//------------------------------// // The Great Work // Story: The Unicorn in the Tower // by Cynewulf //------------------------------// “The shadow of that hyddeous strength Sax myle and more it is of length.” –Ane Dialog by Sir David Lindsay Twilight touched the glass. It was cold to the touch, but she didn’t mind. Beyond it, the Tower glowed with life. It wasn’t life by the estimation of others, even of her own colleagues, but to her it was a kind of life.  It was late. It was often late, when she finally left the lab. Some said she was a workaholic. A few unkind sorts had speculated that the chilly laboratory with its harsh computer lights and muffled isolation were a better alternative to what must be a barren and lonely home. In truth, her quarters were spartan but comfortable. No, she stayed because when everyone had left, and her weary mind did not have to contend with idle chatter and workflows, she could just watch the Tower. She could just contemplate it and its complexity and singularity. Twilight had loved science in its myriad forms since she was a girl. The cool order of math righting the sprawling chaos of reality, the scalpel’s edge of biology exploring the secrets of the flesh, physics and chemistry wrestling with matter itself. But at some point in her teens Twilight Sparkle had started in on computers, and had never quite extricated herself. In a way, the idea of the perfect machine, something that could reach out and synthesize the sciences, each going their own way, had come to dominate her life. Coding was not enough. Working cushy tech jobs for wunderkinds and predatory venture capitalists had not been enough. The challenges of securing vaults of wealth and forbidden knowledge had bored her. Algorithms slithered to life at her finger tips and learned, and in the end they wore thin.  No, the Tower was not like anything she had done before. It was better than everything else. She felt about the Tower what some might believe about God. Twilight withdrew her hand and touched her cheek briefly to feel the surprising cold.  She wanted to say something to it. She always did, when she was alone. And every time she warred against the sentimental foolishness of it. Speaking through glass this thick to a machine that, however she revered it, did not even have ears to hear? She was no longer that lonely sort of child. But every time she spoke anyway. “Goodnight. I’ll be back tomorrow.” The days blurred together. Royal funding had been increased as Twilight’s team put in truly horrific hours working on every line of code so long and so arcane that it warped the mind just a bit to think of the scope. More technicians were brought on, and other teams formed to take on new aspects of their impossible task. The Problem of the Tower, as they all called it, was like a branching web. Every answer, every solution, spawned two new questions and a dozen new problems. The Tower was epistemic quicksand. It swallowed you. It wasn’t the complexity that staggered, sometimes, as much as it was the simplistic nature of it all. A kind of retroactive realization that of course, that it could have been no other way. The pressures mounted, but the sheer momentum of a project of this scale, with this capacity, began to express itself as if it were alive. And maybe it was. Twilight Sparkle found most attempts to define life and “being alive” to be lacking in rigor.  She stood solemnly in the Princess’ antechamber, quiet as a statue. Like a statue, her eyes did not follow the servants and officials that filed through like ant-pilgrims. To the Princess, away on her orders, back for a report, off with new instructions. She was no different, she supposed. Only that she did not go back and forth. She waited and waited. Twilight did not mind waiting. Others imagined that she despised being pulled from her cavernous labs and projects, but they would be sorely mistaken. Twilight did not mind in the slightest. Some time around her first successful spell, Twilight had grasped that valuable lesson that Starswirl had struggled to teach his apprentice, Clover. That the onrushing years do not require one to panic over their sakes. Some things were done quickly, required haste and precision. But some things required only that you keep returning. Some accomplishments were not quick races, but marathons.  So she ate the shortbreads brought on a gilded platter and drank half a gallon of tea brewed by the Princess’ lady in waiting, and she placed a small cube of arcanite upon the table and let her magic toy with it. Her hands glowed with energy, but there was none of the flair of a true spell. Starswirl’s one hundred forty-seven variations kept her occupied. The box twisted and melted and re-arranged itself, following the silent whims of her will. The forms of the variations were imprinted on her memory by more than repetition, though they were also secure in that way; magic had burned these things into her mind. Parts of her selfhood had been rewritten with a hundred and forty-seven otherwise meaningless configurations of matter and energy down to the tiniest detail. The spells she had specialized in were all seared into her mind. The careful, precise, almost spider-like lattice-constructed matrix of calculation and incantation that allowed her to imbue metal with living energy was more real to her than most of her birthdays. Variation eighty nine was more real to her, more foundational to her sense of reality and self than her mother’s smell or her father’s whiskered, unshaven face. A woman walked by, and by happy accident Twilight caught a look at her. Her dark hair, obviously dyed, was coiffed in a way Twilight found charmingly archaic. It shone, quite literally it pulsed—discrete packets of blue-violet light travelled subtly along the strands of her hair.   Augments? Twilight knew knew little about that. Her skin was dark, and her eyes were violet mysteries. She was dressed so… strangely. Anachronistically, like a woman out of time. Twilight blinked, and she was already almost gone, heading towards the door. Twilight looked away, feeling a bit foolish for having even watched. Eventually the traffic slowed and then Twilight was sent for. She pocketed her cube and walked the ornate hallways until the lady in waiting left her at the door to Princess Celestia’s Imperial Solarium. She entered, and found Celestia rising from her desk with a smile that shone like unfiltered sunlight. It was blinding, and beautiful, and unapproachable, and it shone directly on her.  “Twilight! My most accomplished student, I’m happy to see you again. I hope your wait wasn’t burdensome.” “Not at all,” Twilight answered easily. “I had a practice cube with me.” “I’m not surprised. I hadn’t realized you could imprint and then one day you casually refer to a feat your elders did relatively seldomly! You were so young!” Celestia smiled, and it was such an honest and earnest smile that it almost seemed to obliviate the very notion of insincerity. Some said that Twilight Sparkle had lived in the sun’s scrutiny so long that it had made her into a driven woman, desperate for her ruler’s continued favor. In truth, Twilight would say that the Sun had burned her just by being so bright, but it had cleaned away the dross.  Not to say that Celestia thought about any of their long relationship in such a way. What she thought was always somewhat obscured. Twilight appreciated the irony. “I’ve heard good things, but I suppose I’ll be reading more when you’ve given your report.” Twilight nodded and with a bit of magic pulled another cube from her pockets. “I’ve encoded my report in the bindings. It’s based on—” “Variation one-sixteen, yes.” Celestia chuckled. “Clever, and efficient. I’ve only to invert the process and it’ll arrange itself tidily in an epistemic matrix I can commit to paper or to memory.” Twilight smiled back, and it was so easy and comfortable that it would have startled her coworkers. “I knew you’d appreciate it. I wanted to thank you for your notes to the Royal Budgetary Committee.” “I spoke only the truth. Your project is of utmost importance, and you are a level headed and reasonable woman.” “And that if I needed that much treasure to keep the warchest full, I wasn’t overshooting it,” Twilight finished, using her teacher’s words. “Thank you. I had a whole presentation prepared, but I was dreading the ordeal.” “Competence does not equal comfort. I made sure you would be able to stand up for yourself in such a place, but I would never think to make you do so when it was not strictly necessary.” Her smile shifted into something a bit more sardonic. “I am not sure I would do it myself, if I could find some hapless fool to offer as a sacrifice in my stead.” “I’m sure that Raven or Junebug would be happy to do most of your consultations for you, Your Highness,” Twilight offered as she took a seat. Celestia tapped her desk intercom and called for tea for two. Twilight did not mention she had already had tea for one twice over, because it mattered much less than the very real relief on the Princess’ face as she carefully let down her work persona. “Oh, yes, they would be willing. Far too willing, and far too eager for their own good. But I would be betraying their grandmothers before them if I sent their successors off to such a grisly fate one time too many. Corva practically martyred herself corralling the Landsraad, and I was there for most of it!” Tea arrived, and Twilight relished the chance to talk candidly with someone who did not require her to be one way or another. She needed this, and she knew it. She needed to be seen by someone actually looking for her.  She still talked about work, but not about her report. Celestia had been present for the birth of modern meta-magical technology. She had shepherded the endeavors that had laid the groundwork for Twilight’s own opus. She couldn’t help but relish it, not just because she had loved Celestia from a young age, but also because there were precious few people in the Solarian Union or beyond who could really, truly talk with her about her work without needing lengthy explanations. Bless them, but her parents were clueless. Any attempt to get her friends up to speed would result in simplifications that would frustrate them and drive her to distraction. But with Celestia she could just talk plainly. No hesitation, with no barrier, Twilight could just, well, blather. She took a moment to catch her breath (and a snack from the nice tray Celestia’s seneschal had brought in with a stack of reports) when Celestia leaned towards her. “I never even imagined it, Twilight. Not until a decade ago. To birth true, genuine intelligence. Not just a man in a Chinese Box, as the Terrans say.” Despite herself, she eyed the paperwork next to the delicious snacks. She’d asked Raven about that once. Why paper? ‘Celestia is an odd bird, Twilight. She just… does things. Sometimes she gets stuck on something along the way and never, ever changes. She stuck onto writing a very specific way some time in the Feudal Era and now she’s helpless without a quill. We’ve just worked around it for centuries. It works.’ “I’m not sure even I’m imagining it, Celestia,” Twilight replied, taking a breath. “It's hard to look at, hard to think about too broadly. It’s hard to explain to people what I’m even doing half the time! The more mundane bits, the machine learning… We’ve been toying with that for half a century. We were working out the bugs of teaching machines to learn without making them into racist paperclip optimizers for years, and a lot of what we do is build on that. Sure, sure, but… but the important bits are just…” “Many of our subjects are still adjusting to the ways in which magic and technology have reached synthesis. They know that the wonders work, but not why or how. Magic is a fickle thing. It is tied up in thousands of years of evolution, both social and physical.” “I… I know.” Twilight grimaced. She did know. But it was not real to her. She had not met these people. She did not know what it was like to not understand, had never been outside of the blade of the cutting edge. Canterlot had been a city of magitek since she was a child. Her father had helped design the systems that governed several of the mountain’s edenic arcologies. The womb that bore this revolution had been the one that bore her. “You try to know. And that’s alright.” Celestia touched her hand briefly. “I admire that about you, that you go just the last step further where others don’t dain to tread. It does you credit.” Twilight smiled wanly. “Thank you. It is a bit lonely.” Celestia, who had also smiled, let her face fall. “I know. I am sorry, Twilight. But you are not cut off from people who would be lovely companions. Have you spoken much to Moondancer in the past weeks?” “We spoke twice, as you would reckon it. I know you don’t always count work or games,” Twilight said, trying to brighten her mentor’s worried mood. “But we did start another round of Diplomacy. Glimmer is in on it as well. We’re back to sending long messages.” “Like you did in graduate school? That makes my heart glad, Twilight. I remember those days.” “It wasn’t so long ago.” Celestia was smiling now. It was such a strange smile. If she were a different person, Twilight would have called it vaguely alien. It was not a smile she could match, no matter how hard she tried. No one could look like that.  “When you live as long as I have, my faithful student, every day is a tiny eternity.” The Tower had grown. Team 17 had been monitoring the power levels for a week before they’d acknowledged that Twilight’s suspicions were correct. The power needs of the Tower were going to outstrip their previous infrastructure at an alarming pace when they really powered it up. It wasn’t even fully active yet. In fact, only a portion was active in any meaningful way, and they’d already managed to put more energy into it than went into two arcologies fit for ten thousand people each. She knew it would take even more power to keep it bright and alive. Every piece was already active, active the moment it was constructed, kept eternally at the barest bit of activity. It was all delicate, some of it unstable outside of an aligned magical field. Thaumaturgic engineering kept ephemeral elements only possible through freak accidents from decaying into something else.  She removed her glasses and cleaned them with a small handkerchief which bore the three diamonds that served as the complex’s emblem. Three Sapphires Arcology had been a gracious, if sparsely populated host to the nation's (and perhaps the world’s) most ambitious project. The Tower would not just control the principality’s infrastructure. It would not just direct its machines and shepherd its satellites. No, the Solarian Union would have a soul. A living intelligence so vast and so powerful it would become the polity itself. A machine intelligence so far beyond that of a normal person as to be a kind of god. Everything was connected to it. It connected to everything. The Monists would finally be right. She hummed softly, an old song from her childhood days. She remembered her brother groaning as she sang it over and over, his cartoonish anguish only an encouragement. Shining hadn’t been home in two years. She missed him, but like her parents who had not seen Twilight in months, he was easy to let fade into the middle distance. Family and friends were people one knew, whom one loved, but they need not be nearby. They hovered in the background, like notifications in the corner of her screen. Twilight adjusted her now clean glasses and smiled brightly, openly at the Tower behind the glass. She could see a crew of technicians installing a new cooling unit in section 15, right in front of her. The little lights on their zerograv suits blinked like eyes in the murk. Blink, blink, blink, like curious little sprites. Clever sprites, with skillful little hands, playing at building gods to love them.  Her lab changed. It moved down and down with the pace of the Tower. Funny, that they called it that. She’d started calling it that when it was above ground in the arcology proper, cordoned off in a designated building zone that was never filled. But the scope had expanded. The needs of the project expanded. They cleared out levels below the main habitation level. They cleared out the crawlspaces beneath those. They bored deeper until they had left the arcology behind, tunneling down and down into the mountain. When they finished, they moved her lab. At first they had cut it into the rock anew each time, but Twilight had found this wasteful, and more than that found it hampered their ability to work.  So now her lab moved. It dug its supports in until it was time to descend, and then it walked along the walls in a gyre, round and round and round just like the boring machines below them all.  Another mile by the end of the month. She had assigned Moondancer to make preparations for integrating the Union’s disparate networks. Her friend was in a new place every day, adapting old technology to new. Twilight had not spoken to her in days, but last they had Moondancer had smiled. She had bags under her eyes but she smiled, so Twilight assumed this was good. She would not smile if she did not have cause. What had they spoken about? Twilight couldn’t remember. She thought it might have been Appleton, on the coast, nestled between the Singing Forest and the Gorge of Teeth. Something about spending an extra day making sure the town’s automated mass transit system would communicate well with the Tower. Twilight had asked many questions. Lyra, the one from University, had been hired on to the project. Twilight thought that she had studied music, but had been informed with a smirk that you didn’t technically need to go to school to get the certifications that had made her such a catch. Twilight appreciated this, because it was useful. She had not seen Lyra since last week, however. She wondered what team she was on. She could check. She would not. Glimmer had asked for an extension on her decision regarding her next move in their game of Diplomacy. Twilight recalled with exact clarity her message to the others, but admitted to herself she did not see what ‘a lot going on right now’ had to do with accepting Twilight’s obviously solid offer of alliance. But, it was no matter, Glimmer would come around. The message had been strangely short. She was sure that her friend was very busy. She returned to her work station, which was separated from the others. She needed quiet. She liked the quiet. It was focused. The Tower could regulate the systems of every arcology on Mount Canterhorn now, and handle Canterlot’s relatively complex waste management system. She had been asked to delay connecting the defensive network and the Palace’s own closed computer systems. This was alright. It was strange, but irrelevant.  They were approaching the old limits. The Tower could maintain. It could guide and control. But it was not learning, not by her standards. It’s improvements to efficiency she had discarded largely as simply due to the Tower being an arcane computer. It did not need to rely on the slowness of physicality. That wasn’t creation, it was just a kind of rote perfection. She was not satisfied. The Tower had to do more than learn and encode. It had to do more. It had to think for itself. Without carefully constructed palettes of paints that her engineers provided, it had to paint the sky for itself. Twilight knew it was possible. Any doubt that she’d held had been obliterated long before now, back when there had only been two sections, and they’d successfully managed to have the Tower adaptively alter the environment of Three Sapphires in real time. The test was a simple guessing game, oddly enough. Anticipating human needs had been part of the project’s core goals, and they had wanted to gauge what they had accomplished. Twilight had been thinking about the day she saw Princess Celestia wrest the sun from its course, the Summer Sun Celebration, a memory so central to her that not even the variations could write themselves into it. She laid out in the grass of Three Sapphires, and waited. And the arcology’s artificial sun had shone just for her, and the wind had blown her hair back and forth infuriatingly, just like that day. The grass had been gold in the unnatural light, just as it had when her teacher had held the sun. It was perfect in every way, and she had not said a single word about any of it.  But it could do more. Guessing what people wanted was only the first step. Twilight was not lonely. She had friends, and she cared for them. They were all very busy. They all had a lot of work, and so did she. Of course she did. The Tower grew and grew. Her last report to Princess Celestia had been so extensive that the Princess had confessed that she wasn’t sure if she possessed the force of will to read it all. Twilight knew that she possessed this in abundance. Celestia did not tire. Ponies tired, but the Sun was never tired. It never lagged in the sky. What she actually meant was ‘Twilight, you are letting yourself get carried away’ which was both true and irrelevant.  She was always doing that, not saying the actual thing she was saying. Celestia was like a puzzle box. Or rather, the social tact that she employed was like a puzzle box. Within it, when she shook it, you could hear the ringing of some curiosity worth pursuit. But the damned thing had to be difficult and hard to read and so very smugly closed shut. It couldn’t just come with instructions, no, that was far too easy, she’d go soft, no it needed to take a thousand steps. Celestia across the table from her, resting her chin on her hands. The Sun glowed in her eyes. “Twilight, how have you been feeling?” “In what way?” “That’s a rather good question. Physically.” Twilight answered mechanically. “I am doing well. My health is being monitored by project personnel, to make sure I don’t suffer from overwork or exhaustion. The project also includes meal plans which are looked over by a nutritionist.” Celestia blinked at her owlishly. “Mentally.” “I do not understand the question, entirely,” Twilight replied after a pause that was perhaps a bit too long. “What does it mean?” “I’m afraid I don’t follow.” “When people ask that. Sorry. Ignore me. I am doing well. I am happy with the work we are doing. I am a little melancholy sometimes. I wish my friends all worked in the same lab as me. I’ve been sleeping well but worry about fatigue. I eat well but miss my old favorites because they’re considered unhealthy. I drink too much coffee but have refused any attempt to lessen this. I have started trying new teas. I—” “Twilight, dear, I think I understand.” Twilight shut her mouth. “You’re lonely down there.” Twilight was not lonely. “Yes,” she said and deflated all at once. “Yes, I am. I am lonely. My team does not talk to me much, even when we are working. I did make that more difficult. I do not really have a team anymore. They just share a space with me.” “Twilight, have you considered a short rest from work? Perhaps a visit to your parents?” Twilight nodded. Laying on the artificial beach, drenched in artificially wholesome sun, Twilight Sparkle let her dozing father sleep and tried to feel every single grain of sand. She tried to be aware of them individually. This failed. That was alright. There were others, here and there, artificial projections created by the system to simulate a beach full of happy vacationers. It was charming, in its way. One of them walked by, a few meters off, and Twilight’s eyes rolled to meet her. She blinked in the blazing digital light, confused for a moment. A woman with perfectly coiffed hair, in of all things a purple one piece bathing suit straight out of a fashion catalogue from before her mother was even born. Who was—? Her mother was talking. “What about Moondancer? What is she up to these days?” Twilight thought about sand slipping through her fingers. Clinging to her thighs. Getting lost in her clothes. Getting into her eyes, rubbing away strange sights with their friction. “She’s working abroad,” was her answer. “I think she’s at the border with the Concordat, upgrading the infrastructure of the monorails.” “That sounds like quite a job! Did she ever marry that boy?” “Moondancer is a lesbian.” Her mother laughed. “Oh! Right, right. I forgot. What a thing!” Yes, it was a thing. “She thought she might marry Trefoil a year ago but it didn’t work out. I don’t know why.” “Well, that’s just how it is, sometimes, dear. Sometimes it just doesn’t all shake up like we plan it!” The one hundred and eleventh Starswirl variation was overwritten on a memory from her teens. Celestia had assigned her the task of producing a self-contained terminal, with its own magical power source. Twilight had arrived in her office with a device far more powerful than her teacher had expected. She could not remember anything said. She remembered Celestia’s smile, but her lips were traced with the thaumic lines of the variation.  Twilight wondered, sometimes, what the appropriate response to the costs of magic were. To learn something so thoroughly that you overwrote yourself, or wrote yourself into a perfect imitation of that thing. She had always felt like it was a sort of process of approximation, as if she was always becoming something, never quite getting there. But, at the same time, she did miss having that memory. Sometimes. Or wished it had become interlaced with something a bit more practically useful than a practice variation which produced a hazy purple light. The tower was also in the process of Becoming, of approximating itself. So was the network which would form Her body throughout the polity. Moondancer had connected the last of the transportation infrastructure only yesterday. The network’s first phase would be complete so very soon. She accepted another report from one of the few members of her team still awake. Twilight kept late hours. Sometimes people even joined her. Her. She retraced her steps and realized she had begun to think of the tower as a She. When had that happened? Besides being a bit presumptuous, it was so odd and unnecessary. “Ma’am?” Twilight blinked. Oh. That person was still there. “Yes? Sorry, my thoughts wandered.” “We’re a bit concerned. I mean… I know you wanted to go over the latest additions with a fine tooth comb, but myself and Gwyndolin and Zephyr are all well rested and I actually did my dissertation on, ah…” Twilight sighed. She glanced at the name tag on the woman’s chest and burned quietly with shame that she needed to. “Trade Winds, do I appear unable to work?” “I, ah.” Trade Winds fidgeted. Twilight looked into her sea-green eyes and frowned.  “That isn’t a trick question. I’m quite serious. It would be detrimental to the project if I collapsed mid-step, after all.” She paused briefly. “It would also make me a burden to all of you,” she added, “And I would like to avoid that. I am not blind. I know I can become absorbed in work. If you say that I look ‘worn out’ then I will trust you.” Trade Winds took a deep breath. “Sorry, I’m just kind of, I don’t know. You look exhausted, ma’am. Bags under your eyes and pale. Also, I’m really sorry, but we all noticed earlier. The crying.” The what? Trade Winds continued. “We’ve talked, and we made absolutely sure that it would be alright, but with what’s on the agenda tonight we can definitely stay on track without you being here. If you needed to not be here. I’m sorry, we don’t want to pry, we just wanted—” “To give me the option,” Twilight finished, her voice flat. “I see. Thank you, Trade Winds. You may go. I think that I’ll just finish up a few things here before I clock out for the evening.” Her subordinate left in a hurry. Twilight Sparkle blinked at her screen and then flicked on the built-in camera to look at herself. Oh. Right. Light. “Lights at one hundred percent, please.” Twilight struggled to keep her eyes open. How long had it been since she had walked about in real daylight, or anything approaching it? Too long, probably. Her face looked awful. She did not dispute that. Her hair was unkempt and noticeably greasy from a distance, her eyes were tinged with snaking red blood vessels showing through the white, bags forming under her eyes, everything pale… Denying that she was running on empty would have been pointless.  When had she been crying? She cast back through the last few hours for a point where the night shift would have even seen her at all, and could only think of her break earlier, when they filtered in and the second shift team had left. Twilight had been standing before the window, turning to greet the new arrivals for only a moment. Why would she have been…? Denying she was tired was pointless, but wildly speculating also seemed pointless. She was tired. Let it drop. Weariness produced abnormal reactions in people, it was a known phenomenon, and she didn’t need to interrogate that any further.   Sorcerers dreamed, but a mage often does not. As so many things did, it boiled down to methodology. What one did was so often a matter more of how one did things, at least according to Twilight. Sorcerors were bound by their methodology, married to their understanding of magic and the universe which magic interacted with through a thick veil of tradition and fable. Magic had worked for them for centuries in unknowable and untameable ways. One must be strong to control it, one must be pure of heart and mind. Magic spoke to and for the Worthy who could begin to comprehend it. Mages knew that magic was a part of the universe. Separate from what conventionally had been called nature, yes, but nature was such a mutable concept. Nature was what Was, and it brokered no treaty with fantasy. Mages plumbed the universe for its secrets, wrested them from the claws of ignorance. Perhaps, they suggested, it may not be a matter of transcendent worth whom magic chooses, and perhaps, maybe, it was not for their superb qualities that the Worthy were always of very rigidly-defined bloodlines. Twilight was a mage, and she grasped the tools of reshaping reality by study and by her mind’s expansion and change, and so she did not dream as others dreamed. She bathed in the light of the patterns which had first broken in her virgin consciousness, when magic had been a romantic aspiration. So why was she dreaming? Twilight felt her face. It felt like nothing. She slapped her cheek. She slapped it again, harder, teeth already gritting instinctively from the pain which did not come. But she felt the breeze come through the window, and whirled to meet it. This was her old dorm room. She’d only been in it a year, but it was a fond memory. Without rising, she knew that outside the window would be a lovely view of the Golden Wheat Memorial Fountain and the verdant grass cordoned into sections by paths. The Clover Thaumic Sciences building standing across the way, red tiles over beige stucco. The birds chirped. She remembered the birds. They perched in the branches of the willows, and a choir of them always chose the restful willow outside the entrance to the dormitory.  Twilight ran over the possibilities quickly, as she’d been trained to in unfamiliar circumstances. “Why am I here?” Nothing. “Is anyone else here who is willing to speak with me directly?” Nothing.  She took a deep breath and stood. The chair scraped along the old wood floor. It was the same as it had been all that time ago. She refused to accept that the ability to dream had just occurred to her again. This was obviously some sort of construct, presumably magical but possibly mundane, intended to… what, exactly? Trap her? Get her to reveal her secrets? The Union had no enemies, not really, and not anymore. None with the capacity to get at her in this way. It hadn’t fought a war in decades, and its former foes had long since joined it or established extensive ties.  Twilight Sparkle walked to the window and peered out, and she saw what she’d expected. It was sometime in the early afternoon, in that sweet window of time before the day heated up, when the sun was slipping from its apex, when the shadows were returning and the willow tree by the dormitory was calling her name. Had the sun been this bright? Probably. She shielded her eyes. The quad was empty, which was the only detail that felt off. This was around the time it was most full, milling with students let out of morning classes. But there was no one at all. No, there was someone. She came walking up the path, hands clutching a bundle of books held against her chest. Twilight gripped the window sill and scowled. She watched this lone interloper like a hawk committing prey to memory.  Blue-violet hair pulsing with electrical light, dark violet eyes like mysteries, skin a rich dark like dusk-touched wine, steps measured and sure. The woman from Celestia’s sitting room and the beach. She was sure of it. Twilight had no doubts at all. No doubts but one, and a very disturbing one at that. If she had seen this woman before, if she were here now, could it have all been a dream? Had they constructed her some sort of sleeping prison? Wouldn’t it make sense, to work on an important task that was important but seemingly never finished? Twilight shook. She backed away from the window, practically leaped away from it. Protests still spilling out of her that it couldn’t be true, she searched for somewhere else to flee, to avoid this woman—  Twilight tried not to wince as the doctor’s light shone into her eyes. She’d woken in a haze of confusion, calling Celestia at five in the morning for help. The Union’s top nueroscientist owed Celestia a few personal favors, and so by six he’d had Twilight an appointment in a little office with a friend of his who operated in one of the suburbs below High Canterlot. His tests had all been mundane and routine. Twilight tried not to be frustrated about this. Something was wrong with her, but not that sort of thing. They assumed she’d suffered some kind of stress-related hallucination or meltdown and it was grating. She wasn’t an idiot. She knew her limits. She knew that she’d crossed those limits in the past, but that didn’t make her less competent, and right now… It was just a waste of time, in the end. As the doctor left again, she let herself scowl at his closing door. Idiots. This was serious interference. Mind-magic was difficult and often had to be done at short range. Any attempt to access her sleeping consciousness through her augmented eyes would have left some sort of sign of damage or tampering. When they let her go she ignored her teacher’s instructions to call. She ignored her mother’s call. She went back to her now rather abandoned quarters in the main Three Sapphires habitat and with the lights at a safe dimness, she went through the stomach-churning and painful process of examining each augmented eye in turn.  Few knew she’d been augmented. How could they know? Twilight had had access to some of the best surgeons in the Union, and they’d done a stellar job of making sure it all looked natural. She could even adjust how “human” her eyesight was, in the words of one of the technicians. The glasses weren’t necessary, but she could make them so. It had been kept her from losing her sight.  But there’d been nothing. They were fine. Everything was fine. She wanted to scream. Because it wasn’t fine. Didn’t they see that?  Twilight gripped her small omni-tool until her knuckles were white. How could they? She couldn’t even find traces of tampering! But you didn’t just regain things like dreaming! She’d not seen a single line of text, not a single memorized diagram, not even a trace of one of the variations. They’d overwritten everything else! They’d overwritten her childhood memories, her birthdays, her first drink, the Summer Sun Celebration, graduation, everything! But not this! And now it had that woman in it, that stranger! There was nothing to be done, was there?  That was a horrible thought. If she had no recourse, then… then what? Then nothing. Or, really, then anything. Someone could just hijack her whenever they wished. Twilight Sparkle held out a hand and looked at it in the low light. It still hurt. She’d been so upset and careless earlier that she’d slammed her hand and the first mug of tea into the computer desk when she’d sat down. That had been before the self-diagnostic. When she’d thought she could just calm down and think about things rationally, and figure out what had gone wrong with her hardware. But nothing had gone wrong. Her augments, eyes and everything, were running at full. They were optimal.  She was sub-optimal. She was the problem. She’d have to sleep again, eventually. At some point. But she didn’t want to. She feared it. Next time, she’d be there, and so would the figure. What would she say? What would she want? What could Twilight possibly have to give her?  She groaned softly. “Why now?”