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Solid Line saw words around her, and the words were reaching out.
The three of them, not counting the cat — Storm never joined them, and that was worrying — flew along the wide passages. They were looking into private rooms with caution, consulting local ponies, and checking terminals for stray data. Solid Line was picking up terminal passwords and opening door locks with a touch of a hoof — the electricity inside listened to her and wanted to please, lining up as needed for her purpose.
Solid Line filled in dialog boxes and forms, barely touching keyboards and projections, because the access codes were always based on patterns, numbers and symbols, and drawing them wrong was as impossible as not taking a deep breath when one sees the ocean for the first time. This did not disturb the peace of security systems — after all, there is no reason for concern when the code is entered correctly and by mutual agreement.
It was by enthusiastic consent in fact — hidden words, drawings and images emerged from the darkness, reached out to her, asked to name them and received what they wanted. Yes, she often had to temporarily change her name, becoming Purity, Dispassion, or Wired Channel, and at the same time adopt their secondary features — typing speed, usual typos, timbre and height of voice — when such features were expected. The station was ready to support her and to forgive minor mistakes. Perhaps somepony on the opposite side would call it cheating, penetration, hacking.
There was no other side though as no one opposed the course of this step-dance game. There were countless words that longed to be read, there were those who should and must read them, and the sky station, leading Solid Line in joyful and unguarded turns of knowledge and understanding as an entity older and more adult, was happy to make turns for either side as necessary for the sake of a common goal. After all, most of the station bore Dispassion's imprint, and Dispassion was Gentle's friend, and, by transitive relation, she was Solid Line's friend too. And Solid Line answered this happiness with her own.
In passing, at Cursory’s request, she checked the health condition of the inhabitants of the station, and ascertained the team leader’s worst suspicions — the stellar iron, which they used as food supplement and for sheathing vital components, protecting themselves from the light of the Moons, was irreversibly deteriorating with time, assuming another allotropic form.
Only once in eight nines of rounds — roughly once in the memory of a generation — came a period when courageous collectors would go into the cosmic void and align their ships with a swarm of dead stars in order to become its temporary companions and return home with plentiful spoils. For the rest of the time their options were limited to extraction of sedimentary deposits on the planet’s surface — and these deposits drained up, being used up faster than they could be replenished with the dust of the swarm.
At the same time the power of the Moons unshielded by the air or the Net grew, slowly and steadily, and rare decreases were not breaking the trend. With it the rate of wear and the severity of the consequences for each defence failure grew too. The end of the balanced state was foreseen by the main station’s leaders square nine of generations ago, so they stockpiled stellar iron in advance. By doing so they were depleting the deposits on the surface and the great swarm at an increased rate. The reserves of the swarm that were appearing endless for the first generation to discover it, now were waning too.
The balance was lost in the very round Solid Line was born, and, without a doubt, she nevertheless rechecked and froze for a split beat in a dance of symbols, graphs and words, paying tribute to the dark beauty of this coincidence.
The local ponies knew this, even if they did not speak about it out loud and did not actively seek salvation, and it became a weight on their souls, depriving them of their inner peace. Therefore, acting for the public good, Exquisite Prescription with a group of his students developed a secret project based on the ‘Pink Petals of the First Snow’ and the allegedly illegal supply chain of this modifier, slightly altered by another group that had never seen either Exquisite or those who saw him. After the change, in addition to notably strengthened long-term euphoria, it also began to induce mild but irresistible addiction.
In the long term — Purity, the false alicorn, her eternal husband Meteor, and their subordinates were forced to plan for much longer than mortals usually do — this decision and its consequences increased the stability of society and prevented most of the uprisings and resettlements; however, on two specific occasions Purity had to take care that nopony from renegade groups made it to the surface of the planet.
Solid Line was never able to grasp the meaning of the term ‘subordinates’. She spent as many as three beats of the external, slow time on considering this word, almost losing contact with the station, but was forced to drop the mystery. ‘Ponies who have indefinitely relegated the right to choose for themselves to another pony’ was the best — but imprecise — approximation.
But everything else was clear, and having archived the observations and conclusions Solid Line delved into Dispassion’s black notebook and the data associated with it.
The need to get rid of the Moons — at least from the perspective of the ‘moonless’ — at this moment was clear and conclusive from collected data, postulating the very existence of the ‘moonless’ group in their modern state as an absolute value. Solid Line, not sharing this value, saw multiple other options.
The notebook was another deal. Dispassion presented the world as a set of pseudo-endless future timelines, along which the lives of the ponies flowed ‘above’ the infinite void of non-existence. She cited exemplary incidents in which the Moons, by exhausting effort of all the Trinity's power combined during Conjunctions, were replacing the seemingly-inevitable future with other, neighboring futures, close but not entirely resultant from prior events, and thus directing the world as they desired it to be. Solid Line did not believe this part, but the cases were somewhat plausible.
She argued that the reality’s state in relation to the abyss of nonexistence is actually metastable, and that every word of the Moons — including the absence of a word, the volitional act of hiding in silence — impoverishes the set of timelines, tears it and removes entire possible areas of the future, thus diminishing the plateau of stability. And once there is no more plateau, the following life of the world would depend on constant corrections of reality, with next to no tolerance for errors.
Solid Line wanted to know what ‘metastability’ is and the desire was fulfilled by a note made by Dispassion.
‘A state of a dynamic system in which a small ‘push’ can initiate a disproportionate, self-sustaining, and usually very difficult to stop or reverse, decay (‘descent’) to a more stable state. In the context of reality states, the likely end state is extremely unlikely to be compatible with life as we know it.’
There was a sticker below, with a stain of unknown origin.
‘Proposition: find a way to adapt life to the new state of reality, and enact the adaptation in parallel with the process of decay. Proposition of higher priority: prevent the phase of equilibrilium’s rapid decay altogether, if it’s not too late already.’
Dispassion stated then that even the socially beneficial word of total cognitive decomposition of the Red — the word, efficiency of which Solid Line had verified by triply modeling it with the willing help of the station — will inevitably lead, counting only visible and predictable consequences, to the death of all green plants, since photosynthesis controlled by the White Moon was actually rooting deep in the Red, and there is already no room to correct for this side effect.
She also noted that the plateau is already very small, and prone to being easily diminished further. For example, the minor accident of absence of two Moons in the world for just a third of a beat would be enough for the world to deteriorate from metastability to, at best, an unstable equilibrium. The reasons for that absence could be anything: their exhaustion, a successful attack by the Red or decision to move out of the world. So, the Moons were literally holding the reality together, bound to it — and at the same time bringing closer the phase of rapid decay.
The main problem was more about a number of barriers to breach until the end of the world rather than a hope to keep it existing indefinitely, as it was metastable even before the Moons; after that secondary problems of Dispassion’s thesis were about decreasing the probability of the fall, limiting impact of the factors of decay, of which the Moons were main ones, and dealing with the fall itself.
Dispassion verified the truth for each statement with a specter of proofs, valid for each of the corresponding branches of the world, including this one.
Solid Line scanned the summary page. On the whole page there was a single line in Dispassion’s even and small hornwriting, repeated below with a few neon green sigils of Black Moon’s Heralds’ imaging language that were the truth.
"The trinity must be destroyed"
"The trinity must be transformed"
"The trinity must (not) be"
She blinked and read it again, then again and again.
The line was single.
There were three lines. But they remained one line, which nevertheless was three.
All three lines were true.
They could not be true, at least together, and even more so they could not...
Solid Line realized the presence of the paradox and accepted it as it was, and understood its essence; but, for the same reason, in the same ninth part of a beat she could no longer be a station.
She found Cursory next to her, told her that she was not feeling well, and immediately went dark. Solid assumed that Gentle Touch would take care of her shell, and felt somewhat sorry for her, but Solid Line was not to blame herself: the understanding unpacked from the data remained too great even for her alone, more so for any conversations with others or any interactions with external reality. She just needed some time for herself, to process, and organise, and to hope that said reality with all its mysteries yet unsolved would not throw a critical error in the interim, depriving Solid Line an opportunity to observe and log it.
Her death of an ocean, among the background processes, was sparkling. Next to her, at the very edge of the flickering endless darkness, under the cold rain of greenish neon sigils, afraid herself, but accepting Solid Line’s fear without expectations or judgement, a quiet yellow pegasus sat.