//------------------------------//
// Chapter 3: Resonance 
// Story: Quantum Lottery 
// by Doctor Axiom 
//------------------------------//

Rosen Bridge lay on a recliner next to her pool, sipping a cocktail and awaiting the final touches on the remodeling of the west wing. She couldn’t help but marvel at the changes in her life over the past two weeks.
The day after her grand experiment, she won the lottery.
Immediately afterwards, she was sacked from the school.
Well, technically she was still faculty, but she had all her teaching privileges revoked. She knew it would happen; tenure or not, uncaringly giving all your students a zero on their final exams was one of those things that got you fired, no matter how employed you technically still were. She just wasn’t expecting it all to happen quite so promptly.
The grading incident quickly lead to an investigation that dismissed her from her lab as well. Apparently, Bill had tried to hide her mismanagement from the authorities, and he was faced with a disciplinary hearing at some time this week. She couldn’t help but feel slightly bad for him.
Her own disciplinary hearing was meant to be today, but she had no intent to attend and waste their and her time. Easier to just let them find her guilty.
Regardless, she was glad that she had decided to spend all that effort to actually test her spell on the lottery itself, and she had gotten very lucky to win the lottery on the first try.
Not quite as lucky as ponies who normally won the lottery of course, but she didn’t need to be that lucky, because she had cleverness on her side. She wouldn’t have been able to rebuild or repair her trigger unit for better odds if she hadn’t won the lottery, because all her lab resources were locked away thanks to the celerity of the disciplinary committee.
One of the students in her class had been the new Celestial Scholarship recipient, and failing the Princess’s personal student on a flawlessly executed geometry exam really expedited the disciplinary process.
She took another sip from her cocktail.
Fair was fair. Twilight Sparkle was an incredibly clever young unicorn who came up with incredibly clever proofs and she probably deserved better. Just not, unfortunately, in Rosen Bridge’s reality.
Luckily, Rosen Bridge’s reality involved having a fancy new mansion, which really took the edge off the guilt.
It also involved a fancy new lab, and an immense supply of starstone which had, due to a slight lack of foresight on her part, cost her the west wing of the aforementioned mansion.
But that was a trivial matter for her now. She didn’t need to worry about having to rebuild things or consuming resources, and she certainly didn’t need her professorship. She could now simply follow her desire to tinker and invent, with no need to circumnavigate the bureaucracy or other naysayers. She could probably double her already prodigious productivity.
“Miss Bridge?”
Doctor Rosen Bridge very pointedly swirled her cocktail glass around and took another sip.
“Umm… Miss—oh ponyfeathers.”
She could practically hear the eyeroll, even though she wasn’t looking at him.
“Doctor Bridge?”
She smirked, and lowered the glass from her lips.
“Yes, Mortar?”
The Block siblings were some of the best in their trade, but there was no way she was letting them forget that she was the best in her trade.
“We’ve done the marble on the west floors like you asked, and well, we couldn’t help but notice that the layer of deadrock under– ”
“Wait HOW DO YOU KNOW– ”
She paused when she saw the intensely flat look on Mortar Block’s face. She had toppled her chair over with her outburst and took a moment to right it and compose herself.
“We’ve done contracts for the castle, Doctor Bridge. There are plenty of rooms that need anti-magical shielding for one reason or another.”
Rosen blinked.
Mortar looked her straight in the eyes. “As I was saying, the layer of deadrock had a cracked section in it from the meteorite impact which you insist a little too emphatically you had nothing to do with. We did our best to re-align it, but if you had a secret lab or something down there which you were trying to keep magically isolated, you might want to recheck how well it’s sealed.”
Rosen Bridge’s mouth was a little dry. She tried and failed to rectify this by taking a sip from her now-empty cocktail glass.
Mortar’s face remained hard, though he raised an eyebrow when she started to speak again.
“I’m sorry, Mortar.” She looked down at the glass, and then sheepishly up at Mortar. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention.”
Mortar’s eyes softened slightly. “It’s no problem, Doctor Bridge. We’ll send you the bill.”
“Bill? Oh yes! Yes, that will be fine. Thank you, Mortar, and thank Brick for me as well.”
Mortar Block gave her a single nod and left her courtyard.

That was incredibly embarrassing.

The Block siblings were indeed the best in their trade. Pride goes before the fall, Rosen. She sighed as she gazed through the entryway to the west wing. The floor was immaculate.

She moved to her bookcase and flipped “Prophecies and Predictions” upside down. The bookcase slid left and she continued down the staircase behind.
Yes, she supposed. It was best to quench her arrogance now. She had defied the laws of probability already, but she could easily destroy her dream unless she accounted for every possibility. She was aiming to become a god.
The machine she was building in her basement needed to be absolutely flawless. It needed to be several billion times more likely to kill her than to malfunction. Imagine if it left her alive because it only destroyed a leg. Yes, she would need redundancies, and subsystems, and redundant subsystems. It couldn’t just kill her, it would need to annihilate her.

She ran a cursory glance over the deadrock ceiling. Cracked, but intact. Probing it telekinetically, she couldn’t feel any of her magic seep through. Excellent. No distractions and she could get on with her work.

Wait.

No arrogance now, Rosen. Check and double check. With some effort, she conjured a mana crystal and placed it near the crack. She grabbed a thaumometer and ascended to the west wing again to check the seal. The instrument showed the barest hint of an occasional bump in magic in the area she estimated the crack was. She nodded to herself. This was acceptable. Celestia herself could stand next to it and not distinguish it from the background magic. She closed her eyes and fixed this state of mind. Pride comes before a fall. Then she opened her eyes with a calm fury and reentered her secret lab.

The next few days passed by in a blur. She stopped only to eat and sleep. All else was science. She theorized, she tested what worked in practicality, and she built. And she built. And built and built and built.
All of her detection systems to detect a kind of pony magic were brought up to her courtyard and tested on live subjects who she paid.
Each of her kill systems were also, regrettably, tested on live subjects that she procured from the local veterinary hospital. It bothered her at first, but she couldn’t afford to be arrogant and assume her work would function without testing. Besides, from the perspective of those animals, they wouldn’t really die anyway, right? Quantum suicide and all that. She pushed onward.
Each device was assembled around her kill zone with meticulous precision. She had plant growth detectors, thaumic motion detectors, airflow laminarity detectors. She had crystal dart guns, flamethrowers, and several large lasers. Nothing was left to chance as she slowly created her sinister assemblage of machinery. A single door lead into the cubical death chamber on the inside. The entire contraption was covered in heavy duty thaumic suppressors to wick away any magic that she might attempt to use on the structure itself. She estimated she would not be able to overwhelm them unless she had continuous alicorn level output of magic for more than 30 seconds.
Simulations on simulations to verify, of course. She didn’t have … her usual computational resources, but she did have a very expensive computational engine she had purchased. She used redundant parts this time, and the actual trigger units only for the final tests.
4 days later and she was done. One of her fastest turnarounds, and she had not skimped on sleep this time either. It was Friday. Bill would be having his disciplinary hearing today. She swallowed hard.
No use thinking about that now.

She ate a simple lunch and prepared herself mentally for what was to come. She would lock herself in death room for 6 hours and ruminate on Starswirl the Bearded’s unfinished spell. The spell was rumored to be a powerful incantation, meant to potentiate the caster and render them capable of alicorn level magic. Even if that weren’t true, she had an array of other high level spells: haste, duplication, time-reversal, and mirror phase, that she would attempt to perform. One of those would catapult herself into alicornhood. She also had an array of potted plants, a small bed of fertile soil and tomato seeds, and a cloud she had captured from outside.
At the end of those 6 hours, her death room would activate if it did not detect large amounts of all three types of pony magic within a single individual within its boundaries. She had backup systems for each individual type of magic. Therefore, at the end of those 6 hours, she would only observe realities where she turned into an alicorn. Her entire lab was sealed and impervious to outside influence. If anything unforseen happened to destroy her death room, she would simply try again with valuable data on how improbable it really was to ascend to alicornhood.

She was ready.

She walked into the death chamber and locked the door behind her. Her failsafes engaged and the timer began its countdown. Now there was no way out without becoming an alicorn.

“From one to another, another to one. A mark of one's destiny singled out alone, fulfilled.”

That was the wording to Starswirl’s incantation. Everyone in the School for Gifted Unicorns knew that the Princess handed the incantation to her protegees at some point along their studies as something of a test. Now it was her job to pass that test.

“A mark of one’s destiny singled out, fulfilled” clearly referred to her cutie mark- a mark of destiny. “Fulfilled” seemed to suggest she had to manifest the full potential of her mark. That certainly made sense, but her mark was for making clever shortcuts, and she was already making the cleverest shortcut of all time for everything. By that logic she should already have ascended.
“From one to another, another to one?”
Now that was just ambiguous. Was that suggesting that ascension could not be achieved on her own? She would have to think about that some more.
She spent some time mulling over the possible meanings in her head, and before she knew it an hour had passed.
It was time to try something else and come back to Starswirl’s spell later.

5 hours later and she had botched 3 haste spells, a duplication spell, two age spells, and had failed to spontaneously develop the ability to manipulate weather or grow plants. As a result of the aforementioned, she was tired.

She tapped her hoof on the floor in thought. Of course she wouldn’t be lucky enough to discover the secret to ascension within the first 5 hours of her 6 hour period. Tartarus, maybe even the stress of the final hour was needed to help her transform.
She glanced at the clock. 48 minutes remaining. It was time to return to Starswirl’s spell.

“From one to another, another to one. A mark of one's destiny singled out alone, fulfilled.”

Again she read the incantation and focused on whatever power she could produce through it. Her magic just seemed to disperse into the ether. It did not seem to echo through the universe as a powerful completed incantation should.
She meditated and pondered.
“A mark of one’s destiny singled out alone, fulfilled.” That did not seem consistent with the earlier phrase: “From one to another, another to one.” The first half of the incantation implied teamwork of some kind, where the second half of the incantation implied solitude. Her mind churned, looking for a flash of insight.
The two phrases of the incantation needed to be consistent with each other. There were two possibilities.

Possibility 1: The first phrase was the inherent truth, and the second phrase needed to echo it somehow.

She gulped. This possibility might imply that she could not accomplish this alone, and would need a friend. She had driven away her only friend, and most of her potential friends, and locked herself in this room alone. She glanced at the clock. 27 minutes remaining. She shook her head to clear it.
No. She had engineered this situation so she was fated to succeed. She would not die here. Which meant the solution was the other possibility.

Possibility 2: The second phrase was the inherent truth, and the first phrase needed to match.

Which meant that alicornhood was achieved through fulfilling your own purpose individually.

A flash of inspiration.

“From my past to my present, my present begets more. My destiny is my own making, I will see it fulfilled!”

She felt power echo through her, and through the world around her. She felt she could see the magic around her- for all of two seconds, before this incantation also fizzled away.

No!

She had to be close! Maybe she just didn’t have enough power? She breathed deeply, prepared herself mentally, and tried again, with more emphasis.

“From my past to my present, my present begets more. My destiny is my own making, and it is fulfilled!”

Again, a mild surge in power that seemed to come from the universe itself, and then nothing.

“From my past to my present, my future lies in store. My destiny is my own, and I will make more!”

Barely a trickle of innate magic this time.

“From my past I make my present, and my present will bring more. I mark out my destiny, and it is fulfilled!”

Perhaps slightly more than last time? It was hard to tell.

She glared angrily at the clock as she panted. 19 minutes remaining. 

She cycled through all of the incantations she had tried so far one more time. Each one seemed to produce even less power, and she began to grow even more exhausted.

5 minutes left.

This didn’t make any sense! She didn’t have enough power to do this! That wouldn’t be a problem if she weren’t alone. But if she was fated to survive here then she must be able to do it alone, because otherwise she would die here. So where was the flaw in her logic? There must be one.

Possibility 1, possibility 2. Possibility 2, and possibility 1. Except Possibility 1 was an impossibility. She was locked in her death box properly, every redundant subsystem checked, which paradoxically meant she was destined to survive. And the only way to survive was to become an alicorn. Right?

4 minutes left.

Maybe she should just give up and she would become an alicorn just before the time ran out with no effort on her part? No that should be a last resort. There has to be something she was missing about the incantation. Was there any way she could do this with the help of anypony else? Was there anyone who helped her reach this point in her life? No. She had made all her major accomplishments of her own ability, with her own cleverness, and her own luck.

3 minutes left.

Well, she did have Bill’s help for many of her accomplishments. She watched the seconds tick by as she pondered this. Was that enough? Bill wasn’t involved in this project at all. She did have some help from her test subjects. And Brick and Mortar, she supposed. But how would their help echo in this incantation here? Her cutie mark was about making clever shortcuts. None of them had truly helped her do that. She watched more seconds tick by.

2 minutes left.

She was the one who supplied the shortcuts. Always. But what did that mean? How could she indirectly receive power from someone else for this incantation? She watched the seconds tick by on the clock, and felt the slightest hint of despair in the back of her mind. Frustration. Not despair, just frustration, she said. But… what if she had actually just been fantastically lucky all this time, and quantum suicide was a myth. Maybe she had been winning the cosmic lottery over and over and over and her luck had finally run out.

1 minute remaining.

No. This was a counterproductive thought process. Even in the near infinitely improbable case that were true, she would still have to do her best. So would this power be from her? Or would it be from someone else who somehow helped her? She stared at the clock with a grim determination.

30 seconds remaining.

Her or someone else? Her or someone else? Her and someone else together? Wait.

This was her own arrogance again. Science is an inherently collaborative field. She hadn’t done this alone, she had never done this alone! Even her clever shortcuts were between concepts that other ponies had invented, and made possible by generations and generations of clever scientists and engineers. She couldn’t have designed every device in her death chamber from scratch! There were lifetimes of technology behind it. And that was barely the beginning of her indirect collaboration with the great minds of the past.

10 seconds remaining.

She smiled and closed her eyes.

“From me to the world, and to me from the works of many. I stand on the shoulders of giants to mark out my destiny!”

A rush of power. Sustained. She opened her eyes. She could see everything. The magic in her mechanism, the magic rushing through her, and she could see something deeper in the world around her, from which this magic was coming. The air around her became something tangible and she could feel the slow metabolism of the plants within her detectors. Her horn flared with a bright turquoise corona. She was aware she was floating in the air, and instinctively knew that if anyone could see her, her eyes would be glowing white.

The clock read zero.

A click, and a sharp pain in her back. She looked behind and frowned. Her crystal tipped neurotoxin darts had fired and several had pierced her. No matter, she could fix this. She was destined to survive. She removed the darts and began to focus on the weakness spreading through her body, neutralizing the toxin with her magic. She noticed the plants around her experienced a surge of growth, and wind was rushing around her body.

A hum from her side. She whipped around, eyes wide. Her lasers were turning on. She studied her mechanism with her rapidly evolving new senses. It wasn’t detecting enough of the three kinds of magic within her yet, despite her ascension.

She put up a mirror shield to deflect the lasers, and immediately felt more sharp pains in her flank. More toxin starting to spread through her. More offensive traps began to fire. She enclosed herself in layers of shields and tried to focus on neutralizing the transmutation spells and neurotoxin rapidly flooding through her body.

Then the lightning generators activated. The feedback through her shields was overwhelming. She screamed in pain.

The world was starting to get a little fuzzy. She surged her magic again, this time outward and indiscriminately. She would just rip this mechanism apart from the inside. She pushed as hard as she could. She felt the mechanism start to come apart but her vision was still getting fuzzy and her body was going numb. She noticed she was surrounded in a golden glow but could not remember what she had done to create it. She pushed as hard as she could and felt a great release. She saw the sparks of broken mana conduits out of the corner of her eye, and she heard hundreds of clattering pieces of broken machines. She was having trouble focusing. She needed to remove the darts, nasty transmutation spells and crystalline corruption that were still working on her body. She could barely see anything. Except a large blur of white? The white was getting bigger. She saw faint gold as well. She tried one last counter-spell with as much power as she could muster.

Then all was black.