodding their heads in excitement. They were all willing to give up one hour of their own personal enjoyment to help a green thing that served no known purpose.
It warmed Applejack’s carefully beating heart.
The very next lunch, everypony ate as fast as they could and immediately set out. During the first shift of the cycle, several of them had located ladders and brought them to the food tubes, creating a beginning scaffolding to get from the tubes to the dirt below. Getting the apple down was easy – they just had to jury-rig a pulley system to the crate and lower it all the way to the ground.
Digging the hole and getting the apple into the hole without losing too much dirt was significantly more difficult. They had to suspend the apple’s crate over the hole, remove the bottom of the box, and lower it into the hole. Digging out the sides of the box turned out to be more annoying than anything else.
Then the work split into two. They had to wire power to spare lights all the way down to the apple. This took some fancy engineering involving hastily slapped together scaffolding, exposed wires dangling from the food tube room above, and ponies wearing full cloth to avoid electrocuting themselves.
The other half of the project was the stairs. A scaffold of pulleys and ladders was hardly safe for long-term use, so dozens of mechanics set to smacking scrap metal together in every way they knew how to create a stable staircase. Sparks flew, welding torches burned, and metal was dragged from afar. The scrap metal heap, which was usually piled higher than most rooms, was looking small for the first time in kilocycles.
Had Applejack and her close friends been working on this alone, it would have taken hundreds of cycles to get it all done, and it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as effective.
But over a hundred master mechanics working together on a single goal?
It took them an hour.
They all stood, looking up at the green of the apple.
“…I think I know where we’re spending our free time from now on,” Dust said with a grin. “Applejack… you’ve done something amazing.”
Applejack took off her hat and held it to her chest, saying nothing. All she could do was look at the apple in wonder.
It looked perfect.
~~~
Two thousand three hundred and nineteen cycles.
That’s how long it took the green thing to produce its first fruit.
Applejack had watched it grow carefully for many cycles. First, there had been weird pinwheel things. Then those pinwheel things had shriveled up, making Applejack worried… but a few of them had started growing back as green lumps. The green lumps slowly turned red…
And one day, while Applejack was leaning against the apple’s brown base, the fruit fell out of the green plates and hit her on the head.
“Ow…” she moaned.
“BAD APPLE!” Dust chided, yelling at the tree. “You attacked your mother!”
Applejack snorted, picking the fruit up off the ground. It was round and red. Relatively heavy. The skin had broken when it hit her and a pale juice was coming out. A juice that… smelled good?
She wasn’t entirely sure why she did what she did next.
She licked it.
Prior to that day, she didn’t know things could actually taste good.
She stared at it, jaw hanging open.
“What is it?” Dust asked. “Why’d you lick it?”
“I think… I think it’s like a food brick,” Applejack said, sniffing it. “Except… better.”
She ran to a nearby table. They had built several of them down on the ground so ponies could eat next to the towering form of the apple. Applejack placed the fruit down on the table and cut it in half, revealing a white interior absolutely bursting with the aromatic juice. There were also some black bits near the center, but Applejack wasn’t paying attention to those yet. She could only smell the juice.
Carefully, she cut out a tiny cube of the flesh. For a moment, she hesitated. Maybe it wasn’t actually a food brick. Maybe it was some kind of chemical…
…but if that were the case, why was her very being screaming to her that it was food? It was as though this was what she was meant to eat, and the food bricks were just a poor substitute.
She shoved it into her mouth and chewed. The flavors exploded in her mouth in ways she couldn’t describe. It was sticky, but in a way that wasn’t gelatinous like the food bricks. Almost like glue, but it melted away instead of hardening. Her tongue came alive with it.
It was definitely food.
She resisted the urge to shove the entire thing in her mouth and eat every bit of it. Instead, she turned to everypony. “Hey y’all! Come try this!” She split the tiny apple up into over a hundred pieces and handed a cube over to every pony who wanted one. Soon, everypony wanted one.
“Bleh! The black things taste bad!” Dust shouted.
“Then don’t eat them,” Applejack said, tossing one of the black bits over her shoulder. “You get all the nutrients you need from the food bricks. This is just… extra.”
“Yay!”
Applejack looked back to the apple, shining in the lights they had built over two kilocycles ago.
It was finally giving back after all this time.
~~~
Seven cycles later, Applejack noticed the green things poking out of the ground. She couldn’t believe her eyes at first, but there they were – little green sprouts sticking up around the table where they had been divvying up the fruit of the apple.
A connection fired off in her mind.
Carefully, she removed one of the sprouts from the ground, finding that, yes, it was growing out of one of the small black things they’d found inside the fruit.
Those black things… those were baby apples.
Applejack was suddenly struck with a vision of the entire ground at the base of the Mesh covered in apples. Strong, sturdy brown stalks holding up immense plumes of the green plates, and constantly producing delicious red fruit for everypony.
That… that was not something that could be maintained during just a lunch hour by a handful of ponies. They’d need to make a production. Feed the entire Mesh with these things. Bring some color to everypony.
That was the purpose of the apple. Self-sustaining food supply. Self-sustaining delicious food supply. And who knew what other secret purposes it might have?
“Woohoo!” she cheered, throwing her hat up into the air. “We’re gonna have more apples, ponies!” She grabbed the reddest fruit with a knife tool and set it on the table. She specifically cut out the black babies and set to work.
She grinned more than she had ever grinned before. With every clank of the Mesh, she planted one of them into the ground. She moved with such force and motion, one with both the Mesh and the green things. Suddenly, everything in life seemed clear. There was the Mesh, and there were the apples, and there were the ponies. It was a cycle… A cycle she didn’t fully understand yet, but she could understand it with time! Or, at the very least, start understanding it so ponies of the future could finally figure it out!
“Applejack?”
Applejack planted the last of the black bits and looked up to see one of the higher managers standing on the stairs. He had visited a few times before and had smiled every time he’d seen the apple.
This time, he had no smile.
Applejack’s own joy died out in an instant. “Yes sir, that’s me.”
“You and Dust are coming with me to the upper levels. Do not be alarmed, you will be returned to your work by the next cycle. We will need to discuss what you’ve done here.”
Applejack nodded. “Of course.”
~~~
Applejack had never seen the upper levels, and neither had Dust. The two of them were led to an elevator device and stood, quiet, as they rose into the gears above. It did not take long for the Mesh to become both gears above and below – blocking out any sight of the dirt foundation. Were it not for the force pulling them downward, they would have had no way to know which direction was up.
The gears twisted in every direction, every angle, eternally clanking. For the first while, as they rose, the clanking grew louder… louder… until it was almost oppressive.
But then it got quieter. The brass gears began to fade from memory as pristine white gears took their place, getting smaller and smaller. Eventually, they came to a stop in an area that seemed to have no gears at all – just a featureless white hallway.
But Applejack could still hear it. Far below them, faint… the clank. Her heart still beat with it. She would not let it go.
“You… you can still hear it…” Dust observed. “I… I can catch it like… there? But not always…”
“It’s hard,” Applejack admitted. “Just follow my hoofsteps.”
Dust moved in time with Applejack as they were led down the hallway. Dust’s near panic dissipated as she focused on Applejack’s hooves. It was enough of a substitute for the ever-present clank.
They saw no other ponies aside from the stallion leading them before arriving in what Applejack knew was called an ‘office’, though she had never seen such a thing. A private room for a single pony. One of the really high managers.
The mare on the inside had a blue coat and stark white mane. Any fear Applejack felt melted away when she saw her warm, understanding smile paired with tired eyes. Spanner had talked of high mangers having it easy, but clearly this mare was worked to the bone.
“I am Blueberry,” she said, setting her hooves on the table. “Leave us,” she ordered the stallion.
Applejack and Dust stood rigid, looking at her expectantly.
“Oh. Right.” Blueberry coughed. “You can have a seat. I… rarely get visitors from the lower levels, I forget you do not know the way up here.”
Applejack and Dust moved in synch, sitting in two chairs as one. The motion bothered Blueberry slightly, though she tried not to show it.
“So… good news first. Dust, you are being promoted to manager.”
“Really?” Dust beamed. “Oh thank you Blueberry!”
“You are welcome. Under normal circumstances I would not be the one to tell you; rather it would have been your previous manager. However, since you are related to the curious thing Applejack has found, you were called here to hear what I have to say.”
Applejack nodded. “And it’s bad news?”
“…It depends,” Blueberry said. “We found out what it was after you told us it produced fruit in a literal sense.” She pulled a small, dusty circle out of a drawer. Applejack didn’t recognize the material at first – brown, with strange lines and grains in it. But she noticed the edge, rigid like the outside of the apple.
Inscribed in it was an image of the fruit with some words on it. “A is for Apple.”
Applejack held her breath.
“Quite a coincidence, is it not?” Blueberry asked. “The fruit is an apple. The actual plant is called an apple tree, far as we can tell. From all we could find – which is not much – we know that they serve two purposes. The first is to produce food bricks that taste better, and the other is to clean the air. Apparently, most green things did that, in the past.”
Applejack nodded. So there was another purpose.
“Am I right in assuming you want to start growing as many as possible, perhaps devoting actual work cycles to it?”
Applejack nodded. “We could cover the entire ground with… apple trees.”
Blueberry smiled sadly. “I have no doubt that you could. But… Applejack, it pains me to admit this, but it is just not as important as keeping the Mesh from winding down.”
At first Applejack was mad. Not important? But then she remembered who she was talking to – a mare who would know, a mare who managed so many others into doing what was best for the Mesh.
And then Applejack noticed her choice of words.
“…Winding down?”
Blueberry nodded. “The Mesh has been winding down for as long as our records show. You are taught that energy cannot be created; it has to be taken somewhere? And you know that the machines you fix are never perfect, always doing less than the energy put in demands?”
Applejack and Dust nodded.
“…The entire Mesh is the same. It has been running for epicycles, and it is amazing, but despite our best efforts it is still winding down. It works with less and less energy. Where it breaks down, the winding down happens faster and faster.” Blueberry pressed her hooves together. “We generally do not think of the Mesh like us. But it is. It lives… and it is looking like it will die.”
“…And then where will we be?” Dust asked.
“Gone,” Blueberry said. “Without the Mesh, there will be no source of reliable light or power for us… or the apple trees. No food bricks. Nothing.” She looked Applejack in the eyes. “We are trying everything we can to stop this from happening, to uncover some lost secret that could wind the Mesh back up. We cannot afford to waste any resources on growing a forest of trees if it won’t help us fix the Mesh… or survive after it falls.”
Applejack nodded. “I understand.”
“You are to keep tending the trees you have, keeping their memory. You will train others in caring for them so they can continue after you are gone. We may have use for them one kilocycle. But right now they do not serve the Mesh. They only leech off it.” Blueberry let out a sigh. “I… I am sorry. This is one of the few signs of rediscovered knowledge I’ve seen. It’s a shame it is not what we’re looking for. …But I believed you deserved an honest explanation.”
“Thank you for telling me,” Applejack said. “I won’t tell any of the others.”
“Good. Dust, you are to keep this secret, even to your other managers.” Blueberry leaned back in her chair. “You will always be Applejack’s direct superior. She is your responsibility.”
“I… I won’t let you down,” Dust said, her voice hollow.
“In that case, you two are dismissed.”
As they left, Applejack bothered to look up. The top of the office was glass, looking right out at… utter and complete blackness. No gears, no lights…
Nothing.
~~~
Applejack returned for the dinner hour that day. Dust quickly briefed Ingot on the policy with the “apple trees” without mentioning anything about the Mesh. She really was meant to be a manager.
Applejack didn’t eat. She went right down to the apple tree. She sat down beneath it and pulled her hat over her eyes.
She wasn’t sure how long she sat there.
“…Applejack?”
Applejack lifted up her hat to see Spanner. To her shock, he was missing one of his front legs – all the way up to the shoulder. He was wrapped in bloody bandages that clearly needed changing about an hour ago.
“Spanner, what i-“
“Accident with the gears. I…” Spanner bit his lip. “…I may not be able to work…”
“Spanner, listen to me. You don’t go to the furnace yet, you hear? You can have a recovery time.”
“I’ve always been a leech, Applejack.”
“This apple tree is a leech!” Applejack shouted. “And it’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!”
Spanner didn’t bother asking about the word ‘tree’, he knew. “…But do appearances matter?”
“They… they…” Applejack slumped against the trunk of the tree.
“…What did they tell you?”
“We’re not to do any real work on them,” Applejack said, looking up at the red apples in the tree. “We just keep doing what we’re doing.”
“You wanted more?”
“Yeah I wanted more. I wanted to… change something.” Clank. Clank. Clank. “I just forgot. Forgot that we’re all part of the Mesh. Who was I to think I could change something? Even if I thought I had, it wouldn’t really be a change. It’d just be the Mesh working on the Mesh with the Mesh.” She smiled warmly. “There’s nothing we can do.”
Spanner winced.
“Spanner,” Applejack said, looking him right in the eye. “The Mesh depends on us.”
“I…”
“Spanner, believe me. The Mesh needs us. Every last ounce of effort we can spare.”
Spanner looked at her. He nodded slowly. “S-sure… right. You’re right.” He hobbled away.
Applejack, for a moment, considered going after him. But she realized she didn’t want to leave the apple tree. It… it called to her.
“Applejack?”
Applejack didn’t open her eyes this time. “What is it, Dust?”
“Dinner hour is over. Ponies are preparing to sleep.”
Applejack was silent for a moment. She knew that. She felt the eternal clank, clank, clank in her heart. It was her heart.
Was it… slower than it had been when she was a child?
…That was impossible…
…Right?
“Dust… I think I’m going to stay here until the cycle shifts.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.” She paused. “…And Dust?”
“Yes, Applejack?”
“If I don’t wake up on time, come get me.”
“I will.”
Dust left… and relative silence fell over the foundation of the Mesh. All Applejack could hear was the beating of her own heart…
Clank. Clank. Clank.
It lulled her to sleep in the shade of the world’s only apple tree…