Reality snapped back to Scootaloo with a slight
Pop!
“Wah!” She exclaimed, flailing about in surprise. Her flailing upset her balance and she fell to the ground. “Oof!”
Still high on adrenaline, Scootaloo jumped back to her feet ready for her next foe.
None came, but the world had transformed from the battle scared plain into a sparsely furnished room.
Scootaloo then promptly fell over again.
“Oof!”
Groaning, and rubbing her head, Scootaloo looked up from where she lay.
Hooves, four of them. Scootaloo was once again a normal, albeit flightless, pegasi filly. “Whew…” Scootaloo sighed.
“Little worried there?” Came a stallion’s voice.
“Eep!” Scootaloo eeped, scrambling to her hooves.
The source of the voice was another of the machine aliens, sitting behind a desk and hunched over reading a piece of paper.
“Relax, you passed Evaluation with flying colors.” It stated, looking up at Scootaloo. It’s eyes two circular glass lenses that glowed a neon blue.
“B-but monsters and swords and-“ Scootaloo stammered looking around the room looking for another zombie to pop out.
“Shhh sh sh” the robot soothed. “It was just a test. Everything is fine, and you’re still alive.” He said, getting up from behind his desk and kneeling next to Scootaloo.
“But how? When- why?” Scootaloo asked.
“Ok, I know you have a ton of questions, and I’ll answer them all for you, you just need to calm down first.” He patted her on the shoulder. Scootaloo took several deep breaths and glanced around.
“Who are you?” She asked.
“You can call me Tim.” Tim stated, holding his hand out.
“Scootaloo.” The orange filly responded, placing a hoof on the hand and shaking.
“We’ve got a ton to discuss.” He declared, pulling a chair out for Scootaloo in front of the desk.
I’m not so sure if I can trust him, but I need answers... Scootaloo thought as she hesitantly jumped into the slightly too tall chair.
Careful what you broadcast out into the world. Came a reply that “sounded” exactly like her host.
“You can read my thoughts?!” Scootaloo exclaimed.
“Kinda sorta…” Tim waggled a hand as he sat in his chair. “You just have to realize you can use two different aspects to communicate.”
“...Ok?” Scootaloo indicated that he should go on.
“So, like, think about what you do everyday to communicate, like talking and body language. Now add another layer, but it’s like you're writing a note, but only for people who can also write notes, and you can use it no matter the distance.” He stated.
“That just raises more questions though!” She complained. Tim let loose a full belly laugh.
“All in good time.” He chortled. “How about this, I’ll start from the beginning, and when I’m done I’ll answer any questions you have.”
“... That seems fair…” Scootaloo muttered.
“Excellent.” Tim grinned, his face plates moving to mimic expression. “In the very beginning, there was literally nothing. Zero. Zip. Zilch. But one random day, something in that vast nothingness exploded.” He poked a seemingly random spot and an image of a giant explosion appeared over his desk. “Don’t ask me what, scientists aren’t too sure on that, just that it did. The resulting explosion created was so powerful and so huge that it not only created everything in the universe is made of, but it’s literally still happening as we speak.” The image of the explosion floating above his desk started to slow down, the debris beginning to drift. “We call this The Big Bang, for obvious reasons. The end result ended up with two different kinds of matter, which is what the universe is made of. Normal matter, and dark matter. With me so far?”
“I think so…” Scootaloo stated, awed by the presentation.
“Normal matter, is what you, everyone you’ve ever met, anything you can touch, and myself are made of. Dark matter however is very different.” Tim prodded his desk again and the explosion gained a different aspect that glowed purple. “For reasons we’re not so sure, dark matter exists alongside normal matter, but can’t normally interact with it.”
“So how do you know it exists?” Scootaloo asked.
“A metric butt ton of research kiddo…” Tim explained casually. “Anywho, as The Big Bang started to settle, normal matter began to clump together, eventually forming stars, planets, and moons. Dark matter though, started to move on it’s own and developed consciousness.”
“Whoa… Weird…”
“I know right? Anyway, as normal matter started to form proper celestial bodies, the beings that were made of dark matter started to form their own civilization. Skipping ahead a bit, normal matter eventually started to stabilize and certain bits started to develop consciousness of it’s own.”
“Us.”
“Exactly. Now skipping ahead a LOT, somehow, the [̧R̷̨̛E̶D̶̨A̢C̷T̵͝E͟͞͡D]͘͏͘...”
“I’m sorry, but the what?” Scootaloo asked, rubbing her ears.
“Sorry, the [̛́R̷Ȩ͜D͏A҉̸̶CT͠E͞D̷̸͠]”
“I don’t understand, and that noise makes my head hurt.”
“Sorry.” Tim apologized again. “That's the term we use for them. We don’t know how, but their language is… corrosive. When someone refers to them, a little bit of their language leaks through, and gives whatever word you use that freaky effect. I’ll try to not use it.”
“Ok…” Scootaloo nodded.
“So anyway, the, uh…̴̶[̨́OT̷H̴̀̕E͏́R ̡̀T̡H̡͘IN̨͢҉ĢS͘͠͡] damnit!” Tim cursed as his censorship failed. “They somehow found a way to, become more real, for a lack of a better term, to normal matter.”
“Alright, so how am I involved?”
“Excellent question. For some reason, they HATE life that’s made of normal matter. Specifically, they hate life that’s around stars. And well, that’s basically every form of normal matter life because life tends to need a star to, y’know, exist.”
“Seems legit.” Scootaloo commented.
“So eventually.” Tim continued. “They found my homeworld, Earth, or Terra as we’ve begun to call it recently. My people, who were organic not unlike ponies, fought tooth and nail against these things. At first, it went poorly. As a species we were almost wholly unprepared for such an invasion. But our governments were great at keeping secret military tech secret, so they rushed a few and pulled others out of storage.”
“Wow. I can’t imagine Princess Celestia doing something like that.”
“Yeeah.” Tim stated sardonically. “One of those turned out to be the most important weapon in the war. We call them nanites.” He prodded the spot on his desk again and the view of a swirling galaxy was replaced by a still image of a shimmering, swirling cloud. “Nanites, are extremely small machines that can take, let’s say a blade of grass, and turn it into a metal, like gold or iron.”
Scootaloo’s eyes bulged.
“How it does that exactly isn’t important to the story, so I’ll move on.” Tim continued. “Using nanites, we converted ourselves into living machines that could fight the war on equal, if not greater terms. Because the war wasn’t over resources or power, it was because we were LIFE near a star. So after we became machines, the war was fairly easy because the;” Tim coughed to avoid saying the word. “Weren’t interested in machines.”
“That’s… an odd way to look at it.” Scootaloo commented.
“Tell me about it… So we won the war, but because of our haste to not die, and their consumption of all life, our beautiful homeworld was turned into an almost barren rock, with only a few pockets of life in the deepest, and most heavily protected areas.”
“That’s awful…”
“In a fit of vengeance, we kicked them off our planet and chased them into the greater galaxy…” he tapped again and the image showed the galaxy again, but this time it had an area that was a navy blue consume a purple area that represented the dark matter. “When we found the last pocket, we captured a single specimen for study and exterminated the rest.
“... why’d you do that?” Scootaloo asked. “I mean sure, studying it and all, but if they were such big deals, why not get rid of them all and be done with it?
“Actually pretty easy. By that time we were growing weary of hunting them down across the cosmos. But we didn’t really know what else lay beyond in the greater universe. So we decided to tuck a little trick up our sleeve just in case.”
“Pfff…” Scootaloo dismissed. “I’m a native of Ponyville, where stuff like this happens weekly. I bet it escaped somehow.”
“Personally, I agree with you, but the scientists wanted to get whatever they could out of it. And yes, it did escape, which is where you come into the story.”
Tim explained as he tapped again. This time the blue and purple areas disappeared, but a single, tiny red dot appeared. “You don’t need to know the how and why, but the specimen escaped on a very specific trajectory.” A very slim cone emanated out of the red dot, and the image zoomed in on the triangle. “As luck would have it, your sun is the first potential stop.”
“Ok, but what does that have to do with me personally? And why are you so worried about one prisoner?” Scootaloo asked.
“The thing with the[͟R̸E̡̧D̡͝AC̢͟͝T͏È҉̢D̕], sorry, is that they are very corruptive. They multiply and grow by eating normal matter. All it’d take for a world to die is a drop of it’s blood to land in the soil and everything’s a goner. And for you, well, normally, when we discover a civilization like yours, by which I mean hasn’t developed space travel or advanced communications yet, we have this thing called the ‘Prime Directive’.” Tim explained.
“Yeah, the thing in my head kept saying something about that.” Scootaloo remarked.
“The Prime Directive, is a law that prohibits contacting uncontacted civilizations if they don’t have the means to say hello themselves.”
“Ok, that makes some sense… But why?”
“A few reasons. Number one is that we don’t want to drown out your culture with our own. For instance, take everything you like about your society, but then get rid of all of it and replace it with ours.” Tim went on. “It’d turn everything on it’s head and no one would be happy.”
“Ok, that’s fair.” Scootaloo agreed.
“But with you it’s a special case. Since with the specimen likely to show up, your society may be destroyed anyway. Which is where you come in. While we set up defenses and assemble stuff, we need someone inside to observe what’s going on from your point of view.”
“You want me to spy on other ponies?” Scootaloo remarked.
“Well, spy is kinda a strong word in this case...” Tim stated hesitantly, rubbing the back of his neck. “More like we just want you to go about your normal business and give us a shout if we start disturbing things too much.”
“What if I refuse?” Scootaloo asked pointedly.
“Totally understandable.” Tim leaned back in his chair. “I understand how untrustworthy we seem right now. If you don’t want to do it, we’ll reassemble everything we replaced, scrub your memory a bit, and let you go on your merry way.”
“... Scrub my memory?” Scootaloo wondered.
“Well, we need to preserve our secrecy here. I don’t want ponies to push their own heritage away, and with you knowing about what we’re here to do I can’t let you go with the knowledge.” Tim said matter of factly. “On the other hand, if you agree you get to keep everything, including your memory, we give you all the perks of being one of our citizens, and-”
Scootaloo didn’t even need to think.
“I’ll do it.”
Tim seemed taken back. “You sure? This is a big decision and you may not know all the consequences…”
“I may not know everything, but I know multiple ponies who have saved the world several times. And I know that none of them would refuse if they were given this same offer. It’s the least I can do to help.”