Dr. Rosen Bridge was, and always had been, an incredibly smart cookie. She got her mark, two stars stretched around a slightly swirled polar grid, when she was 8, for proving, by herself and unprompted, that there were an infinite number of prime numbers. Her talent, to her, meant she was good at finding simple and clever shortcuts to solving a problem. She was accepted to Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns when she was 14. She published 8 papers as first author while she was there and created 5 new spells while she was still a student. She graduated with perfect scores as valedictorian when she was 18. Since then she had authored two dozen more papers despite the mess of bureaucratic paperwork required, created 20 revolutionary new spells, and failed only 2 students from her class over the entirety of her 15-year career. Celestia herself had met with the good professor on two separate occasions to congratulate her on her achievements.
She was also a mare of some renown: she had appeared in the Equestria Daily twice. The first when she documented the effects of stellar resonance on the image of the Nightmare on the moon and the implications of her findings. The second was when she proposed phase-shifted amniomorphy for medical imaging.
They portrayed her as crazy both times, but hey, any publicity was a win right?
She glanced around the corner before continuing to limp down the hall. Her assistants would be on the lookout for her. Today was the last day to submit grades to the School, and they would know she had to come in today to finish grading. They would be waiting to catch her.
A twinge of pain shot through her leg as she stopped in front of her office door. The price of lack of caution. One of her newest cursed crystals had nicked her flank before she installed it in its intended device. Although she neutralized the deadly cocktail of magic almost immediately, her leg still burned.
It was her own fault, really. She had gotten used to being the best and she wasn’t used to losing.
It was a good chance to learn caution. She supposed that was common for very smart cookies like herself, including, as she understood, the eponymous pony from which the term was originally coined.
Also like the original Smart Cookie, she could occasionally be a little crazy, but no one paid her occasional kookiness much mind. She had been an effective teacher thus far, and she ran her lab tightly and efficiently, so a few funny hats, some gaudy necklaces, and the occasional hallway dance routine would be forgiven.
Although- she had just consumed the lab’s entire budget, so it was supremely unlikely her latest gaudy necklace would go unnoticed for much longer.
She blew a lock of pink hair out of her eye and smirked to herself. It was ironic that she would use the word “unlikely” to describe anything at all that would happen to her in the coming days. She was pretty sure she had transcended the notion of probability altogether.
Just as she sat down to begin marking her stack of exams, harried hoofsteps sounded in the hall. The same kind of hoofsteps her wonderful assistant made. Oh Bill, dear, sweet Bill. Always loyal, to a fault. If she was the captain of her lab, Bill was her first mate. He was the major reason she could run as efficiently as she did. Bill had the amazing ability to know exactly which student to give which job. And he could calculate square roots in his head, so that was always a plus. No need to rent one of the school’s computation engines when you have someone who can more-or-less instantly do all your statistical analysis.
But this was too soon. She would have to finish this quickly. Perhaps a subtle act of rebellion before she left this bureaucracy behind. Without reading the first exam, she dipped her quill in red ink and wrote a calligraphic red F on its front page, then circled it and moved onto the next.
Rosen circled the third “F” in her stack just as Bill entered her office, out of breath. Third try was the charm, she’d gotten her calligraphy skills down to a T. Or, she supposed, in this case, down to an F.
“Dr. Bridge,” began Bill, “If you have a moment...”
Bill faltered after seeing her.
She smiled at him.
He stared blankly for a bit, but regained his composure in an impressively short 5 seconds.
“That’s an awfully fancy peytral, Dr. Bridge. Even for you.”
“Do you like it?” she grinned, gesturing to the sinister looking spiked mess of a device around her neck. “I calculate ten-to-the-three-hundred-and-fifty-two to one odds that it will kill me upon detecting a single thaumon. Also, the trim is real gold.”
Rosen grinned even more widely at the flustered sputtering this effected from Bill.
“Is where this month's lab budget went!? A suicide device that doesn't work?”
“On the contrary, a quantum suicide device, which works perfectly well.” Her grin became positively Cheshire.
“You’re still here, Dr. Bridge, so I’d say it doesn’t really...” Bill trailed off as he turned to the large collection of similar devices on her desk.
Rosen Bridge watched him run his eyes down the line of prototypes and settled on the mark IV Q.S.D. The mark IV had a delightfully Machiavellian aesthetic, but sadly didn’t have a high enough detection probability to stop crystalline mana from decaying completely.
He seemed to study it for a while. Long enough for Professor Bridge to stop watching him and stamp her elaborate seal of failure on a dozen more exams. Ostensibly long enough for someone as smart as him to fully grasp the mechanism of the device, though probably not the true function.
“Ooookay Professor. This is a bit far to go for a joke.”
She wordlessly picked up the Mark IV with her hoof and added it to the already deadly ensemble on her neck.
“Are you mad?!” She could hear the strain in Bill's voice. “Is there not enough magic in the air to trigger it!?”
She held up her hoof.
“On the contrary,” she paused to relish the collision this caused between Bill’s hoof and Bill's forehead, “I've placed a small piece of crystalline mana in its detector.”
“You haven't, or you'd be dead.”
She smiled knowingly and removed the devices from her neck carefully with her hooves. As soon as they came away from her neck, they began to tick rapidly, and with each tick, extended a series of sharp, obsidian-like shards into the space where her neck had been.
“Corrupted crystals from the frozen north,” she said in response to the look of shock on Bill's face. “Each one is also coated with a cocktail of manticore venom and cyanide. The mark V Quantum Suicide Device here that I had on when you entered also has a nice array of decay spells and a blood-to-phosphorus transmutation on it.”
She levitated the mark IV back to the end of her desk in her blue aura, and it stopped ticking and stabbing the air as her aura left it. Ignoring Bill's exclamation of horror as she replaced the mark V around her neck, she was satisfied to find that it too, stopped ticking, and the blades of crystal withdrew into the recesses on the inside of the device just in time to avoid nicking her skin.
Bill sat down on the floor in front of her with a thump, eyes blank.
She turned her attention back to her stack of exams. This one contained a particularly elegant proof of the Piaffagorean theorem. She marveled at its cleverness as she completed the last horizontal stroke of an ornate glyph over the top of the page. Her “F” was particularly elegant as well, she thought.
“Okay Professor.”
She had almost forgotten Bill was there.
“I don’t know how you accomplished this, and it’s an amazing prank, but this is a gross allocation of resources that we NEED for the lab.”
Dr. Bridge frowned.
“It’s no prank. The device is indeed designed as it appears to be designed. I've been wearing it every day this week with increasingly larger mana sources.” She stood up to reveal the scar above her right cutie mark. “The crystals are just as deadly as they appear.”
“Then how-!”
She held up a hoof to interrupt. “I'll explain. You are familiar with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, yes?”
“Yes. Every time an event has two possible random outcomes, it is as if there are two universes, one in which the first outcome occurs, and one in which the second occurs.”
“Precisely. Now there are two possible universes here. In the first, the crystal randomly emits a thaumon, which the detector detects, and I die. In the second, the crystal loses no magic, and I live. The second universe is astronomically improbable. But I can't observe the first universe, because I would be dead. No matter how unlikely the second universe is, from my perspective, I will always live in a universe where the crystal did not emit a single thaumon. I can use this technique to access any impossibly unlikely circumstance, even something like winning the lottery.”
“That can't possibly work!”
Rosen simply grinned and repeated the exercise of removing and replacing the device around her neck. This time, she observed, Bill simply looked thoughtful.
“So, wait. The crystal won’t decay at all, as long as it’s in the detector?”
Dr. Bridge smiled.
“You’ve got it.”
“Dr. Bridge, that’s incredible! You’ve actually stopped mana decay!”
Bill paused and scrunched up his face in thought.
“Well, at least from your perspective. If what you’re saying is true, in all likelihood, I’ll still see the crystal decay.”
Then he looked at her in horror.
“Wait, professor, if that’s correct, then you've spawned millions of universes where I've watched you kill yourself in front of me.”
Rosen Bridge frowned. “I… suppose that’s true.”
He turned his head and covered his eyes.
“In fact, from my perspective, you’re just killing yourself in front of me right now!”
“What- no! Bill, look at me!”
“No!” Bill retreated towards the door with his eyes shut tightly.
“Bill, what are you doing?”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Bridge.” His voice wavered. “I don’t think I should even be around you until you stop this.”
He rounded the door and Rosen Bridge heard no more from him but the rapid clopping of hooves on tile.
She was… not shaken. No, she was not shaken at all. Her hoof had somehow started fumbling with the latch on her Q.S.D and she stopped it. What was the point if she wasn’t going to commit to it? Bill had always been a little too sensitive, a little too cautious. She shook her head to herself. She had already decided on her path.
But… she supposed she could take a little break. She reached up again, removed the mana crystal from her deadly neckwear and set it on her desk.
Free from the range of the detector, and thus unbound from her fate, it slowly dissolved into the air with white wisps of magic. She pushed her remaining exams aside to make space for her elbows. She rested her head on her arms and sighed. Was she doing the right thing?
No.
Of course not.
But she knew that when she started. She remembered the first day the idea occurred to her. It was laughable, insane, even! But she couldn’t let go the possibility of tricking the universe into showing her the most unlikely of scenarios. One late night she had shut herself in the lab and built her first quantum suicide device. That one just used a simple fair-coin spell to decide whether to kill or not. She remembered trembling as she considered wearing it, all common sense and reason telling her it would just kill her outright.
But her curiosity got the better of her. She put it on, and she didn’t die with the first random outcome. Then she didn’t die with the second, or the third, or the fourth. She wore it for hours.There were hundreds of completely random decisions that all miraculously ended with her survival. The whole experience gave her a sort of existential high- one she was still riding now. She quickly got to work trying to use it to crack an impossible problem of some sort. It turned into an obsession, and here she was now.
And now! This was her ticket to whatever she wanted, if only she played her cards right. Stopping mana decay was an impossible problem, and she effectively accomplished it in less than a moon. And it was probably the least of what she could do. With the proper set-up, she could make anything fantastically unlikely happen. Bind her device to a water detection spell and she’d never get wet in the rain, because every drop would miss her. If she could find a good way to cast an identity spell on a railroad, she’d never miss her train again.
She shook her head again. Those weren’t even real problems to solve. Those were far too frivolous problems to solve with any kind of suicide, quantum or not.
Starstone. You could never have enough starstone for alchemy, but stars rarely fell from the sky, and even when one did the odds were low that she would be the pony to claim them. She just needed a spell that would kill her unless it was exposed to a falling star within a week, and she would witness the fantastically unlikely event of a star falling near her.
Still thinking too small. She could ascend to alicornhood! A spell that would trigger her device if it didn’t detect a vast quantity of all three types of pony magic within her. Now these were problems she’d gladly give her life to have the solution for.
She laughed out loud. All the villains of history had tried complex spells and rituals to gain absolute power. She was going to do it just by being willing to risk her own death for science. Her world was her oyster now. But maybe she’d start small. After all- she wouldn’t want any unhappy accidents like the crystal that had nicked her earlier today. No. She needed to be cautious and account for every possibility, and then she would win.
Her initial fantasy had been to find a way to use her device to win the lottery. A fantastically unlikely event made likely, and one that would give her enough resources to pursue anything. That was still a good way to start.
Imagine what the newspapers would say when she was done! “Lottery-winning renowned alchemist ascends to alicornhood: Will she be pronounced queen?” She actually giggled to herself. She could imagine the blowhard editor at the Equestria Daily trying to paint it poorly again, like so many of her spell discoveries. But she would be untouchable. Hay, she would even be able to just cast a haste spell or time-stop spell, and edit the type blocks in the press to get the paper to badmouth itself before anyone even noticed. This was going to be good. She would make this good.
Rosen Bridge unclasped her peytral and hung it up on the wall.
Filled with determination, she finished marking the second half of her stack of exams with an “F” and packed her belongings, aware of the significance of the absent weight around her neck.