//------------------------------//
// Flight 
// Story: The Shift 
// by Marky 
//------------------------------//

Staring from the parking curb, Kamal watched Aminata shut her car door, then approach he and Princess Celestia with the caution of a housecat. Clothed in the unisex, ankle-length djellaba, her hair hidden in a headwrap, she looked like she'd been out somewhere for the night. Some kind of research conference? 
"Aminata, what are you doing here?"
"It was Salsa Night at La Terrasse, and I saw you drive past... "
Her voice trailed off as she beheld Celestia, her mouth half-open. 
So no conference.
As she drew forward, she tripped on the exposed root of a flowering cailcedra, and Kamal thought she was going to fall. Celestia's horn shimmered with sunlight, and a plume of gold-white flushed from Aminata's spine. It seemed to yank her back upright, saving her from losing her balance. She took a few steps backwards in fear, then stood still for ten dense seconds. Shutting her mouth, she continued her approach.   
"It's an angel," she said. 
"No," Celestia replied. "I'm an Equestrian. I hail from a faraway world known as Equestria."
Celestia turned to Kamal, her massive pupils, those cosmic black holes girdled with light-amethyst irises, boring into his face. "Kamal, were you going to tell me something?"
"The other day, I, uh, I was trying to remotely sense the large geomagnetic fluctuations caused by the machine, and I picked up something matching in Australia. Specifically, in a forest in Victoria. I thought it was some kind of error, but... "
Aminata took in a shaky breath, then exhaled smoothly, relaxing her shoulders. "That makes sense," she said, pointing to Celestia. "This isn't real. This is a hallucination. Haven't you seen the news?"
For a moment, Kamal wasn't sure how to answer. "No, I... I don't have electricity at home."
"I-in Australia," Aminata sputtered, "people---Christians---have been reporting sightings of Christian angels and saints. If the magnetic flux you detected corresponds with the charge distribution of MHBS-induced hallucinations... "
Kamal saw where she was going. He and Aminata had worked for years on the MHBS, and now someone could be mimicking the technology in an Australian forest. It had to be a copycat. He didn't need any reminding of how the scary National Intelligence people had ensured that no one outside of Mali would even have heard of an artificial hallucination broadcast. 
"Celestia, you said you wanted to help me in any way you could."
"That I did."
"I need to find out what's going on in Australia. If someone's actually copying our tech, I need have some agency over that, and to be able to stop it if I must."
"Kamal," Aminata said, a hint of a chuckle in her voice. "She's not real!"
Kamal held up his hand exasperatedly. "Aminata, look in the car." 
Aminata's eyes darted to his Honda, which was stuffed to the brim with electronic components---the disassembled, non-operational bulk of the MHBS. The sharp edge of a neuromorphic monitor had etched another scratch in the window. She looked back at Celestia. Then, clamping her hands over her mouth, her eyes like bowls in her head, she stepped back. 
"Unless someone's broadcasting in this parking lot with us," Kamal said, "she's real. And this is going to sound crazy, but she looks almost exactly like a fictitious character from an American children's program." 
"What?"
He wondered if Aminata knew she'd been fired. 
"The universe works in complicated ways," Celestia purred. She glided towards Aminata, her gold sabatons clinking on the sandy asphalt. "I used a magical Crystal Mirror to get here. I'm sure that there's a scientific explanation for its energy, but whatever that may be, it's beyond the comprehension of even the most prominent Equestrian scholars."
Kamal knew that look on the face of Dr. Aminata Sow. That calculating revelation in her eyes, flickering in reciprocity to the sympathy and allure of Celestia's gaze.
"Kamal, are you familiar with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?" Aminata asked. Kamal could almost feel her excitement, like a heat radiating from her.
"Not exactly." Though the name had already given him a hint.
"I can give you the gist. The interpretation proposes that the universe can be described by a single wave function, which defines a nearly infinite number of superimposed quantum states. These would translate into multiple possibilities of reality, once superimposed, yet at some point divided into many different realities."
Aminata's growing excitement was evidenced by her voice turning huskier than usual.  Kamal slapped a mosquito from his forearm. "Like multiple universes?" 
"Sort of. It's all in the same region of spacetime. Just in different parts of Hilbert space."
"What?"
"Hilbert space. Sort of a generalized Fourier Expansion?"
"I... I need to brush up on my geometry." Kamal waved his hand.
"Well, wherever this Equestria is," she continued, "it's not surprising that it mimics something on Earth. I think you said a children's program? As an art, it's something that might not have existed anywhere in the universe, until us humans created it. It's like Schrödinger's cat; before it was created, its status as either fiction or non-fiction were superimposed. Both realities exist, albeit apart from each other." 
Aminata then looked at Celestia with a smile wider than any Kamal could recall seeing from her. 
"You're real!" she cried, chuckling. 
"I never once doubted it," Celestia replied.
"But... how are you here?"
"Like I said, I used the Crystal Mirror. I'm not sure what you were referring to when you mentioned wave functions or quantum states, but I suspect those principles may have something to do with the mirror; at least, once every thirty moons."
"Kamal, do you realize the implications of this?" Aminata asked. "The many-worlds interpretation is actually correct! That means, somewhere out in the universe, there's a reality where you're... a talking cat. And one where... the Nazis won World War Two. And... a universe where nothing at all exists in a stable state."
And somewhere out there was a mirror of crystal, able to convey observers from one quantum world to the next. Aminata was right; by the many-worlds interpretation, any work of fiction could exist as non-fiction, its contents abiding by the laws of physics via whatever scientific gymnastics were necessary.
"Kamal, I can carry you and your friend to Victoria, Australia, if that is desirable," Celestia said. She sank in a four-legged crouch, as if beckoning he and Aminata to climb on.
The only place outside of Mali to which Kamal had ever traveled was Jordan, when he'd studied abroad as a graduate student of neural engineering. Australia, despite laying far southeast, was thoroughly Western. He fidgeted with a remote maxima inductor, a tube jutting from the half-open window at the passenger seat. It was a remarkable device, containing an arrangement of wires that allowed it to mimic whatever hypothetical material could be described by a negative magnetic permeability. The technology availed itself of the fact that electromagnetic induction could go in either direction; a change in magnetic flux could cause an electromotive force, and an electric current could induce magnetism. 
By the theoretical metamaterial, a current-induced magnetic field could take shape in an empty space away from its source, and probably make Samuel Earnshaw---the mathematician whose theorem such a phenomenon bluntly violated---roll in his grave. In the MHBS, the law of induction applied both ways; when a magnetic field was imposed, the current in the wires of the remote maxima inductor could form magnetic dipoles about a hundred meters away, and the new field would in turn induce neuron impulses in the brain of the enemy. They might see and hear gunfire that wasn't really there, or the illusion of a bomber flying overhead. Christians might see a flock of angels gracing the sky above. 
In fact, with a more complex assembly of wires and a bit of artificial intelligence, a person might manage to induce magnetism at distances much further than one hundred meters. There was a small chance that another mystery copycat, lurking about some shadowy alleyway in Bamako, was broadcasting elaborate lines of magnetic flux, and that this Greek armor-clad horned Burāq could still be an induced mental construct. Kamal could only think of one way to find out for sure. 
"What about the broadcast system?" he asked, gesturing to his car. In an instant, it was enveloped in a film of sunlight, and the resulting glow exploded into the cool night air. The tires pulled gently away from the asphalt.
"I'll carry it."
The sheer force being generated to lift over one ton... Kamal could hardly imagine. As a beast of burden, this equine species could revolutionize the economics of draft animals across the continent. The sudden paranoia that the supposed mystery copycat could read his brain gripped him, that his dehumanizing thoughts on an intelligent being of Islamic legend would be exposed for all to see. 
The being, still crouched, looked him up and down. "No need to fear, little one. The ride will be perfectly safe; my magic will secure you."
Of course, the MHBS wasn't built to read minds. Aminata dusted off her djellaba, then touched Kamal's shoulder. At the jasmine-lilac fragrance of Bint El Sudan radiating from her, his stomach turned with adoration. 
"You remember what we pledged at graduation?" she asked.
The obligation to serve humanity... for the public good.
"The Obligation of the Engineer," he replied. The oath originated from North America and, by 2023, had fully spread to Africa and Europe.
"Lives could be at stake. We need our technology back," she said, already swinging her right leg over where a saddle should have been. Kamal obliged and sat behind her. Warmth blossomed over either of his feet as they were enveloped in glimmering yellow, and he felt the same thing at his spine, making him feel oddly secure, despite the fact that there was nothing to hold onto. 
The wonders of Equestrian magic.
His fingers dug into white fur as the winged beast sprang forward into the air, wind battering his face. The parking lot raced away from them, treetops whizzing past. He could make out the creaking of his car's mechanical infrastructure through the roar of air.
"Be careful with my car!" he shouted. "Its cargo is precious!"
On either side, eagle-like wings the size of castle doors breathed up and down. Kamal looked down. Under his magic-wrapped feet, the street lamps casting sodium vapor-orange over buildings' dilapidated facades burned past at what could have been seventy miles per hour. If he let his eyes relax, the light blurred into trails, along which raced the sandy roads and sandy clearings strewn with rocks and litter, and the trees that pocked the city's multihued beige and grey with fluffs of green. 
He glanced back at Aminata to see her looking at the waxing moon, a lock of black hair that had escaped her headwrap rippling in the wind. Her skin looked dark blue by moonlight. And she still didn't know she was no longer a postdoc at UB.