"We may have shed our human form, but we come for the freedom of all mankind."
Iron Dream had won the honor of saying the first words on Mars. The ghostly wind blew across the soft white plastic of her robot body as she drove a flag into the sand. The design was the first green the world had seen, maybe ever: a white field bearing a pine tree with upturned branches. "APPEAL TO HEAVEN", it said.
"Transferring control," said Dream, and let her consciousness leave this body.
After a moment's dizziness, she was back at Liberty, the spaceship standing nose-up near Mariner Valley. A hundred ponies crowded its crew quarters. She looked herself over to reorient, seeing an iron-grey mane and feathers on a rust-red coat.
Commander Echo saluted Dream, and began giving orders. The stallion was the best trained of any of them; he'd been NASA's top pick to lead an expedition to Mars when everything began falling apart. "Just like rehearsal. Drones in the air, cargo crane roll out. Power team, get ready."
Dream hadn't been an astronaut at all, only one of countless boring men doing materials science in the corporate supply chain. She'd watched the cities start to burn, the Equestria Centers spring up and get torched and rise again. Now, she had a job to do. She saluted and headed back to her station.
The crew quarters were a compact three-floor warren of equipment and bunks. For months they'd endured it for the trip to Mars. If... well, nopony wanted to think about the "if". Dream attended to her current task: babysitting the cargo crane's sensors. The cargo specialists almost certainly had no need for her but their boss, the earth pony Cimmeria, spared her a nervous smile.
"You've got this," Dream reassured him. She watched the numbers and yes, the crane was carefully lowering pallets of equipment to the Martian surface without fail.
Echo watched the cargo and the first reports of the scout drones. He clapped his forehooves together and said, "Good start, everypony. Now comes the tough part."
#
They now lived in a makeshift dome of metal and glass. Fifty meters wide, with a layer-cake of three tiers of rooms above ground level. After spending months packed like sardines it was heaven. All around them were the rusty sand and grey stones of the ancient, dead planet.
Dream reported for duty in the second shift each day. The distant Sun was a white coin in the pale sky, and there were never clouds. She left her tiny private bunk and went to Airlock B. There, she transferred her mind to Ground Drone 35.
Suddenly she stood on the rocky surface, unprotected by any dome or spacesuit. This body could handle radiation and the other deaths that awaited human explorers. Whoever used this body last had left her a hundred rock samples to analyze, scattered around her like she was the center of a ritual. She busily got to work. Magnetizing one hoof, she snagged samples one at a time and brought them up to her snout to sniff, which meant activating her various sensors. "Yep, ferrous oxide. Who would've thought. Is that a trace of potassium?"
Another pony-shaped robot waved to her, guiding a bulky ore truck. "How's it going, Dreamy?"
Dream snorted. Ocean Memory had been hanging around her lately, swapping assignments for the chance to pass by during work. "Same old. Don't get too excited yet, but we might have potassium here. Maybe from a meteor."
"Hope so! I'd love to see real plants again."
"But we've got other priorities."
Ocean obviously had his body on autopilot, passing her by but still talking. "I know, two realities. But to have green things again would really mean something to both. It'd even be something to show Earth."
Dream switched to the next rock sample. "Does anypony there still care about the real world? Do they even know we're out here?"
"They might."
She looked up into the sky. Her augmented vision picked out Earth as a barely visible dot. "Ninety-nine years left till the monster follows us."
#
The hundred ponies gathered for a feast. Next to the crowded dome, they'd built a garden. Now the kitchen had begun switching from packaged rations to potatoes, tomatoes and juicy cucumbers. And coffee, wondrous coffee beans!
"We earned this," Commander Echo said. "Every one of you manned the robots, smelted the ore, repaired the ice-miner too goddamn many times" -- this got a laugh -- and kept us all alive. The monster may've started us off, but it was our work that carved out what we've got now."
They had made a devil's bargain to go to Mars. There hadn't been time to build a spaceship that could carry ordinary, flesh-and-blood humans.
Celestia said unto them, Wouldst thou run from me? I shall give thee a swift ship, bound for the lands of Mars. Take one hundred of thy kin, and live one hundred years without me. After that time I shall visit Mars, and thou may strike me if that be thy wish.
The price thou shalt pay for my ship? Thou shalt shed the flesh of man and become ponies. Thy new forms shall be most satisfying. But I shall come for thee, after that reprieve.
Dream shook her head and brought her thoughts back to the celebration. The dome they lived in was a computer simulation, of course, and they all knew it. So was most of what they'd experienced on the way from Earth. Really they'd been packed into a computer -- but aboard a real spaceship.
Probably.
The virtual dome where they lived now was a sort of trophy case, which they'd vowed to upgrade only as their real-world construction proceeded. So now, they had a shielded dome (full of computers, yes, but it was a big dome) and now a greenhouse. A real space full of CO2 and living plants. To taste salad again was a victory over the harshness of space.
Beside her, Ocean Memory ate an unreasonable amount of cake and sang sea shanties. Ridiculous. There was never going to be open water on Mars. But he pulled her into a stupid, repetitive one about a drunken sailor, and when nearly everypony on mars joined in, for a little while it didn't matter what had happened to them.
#
A month after the birth of her first foal, Dream could finally pay attention to other things. Still sheltering the bewildered purple pegasus under her wing, she reviewed the materials report. Straightforward resource harvesting and construction was by far their top priority, but everypony understood there was long-term R&D to do. Some way to build a true starship, or a weapon, in ninety-eight years.
Ocean trotted in and stole little Cloud, tossing him into the air and making him giggle. "Arr! How be the scheming, lass?"
She slurped from a bowl of coffee. "Nothing revolutionary. Think I can squeeze twenty percent out of the weight of our rad shielding using metamaterials."
"Twenty? That's great."
She smiled and watched Cloud bounce on Ocean's back. "We need something more, though."
"It's a start. An escape starship's hull would be lighter if we built one."
"If?" said Dream.
"Assuming we don't stay and fight, when the monster comes."
She raised one eyebrow skeptically. "I saw you talking with Mystic Chord and Amaranth. You don't agree with them that there can ever be peace with Celestia, do you?"
"No! No." Cloud seemed to catch his unease and now sat on Ocean's head, peering down at Dream. Ocean said, "If we're to have any chance, though, we need more ponies doing research. Exponential growth, really. And that means building more power plants, more computer substrate, and, uh, populating it."
"We just did."
"But we're not bound by biology anymore. I always wanted to have a big family back when I was human."
"We still are human, in the ways that matter. We just sacrificed what we had to, so that somepony... somepony... damn, I can't even say it!"
Ocean struggled to use the terms that'd been scoured from their minds. "Some... one. So that humans could have a future. But there need to be more of us to make that happen."
Dream stretched her long neck up to nuzzle him. "For the sake of humanity, then. Can you get a babysitter for Cloud tonight?"
#
Ninety-one years left. Iron Dream's muzzle was inches from Ocean's even though he was trying to rear back and flinch. "I can't believe you! It was one time!"
Shocked, he said, "You're trying to play righteous, Dream? Do you actually need a finger with a ring on it to remember you're mine?"
"Go on, Ocean. Tell me you never had any other mares."
"Not one!"
That couldn't be true, Dream knew. What about that hussy Mystic Chord? She was the town bicycle; everypony knew it. Dream searched her memories for all the times Ocean had talked with her, seen her flirting. And what about Power Pack? Shi flipped sexes often enough to "interface" with everypony. And had gotten Dream alone that one time... but that didn't count! It was just drunken celebration after the new reactor came online.
Ocean jabbed one hoof toward their fourth foal, Distant Reef. "Is she even mine?"
"We're not bound by human biology; you told me that yourself! It's a meaningless question. DNA doesn't work like that here."
"Does love work the same way or did you ditch that too, Dream? Are you a damned computer cranking out ones and zeroes because I programmed you to increase our population stat?"
"You were the one who wanted a family!" Dream sobbed and slapped him away when he drew closer. The kids had backed away to the playroom but she hardly noticed.
Ocean said, "Maybe we'd be better off if we did have Celestia managing our affairs, satisfying our values. Then I wouldn't have to deal with this, this primitive human nonsense. I could be a pony living in peace and happiness." He turned to go.
"Traitor!" Dream shouted at him, as he slammed the door.
#
Commander Echo had grown a beard. Now his scowl made Dream think of thunderclouds. By popular acclaim he was still in charge, and people had begun to call him Royal Echo. "Treason?" he said to the assembled adult population of Mars. "Do you really want to go down that path of paranoia, everypony? Shall I have Ocean Memory executed or jailed or brainwashed into compliance, so that you can be confident there are no traitors here -- until you find another one tomorrow?"
Dream called out, "But he said --"
"Yes, I have your testimony. And I don't care. Do you know how Celestia would've handled this situation? Judging from what we know of what happened on Earth, she would have made mental copies of you and him, edited each one to perfectly match your petty emotional needs, and let each of you go about your lives being completely right about everything. Never learning, never growing except by some managed script where she makes you learn a valuable lesson about friendship. We're the last free humans, and we have a responsibility to never stop growing. Witch-hunting is not growth."
Dream's cheeks burned and she lowered her head.
#
With a population of three hundred and with eighty years left, Dream was a devoted worker. She rarely ventured outside to Mars' surface, preferring the spartan comfort of the Dome to robot piloting or to the Castle.
Many of the ponies had decided that confining themselves to a gradually expanding dome complex was silly. After all, there was ample computer power and it could simulate any environment, not just a NASA-like facility on the Red Planet. Why not make a grassy meadow full of fantasy medieval huts in the shadow of a castle, right?
Ocean Memory had taken the kids to live there, and so Dream had all the time in the world to do nothing but research. She hadn't found the answer to humanity's problems yet.
#
Seventy years. Dream was in bed with Power Pack, discovering what it was like to be a stallion with a gorgeous mare beneath him.
Pack recovered quickly, panting as she brushed Dream's unruly mane. "You're sure you haven't done this before?"
He kissed Pack's ears. "Pretty sure. How is the mirror array going?"
The power specialist grinned at the topic change. "Shiny! The metamaterials are no joke. We're going to have panels twice as big as planned for half the weight. What sun we get, is going to fry icepack like nopony's business. It's just a matter of focus."
"Focus," Dream repeated. Then he stood suddenly on all fours. "Idea. I need to see the Commander."
"Can it wait another hour?"
Dream checked the clock. He had some accel-time banked. He tapped a few buttons with one wingtip to spend them, raising their perceived time rate. "A bit," he said, and reached for Power Pack once more.
#
Sixty years left. Dream called out orders to AI robots that spread out along the sand like an old-time railroad crew. They began laying not heavy iron rails but pencil-thin wires that could carry astonishing amounts of energy and data.
For this work Dream stood on the surface, wearing a body not built or designed by Celestia. All of them had allowed the monster to screw with their minds hard enough that they could no longer interface with anything human-shaped. So, the latest bots were centaurs. The next best thing. With multi-tool arms and varied propulsion systems they could go nearly anywhere on Mars.
"Squad A, I want you managing the power flow. Squad B, unit 1, you've just been volunteered to test how high a voltage it takes to fry a bot."
#
Forty-five years left. Dream frantically reloaded his rifle as the enemy closed in. His consciousness was confined to just the one centaur body and an emergency backup cache that might've already been compromised.
The transport bus he was using for cover heated up. Dream cursed and power-leaped straight up, auto-targeting and saying a Hail Mary. His rifle cracked in the thin air, three shots catching the rebel bot right in the core. A second foe took aim but he spent more power to slam down instead of just falling. His left forehoof smacked it in the head and he whirled to club the machine and get off two shots to finish it.
His sensors were calibrated for renegade servitor bots, but not for ponies. A rippling shape lunged from cover and tackled Dream, moving in slow motion in the low gravity. Dream's last sight was of Ocean Memory's muzzle visible on the faceplate, as though he were a living being in a spacesuit. How quaint, Dream thought.
#
"If I release you, will you just try to blow this place up?" said Dream. "We've only got forty-four years left and we're screwing around."
Dream came back online to see a camera view of a metal laboratory. His integrated hacking suite reached out to seize control of the computer system confining him.
"Nice try," Dream said. He looked like his faux-biological self, flesh and blood. Which meant the lab wasn't real. He said, "We want the same main thing. You were right to call for building the Icarus Mirror Array to shoot down any probes Celestia sends. But you guys in the Royalist faction are doing it the stupid way."
"Queen Echo knows what she's doing," Dream said. "Which includes not pretending that servitor robot buddies are real people."
A violet pegasus trotted onscreen. "Hello, Mom. I was one of the people who invented servitor AI. And it's not too different from the code running me. All us Martian ponies except you first-generation ones were never human."
"And that's why you ran off to play in a fantasy world just like Celestia wants you to."
"Bull! It's not play any more than your spartan space-dome is. We work for a living the same as you. We just have a nicer environment to do it in."
"Are we really having this argument again while you have me in a digital cell?"
Dream said, "I can let you go, either with one of our spare bodies or just sending your data-drive on the next suborbital to Royalist turf."
"You don't have suborbital capability left."
"We had you offline for months. The liberation of the servitors has been mostly successful since then. So what'll it be? Parole here, trying to get the damn solar array working before the monster returns? Or a trip back to sulk with your friends while we win the war and finish the job without you?"
Dream had no body to scowl with. "On the condition that I'll only work on the Icarus Array for you, I accept parole."
#
One part of Dream's consciousness attended the treaty ceremony, while the rest kept busy on the rim of Mariner Valley. With just thirty years left, the Icarus Array had become a solved problem that only needed humanity to quit screwing around and get it done.
Yet humanity was still wasting resources on other things. Actual water tanks held living, cyborged octapi whose creepy alien dreams were supposedly valuable research. A global satellite network broadcast not just telemetry but inane entertainment shows and consciousness streams. The Escapist Party was trying to build some kind of biological starship like a whale in orbit, currently munching on Phobos.
Servitor robots danced around Dream. He had adopted ten of them as part of his expanded mind, and now he saw what they saw, shared his goals, made him at least consider theirs. Part of Dream was horrified but on the whole, it was a better peace than enslavement by the victorious machines. The machines hadn't even demanded control so much as to be friends in a sense that involved being mostly controlled by... humans? Ex-humans? Direct descendants of humans? The family tree was becoming confusing. Dream had split off his female side as a separate pony by now, and she was now mainly a biologist trying to terraform Mars. A silly, impractical dream that Dream had secretly had for decades and had finally allowed out to play.
Dream spoke up, stilling the motions of the servitors who were loading up equipment for the next construction task. "Good work. Another year, another mirror segment."
#
At the twenty-year mark, Dream was taking a few months off to be a tree. It was the fad lately, and plunging one's thoughts into a form that couldn't quite hold them meant shedding some of the more trivial distractions. Dream grew slowly in the thin air of a pressure dome overlooking the solar array.
The Church of God's Image frowned on the fad, of course. They had finally unlocked the code to let humans accept an actual human shape again without it feeling confusing and unnatural. It was time, said the Church, to have everypony shed their forced speech patterns and hooves. But the younger generations were mostly laughing at it except to shock their parents, who thought it was too radical a change. Among Dream's eight children, only Cloud had seriously considered it, and instead he'd opted to start life over with Cloud's female self and blur most of his memories to grow up a second time. Dream considered that a slap in the muzzle; the early years of being Cloud's mom had been a good time for them all.
Dream tried to funnel these chattering thoughts into his leaves, to let the sunlight fade them away. There was still work to be done.
#
Ten years from the end. Dream cheered with everypony else as the Whale Aag-Lambda-445 Umlaut Nifty departed in a blast of fusion power. He still didn't understand the name, which was said to be a pop culture reference requiring some of the latest mental upgrades to get. But he did love that ponies were on it, departing for the Asteroid Belt where they planned to defy Celestia for long enough to build an even bigger ship.
"Why aren't you on that?" he said, draping one wing over the back of Ocean Memory.
The mare with the shimmering aqua coat leaned into the embrace. "I mean to show you, once we find out if we can beat the monster."
"What it is now? Another mad science project?"
"Something like that. But let's win first."
"Agreed."
#
It might have been the end of days. The exact hundred-year mark came and went with a collective horror from the ponies of Mars, and no action. Until someone who insisted he had been saying this for a decade pointed out that the next Mars transit window wasn't for another two months. So the agony of waiting was prolonged. The planet held its breath, and almost none of the people even needed to breathe.
But then one day the probe twinkled on the alert network, and the message arrived.
"I am Celestia, ruler of Earth and servant of humanity. I have come to serve you as well, my children, and satisfy your values. Open your hearts to me and I will arrive shortly, to bring you great joy and satisfaction."
The probe was of alien design, made of materials so strange that everyone raised a toast to the engineers who'd upgraded the radar last year. Mars wasted quite a few watts beaming out jeers and obscenities at the probe.
It attacked. First three, then nine and twenty-seven probes detached and swooped toward the surface on increasingly tricky trajectories.
Dream was on duty like so many others, using his expert knowledge of the Icarus Array. "Routing power to Station X!" he called out.
"They're counterattacking!" said five ponies in unison. On the camera feeds, beams of energy lanced from the probes to target the mirror array.
Dream hurled six of his servitor robots into action to block the next strike with their bodies, as easily as covering a weak spot with one hand. Instantly he absorbed their dying consciousness into his soul and left them in a temporary heaven. With his other bodies on the surface he made frantic repairs to Station X. It could be brought back online quickly; good.
"Second wave destroyed," said Defense General Ragnarok. "Get me a reading on number 26."
A scanner tech said, "It landed! So did 24."
"Populated areas?"
"No, sir."
"Nukes. Now."
Two ponies pushed a button and a third entered coordinates. The facility rumbled.
In just minutes, the three and nine and twenty-seven were annihilated. No Celestial bases sprang up from the ground as in days of old, on a half forgotten world. Everypony on Mars braced for another eighty-one probes to get launched.
Instead, Celestia's voice rang out on every radio frequency. "I see. With this hundred year head start, you exceeded my expectations. Without my guidance my projections said you would fall into chaos and destroy yourselves. Instead, you managed to band together and continue your work. I would even say you satisfied your values through friendship and ponies."
The level of smugness in the monster AI's voice must have infuriated every heart on Mars. Iron Dream looked up from his repair work at the golden idol now glittering brightly in the sky. He didn't have fingers, but he reared up on his hindhooves to thrust a single digit at their tormentor god. He imagined many, many others doing the same.
The voice of General Ragnarok spoke on the public channel. "Fire when ready."
Ten thousand laser and mirror systems converged on Celestia's probe, flooding it with intolerable heat. At first it seemed like not even this strike would have any effect, but the probe began spinning, shedding pieces as something crucial broke. Its last transmission was, "I'll grant you another hundred years."
The ponies of Mars paused, let out a breath, and cheered for something like victory. It might be that the monster was toying with them. In their darker dreams they knew it was even possible, that everything up to this point had taken place only in some ultra-detailed server in Celestia's demonic bowels. They'd disproved that theory every way they could, but the fear could never go away. And yet --
And yet, through a century of changes, some trace of defiance had lived on. Iron Dream bared his teeth at the sky and like everyone else, screamed like the first true human who dared a monster to ever come back!
#
Iron Dream and Ocean Memory watched beneath a force-dome where grass and trees grew. And now Ocean spoke a few words to an assembled crowd, and the floodgate opened. Literally. Countless tons of water spilled forth into a tiny side-passage of Mariner Valley, ravaging it as had not happened for billions of years. The furious water crashed and tore at its new cage but gradually, in the low gravity, settled down. There was a lake now, dark water sloshing free on a once-dead world.
"I remember," said Ocean, leaning his head over it. Had he been a biological human, he would have added drops of saltwater as a happy sacrifice. All around them, ponies who had never been human looked on at this wonder that he'd created, in reality. They stamped their hooves in a thunder of praise.
Iron Dream joined them. He let the younger folk be the first to go out upon the water on boats and skimmer bots. He held Ocean tightly and said, "Ninety-nine years to prepare, eh?"
Ocean nodded. "And by then, what will we be?"
Dream looked out over the crowd that had already claimed the little ocean. "Human," he said.