On the walk back to the SIVA chamber, my hoof started to ache worse with every step. It itched under the bandages and felt like the crack was getting worse, which it might have been since I fought a couple of robots, which was probably against doctor’s orders. I was kind of afraid of how bad it might be under the bandages. Have you ever felt that? Like you’re hurt or sick and you’re more afraid of what the doctor might say is wrong with you than anything else, so you just sort of sit on it and hope it gets better on its own. Either it goes away and you stop thinking about it, or it gets a million times worse and ends in gangrene.
“Are you okay?” Emerald asked. “You’re limping.”
“I’m fine,” I said, trying to shrug it off and make myself believe it was the truth.
“We’ll get a doctor to look at that laser burn,” she promised, mistaking the reason why there was a hitch to my step. “It doesn’t look too bad. You’ve got thick skin.”
“I’m pretty sure the robots just weren’t at full power,” I said, resisting the urge to poke at the burn. It didn’t really hurt or anything after the healing potion she’d given me, but it had a weird pulling sensation to it. It was like the skin had healed just a little too tightly.
“Not at full power my flank,” Dad huffed. “I got shot too, you know!” He pointed to the black line of soot on his side.
“You got dinged,” Rain Shadow sighed. “Your coat is barely even scorched. The shot was a clean miss.”
“It felt like being burned with a hot poker! How is that a miss?!”
“Being shot with a laser weapon can reduce a pony to ash,” Emerald said. “You were burned by the superheated air around the beam, not by the beam itself. It’s like the difference between a pony flying right into you and being knocked over by their wake.”
Dad huffed.
“Your daughter got lucky that she didn’t get hurt worse than she did,” Emerald said pointedly. “She’s probably right about them not being at full power. If they had time to warm up, they might have put a hole right through her!”
“In which case the Commander would probably put holes in us,” Rain Shadow sighed and continued under his breath. "Not that I'd blame her."
I tried to figure out the right question to ask as we got closer to the big room. I could feel it getting closer like… like a magnet was pulling me.
“Is my mom a bad pony?” I asked. It was a stupid question, like something a lost filly would ask, but I didn’t know what else to say.
“Commander Zinger is… dedicated to her goals,” Emerald said.
“She’d have you and everypony else here thrown into the volcano to appease it if she thought it would mean getting a little closer to what she wants,” Dad corrected. “That’s how she always was. It did make it easier to get access to dig sites, granted.”
“She’s a good commander,” Rain Shadow said, raising his chin. His tone was sharp and defensive. “You shouldn’t talk about her behind her back. She got where she is because ponies think she’ll do a good job and she convinced them enough to vote for her to do it.”
“Oh yes, an excellent job,” Dad agreed. "We just disagreed on what her job was supposed to be. I thought the purpose of our excavations was to preserve the past and learn from it so we didn’t make the same mistakes all over again. She thought it would be even better if we dug up those mistakes and gave it all another shot, and unfortunately the ponies paying our bills agreed with her!”
“Can we please stop arguing?” I asked, gritting my teeth more from frustration than pain. I could deal with being hurt, but the arguing was starting to wear on my nerves.
Emerald patted my side. “That’s the best idea I’ve heard in a while. We’re all on the same side, right?”
Rain Shadow nodded. “We have our orders from her, she gets her orders from up above, and all of us just want the Enclave to be safe and happy.”
“And this SIVA stuff sounds like it could do a lot,” Emerald said. “If half of what Commander Zinger said about it is true, there’s a bright future ahead of us.”
Dad gave her a look that said volumes, but held his tongue and just shook his head. I was grateful for the silence, even if it was only temporary.
I stumbled a little as we walked into the SIVA chamber and looked down at the deck, half-expecting a loose plate or dropped tool. My hoof was throbbing with every heartbeat. I was trying really hard not to think about what I’d seen in the medical bay. The ponies who looked like they’d been dipped in steel and mummified.
Driven insane by pain. How much pain did a pony have to be in before they lost their mind and turned into an animal? I couldn’t imagine it. I’d been lasered, stabbed, beaten, and the worst I’d ended up with was a bad mood.
“You’re back already?” Mom asked, when she saw us. She was up on a catwalk, examining the core from above. “Did you find anything?”
The core somehow looked more sinister than before. When I’d first seen it I’d thought it looked sort of like a swarm of locusts in a cage or an aquarium or something like that, swirling and purposeless and more like a force of nature than anything else. A bottled storm. Now it was more focused. The flow was slower, and I could almost make out a shape in it.
Maybe it was just in my head, but I’d swear it almost looked like a devil, curled up on itself and waiting inside that shield like a dragon’s egg about to hatch. Or I could be seeing shapes in wild clouds. I had to hope it was my imagination.
“We got shot at by security,” Dad said. “It’s too dangerous to go wandering around.”
“That’s not what I asked. Lieutenant Rain Shadow?”
He actually looked uncertain for a moment before stepping forward. I saw him glance at the core. Had he seen the same thing I had?
“We found something,” he confirmed. “Memory orbs and a device to play them.”
“Excellent,” Mom said. She hopped off the platform, her bright yellow aura surrounding her hooves and slowing her fall, absorbing the impact when she landed. “I knew you could do it! So, what’s the code?”
“Well, um, Chamomile is the only one who watched the orb,” Rain Shadow said, looking at me. “She said there was a code.”
“And that code is?” Mom asked, turning to me.
“Don’t tell her,” Dad interrupted, before I could get a word in. “Chamomile, listen to me. It’s too dangerous! The last thing we need is another disaster when somepony clearly spent a lot of time and effort trying to keep it from happening!”
Mom sighed and adjusted her glasses. “The code, please.”
“Can we talk about this for a minute?” I asked. “This stuff might be dangerous.” I hadn’t noticed it before, but the throbbing in my hoof wasn’t really in time with my heartbeat. It was close to it, but that was a coincidence. This close to the core, being able to see it surge and move like a storm, I could tell. It was pulsing in time with that core, in tune with it somehow, even while it was eating me up.
“Of course it’s dangerous!” Mom groaned. “I’ve explained this over and over again… yes, it’s dangerous. Any tool is dangerous if used incorrectly. A knife can be used for surgery, or to kill. It’s about the intent of the pony using it.”
“A knife doesn’t use itself,” Dad said quietly. “Look at that mess, Lemon. The war was a mistake. All that came out of it was poison and death. If you need a prize to take back to the military, there’s plenty here. Even the deck plating and wiring is worth a fortune.”
“It’s not about the money!” Mom snapped. “I don’t have time for this.”
She sighed and pulled out a pistol.
“Give me the code,” she ordered. “Emerald? Rain Shadow? Neither of you have it?”
“Sorry, Ma’am,” Emerald said. "The reader broke after Chamomile used it."
“I’m not angry, but I’m very disappointed. When you knew the memory orb had the code on it, you should have found a way to watch it yourselves. Chamomile, give me the code.”
I hesitated. “Uh…”
Mom sighed. “Bring her in.”
Quattro stumbled inside, pushed ahead of Colonel Ohm. She looked more than just a little annoyed, turning to Ohm to glare at him. He glared right back at her.
“This is a friend of yours, yes?” Mom asked. She levitated the gun over to Quattro, who froze as the weapon touched her temple.
Quattro very carefully turned to look at me.
“Nice uniform,” she said, looking at the burned shirt I was wearing. “I didn’t think you were the type to join up with the military.”
“Quiet,” Mom said. “Chamomile, give me the code. I didn’t want to have to resort to threats, but here we are.”
“Destiny-Pi-One-One-Alpha,” I said. I wasn’t going to stand there and argue with her when I’d heard her order ponies to their deaths and she was literally holding a gun to another pony’s head. Even if it had been a total stranger I'd have folded instantly.
“There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Mom asked, smiling. “Thank you, Chamomile. Why don’t you go and have a medic look at that nasty wound? You look like you’re in awful pain.”
I was hurting, a lot, but the laser blast wasn’t the first thing on my mind.
“What should we do with her?” Ohm asked, nodding to Quattro.
“She can keep my daughter company,” Mom said. “As long as she doesn’t try anything too stupid.”
“As you like,” Ohm said. “Move.”
He shoved me and Quattro off to the side, and motioned for one of the medics to come and see us.
“Nice work,” Quattro whispered. “Let me guess, that code is going to let her unlock that cage?”
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“I can’t be too angry at you not wanting me to get shot,” Quattro said.
A soldier with a yellow and pink patch on his shoulder stepped over and knelt down.
“Hey there,” he said. “I’m just going to give you a little look-over.”
“Do I get a lollypop after my check-up?” I asked the medic.
He laughed. “Only if you’re good.”
“I’ll try my best,” I promised.
“You had a healing potion already?” the medic asked, prodding at my shoulder. I nodded. “Looks like everything closed up alright. You’ll have a little bit of scarring here and on your cheek from the burns. Can’t do much about that.”
“Eh, chicks dig scars, right?” I asked.
He patted my other shoulder. “That’s what they tell us in boot. The uniform’s a lost cause, though. There isn’t a laundry service in the Enclave good enough to clean up that mess. Let’s get it off.”
He helped me strip it off and caught it when I winced as it was pulled over my bandaged right forehoof.
“And let’s change those bandages,” he said.
“Do we really need to--”
“If I don’t take care of you, your mother will be upset at me,” he said. I looked away while he pulled out a small pair of scissors and cut down the side of the bandages, some of the pressure releasing. The throbbing in time with my heartbeat didn’t stop, and when he finally pulled the bandages free I caught the hiss from his lips.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” I asked, finally looking.
He looked up at me wordlessly. My cracked hoof was better, for some definition of better. There was a thin bead of metal running up where the crack had been, like somepony had welded it back together. Black veins were running all the way from there to my elbow, standing out under my white coat.
“It’s bad,” he whispered. “This is a nanometal infection. You’ve got that stuff growing in there.”
“A healing potion probably won’t help, huh?” I asked.
“You’re holding it together now, but the pain is going to get worse,” the medic said quietly. “Before you ask, even amputation won’t work. It’ll just try to regrow your hoof and you don’t want to see what that’s like. If we take you back to the medbay we can sedate you, but…”
“Just wrap it up,” I grunted. I wasn’t ready to be put under and never wake up again. Maybe I would be in a few days. I didn’t know how much sleep I’d be getting if the pain got worse, and being sedated might turn into the only answer sooner rather than later.
“Bandages aren’t going to help much,” he said. “Honestly I don’t know how you’re dealing with it.”
“It’s…” I didn’t want to say it wasn’t as bad as it looked. It looked bad and felt like my leg was being burned and pried apart. “I’ve got a high pain tolerance,” I said.
“No kidding,” he muttered, wrapping fresh bandages around the hoof. The pressure made me hiss, but it was better than having to look at it. “Here.”
He gave me a few pills.
“It’s just some steroids to help with the swelling, and a mild painkiller. They’re not much, but they might help take the edge off. I didn’t bring any Med-X with me. We’ve got a supply in the other section. I’ll ask the commander for permission to take you to the medbay ”
“Thanks,” I said, swallowing the pills. He passed me a canteen to help them on the way down, and I chugged the brackish, slightly-sulfury tasting water, draining it before passing it back. He didn’t even look annoyed, which meant I was really in a bad way. He got up and patted my shoulder again before leaving, having a few quiet words with my Mom.
I watched them speaking, and I could guess what it was about because I wasn’t that big of an idiot, especially when Mom glanced at me very significantly.
I gave the painkillers a minute to start working, and they really didn’t at all, so I grunted and used the bulkhead for support to start pulling myself back to my hooves. Three of them, at least.
“Are you going to…?” Quattro started, trailing off.
“I’ll let you know when I figure it out,” I said, standing up. “I need to keep my parents from killing each other.”
“Good luck with that, they’re both pretty awful ponies,” Quattro mumbled, with a tone that said she'd be okay if they both ended up shot. I almost felt the same way, but I had to try and save them from making a mistake. They were my parents. I loved them. They loved me. That's how it was supposed to work.
But... they were shouting at each other and Mom was emphasizing her points with a firearm. That was the kind of thing a stable, loving family generally didn’t do.
“Mom, please stop,” I said, limping over to her. “You don’t want to shoot Dad, right?”
Mom sighed and lowered the gun.
“You’re right,” she said. “I can’t shoot him. Red, you’re the only pony here that knows enough about computers to hack into the suit remotely and shut it down. I need you.”
She didn’t even look at me, she just pointed the gun in my direction.
“But I can shoot our daughter. It would hurt me, a lot, but if that’s what it takes to get you to take me seriously, I will put a bullet in her skull right now,” Mom continued.
“Uh…” I swallowed, looking down the barrel of that gun. It looked big enough that I could almost see a light at the end of the tunnel.
“You won’t shoot her,” Dad said. “You like her more than I do!”
“She’s infected with SIVA cells,” Mom countered. “I heard my medic talking to her. Right now this gun is a tool of mercy. If I shoot her, she won’t die in screaming agony.”
“Be sensible,” Dad said. “You’re not going to do it. I know you better than that.”
“I’ll do what I think is best. For her and Equestria. If we lower the shield and access the SIVA core I can use it to cure her, and all the other ponies lying in agony in the medical bay!” Mom nodded to the swirling mass. “Time is of the essence, Red. She has even less time than the rest of the Enclave.”
Dad looked at my bandaged hoof. “How… bad does it get?”
“Unlike you, Chamomile has seen what happens to ponies when the infection progresses,” Mom said. “Go ahead, tell him.”
“It’s not so bad now,” I said. Given what I’d seen, how bad it could get, this seemed like nothing. “But from what I saw… it gets bad. There were a few that broke out of sedation in the medical bay and they were completely crazy, like wild animals.”
“The pain does that to them,” Mom added. “I don’t want to put my daughter through that. I want to remember her as a pony I’m proud of, not an insane animal that has to be put down. Please see reason, honey. We can save her!”
I tried to silently step out of the way of the gun, but Mom managed to keep it trained on me without looking, even though she seemed to be paying attention only to Dad.
“I’m not going to help you unleash a horror on Equestria,” Dad said.
“I understand,” Mom said. The gun lowered a little. “You need more motivation.”
It snapped back into place. It was like everything moved in slow motion. I saw her aura tighten on the trigger and the very start of the mechanism moving.
There was a flash of light, brighter than anything I’ve ever seen before or since. Looking back on it, I don’t know if it was the muzzle flash or just an optical illusion from the shock of having a bullet go into my thick, dumb skull.
It wasn’t like being hit with a laser. A laser would have popped my skull like an egg and boiled everything inside. It was a real bullet, and it just made a neat little hole. I didn’t know that yet, of course. I was busy suddenly being on the ground with my ears ringing. I could feel the blood pouring down my face.
I don’t really remember things in order for a while after that. I don’t even know how much was a dream. Have you ever had one of those nightmares where you think you’re awake but you can’t move or talk, like your body just won’t respond? It was just like that. I was lying on the ground and things were happening around me but I was only dimly aware of them. I think some of it was real, but I still don’t know how much.
I remember Dad holding me and telling me it’d be okay, but I remember Quattro doing that, too, like the memory looped and replaced one with the other. Or maybe it was mom, or Emerald Sheen? I remember getting up, blind, stumbling around, and immediately being on the ground again, not having actually moved at all, just imagining it so strongly that it seemed real for a moment.
I remember everything getting colder and colder.
I remember hearing my own breathing and not being able to control it. Just slow, ragged, in and out. Like a machine. If you think breathing manually is bad, not being able to control it is worse, just feeling your body on its own, sucking air in and out, is worse.
I’m pretty sure some of it was real. I know I heard alarms go off. I heard the shield go down. There was so much screaming, and none of it was mine. Shooting. A roar that shook the deck under me. All of that was probably real, given what Quattro told me later.
I think I saw Emerald Sheen and Rain Shadow shooting at something, but I couldn’t tell what from where I was lying on the floor.
Then Dad was standing over me. Everything snapped into focus for a few seconds when his hoof rested on my shoulder. It was like actually feeling something besides the chill reaching into my bones grounded me and made it more real.
“I don’t know if this is going to work,” Dad said quietly. I think there were tears in his eyes, which makes me really doubt the memory since I don’t think he’s ever cried before or since that moment.
He held up a piece of blue metal. I was vaguely aware it was part of the powered armor that had been keeping the magical shield running.
“This has some kind of life support built into it. It doesn’t look that different from one of the auto-docs I’ve used, so I think I can get it running, but… the last pony who wore this suit is gone, and I don’t know if everything still works, or if there are enough supplies to do anything, or what that infection in your hoof is going to do…”
Dad swallowed, looking down at me.
“I’m sorry. This is all I can do for you. I can’t stay to watch over you because this whole place could collapse at any moment, but if I move you too much, there’s no telling how much damage it’ll do, and you’re…”
He stopped himself.
“You’re a tough mare, Chamomile. You can pull through, but you have to fight! Don’t give up.”
The world shook like a skyquake during a thunderstorm. Dad almost fell to the deck.
“Don’t ever tell anypony this, but I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for you. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better father.”
He picked up the armor’s helmet, taking something ivory-colored and distinctly skull-shaped from inside, putting it down where I couldn’t see with the care he showed to everything ancient.
Dad lowered the helmet towards me, and it got closer and closer until it eclipsed everything else in my vision.
But for me, everything was getting further and further away. I was drifting. I felt detached, and the longer the nightmare went on the more it faded to black, like I was going blind even in my mind’s eye. The ringing in my ears was louder than any of the voices around me, and I wasn’t able to hear my breathing anymore.
It was black and silent.
I’ve heard a lot of ponies guess at what happens after you die. A lot of them think you go on to the Elysian Fields. A couple older ponies told me once that Celestia gathered up your soul and judged you. One pony told me we just forget everything and wake up somewhere else in the wasteland because we’re already in Tartarus and don’t know it.
I don’t know how long I was actually dead for. It had to be a minute or two, but it was timeless like a really good, deep sleep is.
And like most sleep, I dreamed.
I sat back in the squeaky chair, moving back and forth just a little and letting it make noise because I knew it would annoy my brother. It was just the three of us in the wood-paneled conference room, which almost made it feel like the early days all over again, when it was just us running things out of a garage.
BrayTech was a lot bigger now, and we had bigger plans. The diagrams of proposed city-sized airships hanging on the walls around us, covered in notes and sketched corrections, showed just how big our ambitions could be.
“All these advances and office chairs still make noise,” I said. “ How many centuries will have to pass before ponies defeat the scourge of chairs that sound like farts when you sit in them?”
“Oh, that’s the chair?” Karma asked, looking up from his portable terminal in mock surprise. My brother was almost my twin, except for the obvious differences and a year between us. “I thought it was taco day in the cafeteria again.”
I stuck out my tongue at my brother and blew a raspberry at him.
“Don’t fight, you two,” Dad rumbled from his side of the table. He’d put a metal box down on the table and had been poking at his terminal, setting something up and making us wait for him. “So, take a look at this.”
He put a wide plastic dish on the table. There was a pile of dust in the middle that had a weird oily glimmer to it, like it was shavings from a machine shop covered in a thin layer of oil.
“What is it?” Karma asked.
“It’s something new,” Dad said. “It’s still in prototype stages but…” He tapped a key on his terminal, and the dust moved. The loose pile came together, snapping together like tiny magnets into a perfect cube.
“Oh hey,” I said, leaning forward. “How does that work?”
Dad smiled. “I want to hear guesses first.”
“You’re transmitting something from the terminal,” I said. “So… maybe the material responds to a magical field?”
Karma nodded. “Like iron shavings responding to a magnet. It’d be hard to make it form a cube, though.”
“It would be hard to shape the field into a cube,” I agreed. “But if there were a bunch of different alloys, or maybe a smart metal that returns to its original shape? Cast a cube, then grind it into dust, then the field reforms it.”
“Here’s another clue,” Dad said. He tapped another button, and the cube turned into a sphere.
I shook my head. “Okay, that’s not just snapping to one shape, then…”
Dad smiled widely and keyed the button again, and the sphere turned into a crude sculpture of an airship. Not just any airship, but an Exodus Ark, just like the ones whose plans were papering the walls.
“It’s programmable matter?” Karma asked.
“Better! We’re still working out the kinks, but it’s actually countless tiny machines, each one the size of a mote of dust. They’re self-improving, self-replicating, and self-repairing. We’ve got more in the lab, since they make themselves. This is the answer to our workforce problems. A whole self-building factory the Ministry Mares won’t even know about.”
“We’d need a lot to build a whole ark,” I said. “And I don’t know if I’d trust an airship that might come apart around me because it decides to turn into lunchboxes or My Little Princess dolls.”
“The SIVA cells won’t make up the actual structure,” Dad said. “That would be like making walls out of contractors. They’ll take raw materials and build up a scaffolding. By manufacturing at a nano-scale we can even make some materials we wouldn’t be able to otherwise.”
“You mean we might finally be able to use some of the tech the boss-mare is always talking about?” I asked.
“Hey, she’s the reason we have portable terminals instead of those big clunkers they’re using everywhere else,” Karma reminded me.
“We’ll need to start prototyping structural members,” Dad said. “I want to try foamed aluminium alloys and carbon fiber. Get me some numbers while I’m away, okay?”
“Going to visit the other side, huh?” Karma asked.
“Boss-mare wants to talk about the backup plan,” Dad said. “She’s worried we might not have time for it. If we don’t have enough warning, or the timing is just way off…”
“If we can get the arks built, we won’t need a backup,” I said. “We’ll get you those numbers, Dad.”
He nodded, and I looked back at the little model Ark made out of pure SIVA, glittering in the overhead lights. It looked like the future.
It was the first time I’d had somepony else’s dream.
It wasn’t the first time, even in this story, that I woke up with a terrible headache. This was worse than any hangover I’d ever had before. A big part of me just wanted to roll over and die. Again. Deep down inside me there was this feeling I can’t explain, an awful wrongness that I couldn’t shake.
“Hey. Eyes up, chief,” said a voice in my ear.
My eyes snapped open. Breathing felt wrong, like it was through a filter. My vision was narrowed. There were glowing squares right in front of me and it took a long few moments to get my eyes to focus on them. They were half-transparent boxes of text and numbers.
I touched my face gingerly with my good hoof, and felt the helmet that had been shoved onto my head.
“What happened?” I groaned.
“Oh hey, talking! Good sign,” said the voice. A few of the windows vanished, and I looked around, trying to spot who was speaking. The voice was familiar. I couldn’t see anypony around. What I did see was… less encouraging. I was still in the SIVA chamber, there was a lot of blood on the floor, I was pretty sure a good amount of it was mine, and the place looked like a dragon had been tearing it apart.
I tried to stand, and a wave of dizziness sent me back to the floor.
“Careful,” the voice said. “You were dead for a little while, so this might all be a little confusing. I don’t know how much you remember about the last few minutes.”
“I remember getting shot,” I mumbled. Even turning my head was difficult, and I instinctively touched the brow of the helmet where I’d been injured.
“That’s really good,” the voice said. “You’ve got some of the important details!”
“Who are you?” I asked. “Where are you?”
“I’m a ghost,” they said. “I’d love to explain everything in detail, but we’re going to have to do it on the move. This place isn’t safe.”
We were alone, as far as I could tell. I was about to ask her what she meant, and the floor rumbled under me. I felt the whole room tilt, just a tiny fraction. Just settling a degree or two on its foundations. Foundations that were an active volcano.
No kidding, not safe.
“What’s your name?” I asked, feeling like I half-knew the answer. That voice was too familiar.
“Call me Destiny.”