//------------------------------//
// Chapter 4: Collapse 
// Story: Quantum Lottery 
// by Doctor Axiom 
//------------------------------//

Rosen Bridge woke to an irregular, quickly beeping noise. “I did it!” she thought. “I'm still alive!” She felt a strange tingle on her back and felt… feathers? “Wings? I hope those are wings!” 
Then she noticed that there was someone familiar speaking something beside her. She tried to open her eyes to see who it was- but found she could not. 
“…and they’re going to take you off life support soon. They say given the damage to your spine and brain, it's impossible for you to come out of that coma. We… we all agreed to it.” 
It sounded like he was crying. 
“Bill! No no! I succeeded! I'm still alive!” she tried to say, but found she could not. 
“E- Even the princess couldn’t…” 
She heard rapid receding hoofsteps. He had run away. 
She began to notice some more things. She was not breathing on her own. Her throat hurt, and there was something forcing air into her lungs. She tried to fight it and breathe against it, but her body was not responding to her will. 

Deeper, slower hoofsteps, with a light metallic sound accompanying them. 

“My dear Dr. Bridge.” 

Princess Celestia. 

She still could not speak. 

“I know it’s… unlikely you can hear me. However I will speak anyway, if only for my own closure. I attended Dr. Neigh’s disciplinary hearing. He was very distraught. He was very concerned for you, you know.” 

A long sigh. 

“He told us about your quantum suicide experiments immediately. I was intrigued by your thinking, and it certainly explained the fortune you had recently. From… our perspective, I suppose.” 

The Princess paused for a moment. 

“But this was dangerous thinking, and Bill expressed to us that it seemed you were obsessed with the concept. Given that and the recent headlines you’ve been in, we realized you would only continue to experiment.” 

Hoofsteps moved around her. A chair creaked. 

“Bill also expressed one additional possibility that he was worried you might not have accounted for. The possibility that you might be unlucky enough to survive one of your experiments but be irreversibly crippled by an injury.” 

Another sigh. 

“Credit where it is due: you did take precautions.” 

Her mind raced. This couldn’t be it. This couldn’t be the way it went down. She was supposed to be an alicorn! She was supposed to win! She always won! 
“After the hearing in the evening, I flew to your mansion fearing the worst. There didn’t seem to be anyone home, so I teleported inside to investigate. I thought I could apologize in the worst case scenario. No sign of you around, but I am an adept scryer. I felt around for magic and found a tiny, odd spike coming from the floor of your west wing. I left it as a fluke initially. I went into your study next and found a bill from the Block brothers.” 

Celestia! It was her interference somehow! 

“It included an item about repairing deadrock. I wasted no time after that. I went to your west wing and tore apart the floor. Just in time to see a partially torn cube of death, with you floating in the middle, eyes glowing but flickering out. I surrounded you with my aura immediately and tore your machine apart. It was difficult even for me. Very well engineered, Dr. Bridge.” 

No, no, no! No! Was it Celestia? Did she survive because an external alicorn came in and removed her from the situation? 

“I did my best to neutralize everything you had inflicted upon yourself. I must say that your bone-to-mercury transmutation spell was devilishly clever. Unfortunately, even I am not fast enough to heal that many fatal injuries.” 

It was Celestia! She would only survive by alicorn magic, and Celestia had provided that magic. She accounted for that possibility! Her lab was shielded! But she did not account for the fact that the probability of Celestia noticing her lab might be higher than the probability of her succeeding on her own.

“And now here you are. You ascended. Wings, horn, and strength together.  But your spine is shattered and mostly dissolved. Third degree burns all over your body. The electrical activity of your brain suggests you are having frequent mild seizures. Many injuries, and worst- you seem to have cut yourself off from magic entirely.” 

No! She tried to push magic through her horn. She tried to feel with her unicorn senses. There was nothing. 

“The last possibility I can think of is that you may not be cut off from the dream realm. If my sister were here…” 

Rosen Bridge could no longer think of anything. 

“I wouldn’t wish an existence like yours upon anyone, Dr. Bridge. The doctors here will make it swift and painless. But I hope there’s not enough left of you to worry about that. The only thing I fear now is that there still exists a reality where you’re conscious, alive, and experiencing all of this.” 

That brought a chill to her remaining senses. 

She heard someone else walk in beside her, briefly talk to the Princess, and then move next to her. She felt a cold sensation run through her arm and into her shoulder. Everything started to feel strange. Someone pressed something beside her with a click. There was a loud beeping sound. Another click. 
“Is something wrong?” she heard Princess Celestia ask. 
“The machine won't turn off!” 
Several more clicks sounded in rapid succession. 
“Have you tried simply removing the power?” she heard the Princess suggest. 
“It’s fused into the machine!” 
With a grim horror, Rosen Bridge understood what was happening to her. This was the reality where she was conscious, alive, and experiencing what she had done to herself. And she was trapped here. She couldn’t die from her perspective. 
“I can’t get the crystal out!” 
More hoofsteps, other ponies in the room. 
“Maybe if you just- OW! It zapped me!” 
They struggled with it for some time. 
“I got it-” A loud whoosh of wind and a crackling of electricity. “Where did that thundercloud come from!?”  
“Sorry!” A voice sounded from seemingly outside the window. 
“It’s fused in even harder now.” 
“Let me try.” The princess’s voice! Yes, if anyone could fix this.... but she had already failed her, hadn’t she. 
“Rrrrhahhahhhhhhhhhnng!” She could hear the strain in her voice, and she swore she could feel the concern of onlookers. 
Then just huffing and puffing. 
“I... am sorry. I am still exhausted from the amount of healing magic I used for her.” 
“Let me get my hammer.” 
“And I’ll get my tools.” 
“I’ll get some deadrock to try to negate the charge.” 
Rosen knew it was futile. Her mind raced. There must be something she could do to indicate she was still here. She couldn’t even blink. She could feel the movements of her eyes, and they were random. She didn’t seem to be able to influence them in any way. 
She heard shuffling around her, and occasional metallic clinks. 
Her heart rate! If she were stressed enough her heart rate would increase. She listened for the beeping of the monitor next to her. It was already so rapid! She didn’t have any way to count, but it seemed it was beating already at two times a second. She strained with mental effort, but nothing she did seemed to slow it down or speed it up. 
BANG BANG BANG. A rhythmic banging noise. Then a slip. A crash of glass. 
“It flew out the window!” 
“And took my tools with it!” 
Rapid hoofsteps to the window. 
“Is that... the technician we called that they fell on?” 
“Yes!” 
“What are the odds of that?” 
Despair. She gave into it. They continued to work around her, but each time they tried something supremely unlikely would happen to prevent them from turning off the life support machine. Her life was bound to this machine, and therefore neither she nor the machine would ever stop working. She was immortal, just as she had hoped. And her immortality was hell. 
The princess washed her hooves of the situation within a few hours and stopped trying to help. She presumed because the princess realized it was only a matter of time before fate killed the princess to keep her alive. 
After a week, she heard curious scientists come in around her to examine the phenomenon. After a few months, she simply became a tourist attraction and she began to lose track of the days. 
Her last sane thought was 4 months later: “I’ve filled the multiverse with corpses gone mad.”