“I hate your cleaning robots!” I yelled.
“He’s supposed to avoid ponies and automatically activate if they sense a collision!” Destiny yelled.
Behind us, keeping pace and even gaining on us despite me running as fast as I could, the huge boxy robot with knives for legs skittered closer and closer, glaring with that camera like a single baleful eye.
“You said it was small!”
“I didn’t want to scare you! You’re on edge all the time!”
“I’m on edge because something’s always trying to kill me!”
“It’s not supposed to kill anything! It’s a maintenance and cleaning robot! Something must have happened to its programming! If you can get me close enough to reboot it--”
I looked back at the wall of death.
“Nope!” I yelled. I was not getting closer to that thing if I could help it! Even when I’d faced off against a tank it hadn’t seemed as implacable. My instincts screamed at me to get away from it. I wasn’t running, I was bolting down the hallway like a wild animal. I didn’t even have the presence of mind to turn down the side passage I ran past. It was stupid. Every pegasus knew when something was diving towards you, you had to fly to the side to avoid it. Staying in its path was stupid.
And it saved my life, because if I’d taken that turn, it would have been right at my hooves. The robot took the turn without even slowing, changing direction at the kind of hard angle no pony could manage. I slowed down, the panic abating.
“Huh,” I said.
“See?” Destiny sighed. “I told you it wasn’t after you. It’s just on some kind of automatic cleaning cycle. The recognition talismans must be broken. It can’t tell that we’re here.”
“Do you think it ran over Fornax?” I asked. I wouldn’t mind too much if the robot had finished the job for me. I just hoped it had left enough of him on the floor for me to salvage whatever part I needed.
“If it did, we’ll have to disable the cleaning service and-- oh no.” The vibration running through the floor grew stronger. Ahead of me at the next junction, the robot rolled back into the main hall and turned to face me, charging at me and making me run right back the way I’d come from.
“I hate your stupid robot!” I screamed. At least it was sort of forcing me in the right direction this time. I took the sharp left ahead, not slowing down even a little. I just slid around the corner, my hooves raising sparks on the ground as I fought to keep control. Because of the way the robot had gone around me, I’d gained a lot of ground. I just needed to find somewhere safe to catch my breath and figure things out.
“Blood,” Destiny said, so calmly I almost missed it.
“What?”
“Blood!” she repeated, highlighting it in my vision. There was a trail of dark, oily blood on the ground, leading around the next corner. It started in a patch of burned and blackened metal that was either the result of a firefight or… “Those marks are from Fornax’s teleportation spell! I’m getting the same magical signature!”
“I got you now, you bucking--” I skidded to a halt right before hitting a wall of steel. The blood trail went right into it and, I assume, beyond.
“It’s one of the emergency bulkheads,” Destiny said. “We installed them to stop fire or flooding from spreading from one building to the next.”
“How do we open it?” I asked.
“There’s an override right over… where that destroyed control box on the wall is still sparking and smoking. Great.” Destiny huffed. “I hate vandals!”
“So what, we have to go around?” I asked.
“This place wasn’t built by Stable-Tec idiots who don’t understand the idea of redundant systems. We just have to go to the nearest maintenance room or emergency shelter. As long as we have the door number we can open the way from there.”
“Great. Well, all we have to do is--” and right then, the deadly robot appeared at the other end of the dead-end corridor, boxing me in. “Oh buck.”
It charged me, and I instinctively backed up, pressing myself up against the bulkhead. It rushed forward at full speed, all scything blades and impenetrable armor and-- it stopped right in front of me. I was standing on my hind legs and holding my breath and it was staring right into my face. I looked down at the cluster of tiny knife-like blades. It had stopped right at a painted line on the floor. It turned around placidly, totally ignoring me, and charged back the other way.
“Destiny I think I need to use the Auto-Doc again, because that just took decades off my life,” I whispered, my voice high and tight.
“You know, I’m starting to understand why we were never able to sell any of those units on the market,” she said. She sounded right on the edge of fainting.
“I’m just gonna stand here for a minute until my heart starts working again and then we’ll go find the switch.”
It was almost depressingly easy to hit the switch and come back. The robot really wasn’t after me. Destiny had been right about that. Once I figured out its routine, I knew where I could duck into a side corridor to avoid it and when it would go the other direction on its own without me needing to intervene.
“You really named it BLU-BLD?” I asked. “Why?”
“We had a really annoying investor who kept making impossible demands every time he remembered we existed. The Boss Mare hated him, so she changed the name of our janitorial robot project. She got a kick out of the idea of him crawling around and eating garbage.”
“Who is this Boss Mare, anyway? I thought it was your mom, but…”
Destiny was quiet for a moment. “I don’t really remember. I remember some things about her, but she’s in one of those holes in my memory. I know she didn’t like us talking about her or using her real name anywhere.”
“Maybe it was one of the Ministry Mares?” I suggested. “Remember the recording back at the SPP where they were talking about seeing Ministry Mares in town all the time?”
“That would make sense,” Destiny agreed. “You know, it could have been Twilight Sparkle! We know I was working with her on some projects.”
I nodded, remembering the recording we’d found of her and Twilight Sparkle making a memory orb to teach the shield spell.
“It doesn’t feel exactly right, but it fits the pieces we have,” Destiny said. “If it’s important I’m sure we’ll figure it out.”
We followed the bloodstain through the next set of corridors.
“Where are we going, anyway?” i asked. “Any idea?”
“Yeah. Check your radar. We’re almost on top of the Auto-Doc signals we were tracing. They must be installed in the warehouse storage ahead of us. It was armored fire-proof storage for hazardous materials.”
“So it makes a perfect evil lair,” I said.
“Almost as good as a Stable,” Destiny joked. I walked up to the door and hit the control next to it. It buzzed and refused, flashing red.
“Should I knock?” I asked.
“Don’t be silly! This is exactly why we have DRACO. Even without armor, he’s the best gun in Equestria!” The rifle’s scope display switched over to the electronic warfare program I’d seen before. Destiny hummed happily, and the screen flashed green and showed a smiling face. The door beeped along with it and flashed green, sliding open.
“What would you do without me?” Destiny teased.
“Probably kick the door until I broke it down,” I said. I trotted in. The room was almost pitch black. Destiny lit up the armor’s horn with her magic, and a cone of light shone out ahead of us. DRACO’s scope shifted over to night-vision at the same time.
“So, you followed me. Impressive,” Fornax said, sounding drained. The High Priest was right ahead of us, and he was not in great shape. He was embedded in the wall, wires and tubes running to his body and plugged into ports in his body.
I fired the Junk Jet at him. I didn’t have any explosive charges left, but I still had a few rocks. It bounced off a barrier right in front of him. Not a magic one, this time, just something clear and tough separating us like a huge window.
“Transparent aluminum,” Destiny said. “We developed it as part of a stealth program. You’re not going to break through it with what we’ve got with us. We need to figure out a way in there.”
“A stealth program?” I asked.
“They wanted an invisible airship. Then when we came up with the material and told them how much an entire ship would cost, they changed their minds.”
“I suppose I don’t command much respect in my current state, but I was hoping you would at least indulge me enough not to engage in idle banter while ignoring me,” High Priest Fornax wheezed.
“Sorry,” I said automatically. “Wait, no! I’m not sorry! You’re a monster who’s been doing awful things to… dubiously innocent ponies. Things that even they don’t deserve!”
“Deserve?” Fornax coughed, hacking and raising himself up as much as he could with his waist sealed into the wall, presumably to hold together whatever was left of him. “You have no idea what you speak of! The Green isn’t some plague or monster to be fought! It’s the next stage of evolution for this world!”
“The Green? You mean that razor-edged jungle outside?”
Fornax nodded. “Look at where we are - the middle of an icy tundra. The worst possible place for a tropical forest. But it survives! It thrives! It’s nature and technology as one! The true sin of the old world was the divide between the natural world and the one ponies created.”
“Keep him talking,” Destiny whispered. “I’m going to use DRACO to see if I can map this place out and try to find a way in there.”
I nodded subtly. “Ponies lived in harmony with nature,” I retorted.
“They did for a while,” Fornax agreed. “But society and nature were always at odds. Long before the long war that ended the world, Equestria had a few grand cities but most ponies lived in small towns. They were points of civilization in a land of plenty. The earth ponies tamed the land, and pegasus ponies tamed the skies, but they still respected nature. That all changed one day. It’s impossible to say when or how it started, but it was soon after the Mare in the Moon returned from her long banishment. Something about the way ponies saw the world shifted. The paradigm, the way they viewed things and thought about things, it changed. It was a revolution, but instead of overthrowing a government or establishing a new artistic movement, it was an industrial revolution.”
I was not prepared for a history lesson today. Thank Celestia my Dad had quizzed me about this kind of junk all the time.
“I know from what I’ve read, most ponies associated it with the project to bring electricity to everypony in Equestria,” I offered.
“Yes. Yes! You’re exactly right,” Fornax nodded quickly, pleased I was paying attention. “Everything became connected and interdependent. Think of what it takes to bring electricity to a small town. It’s not just running wires to the houses, those wires have to go to a power plant. To build the power plant, they need to bring in equipment and machines, which means roads and railways. That means it becomes easy for ponies to travel anywhere they want. And once ponies have electricity they’ll want to do something with it. They’ll want appliances and conveniences. With the new roads they can leave their small-town life to go to the big city any time they want.”
“It sounds like their lives were just getting better,” I shrugged.
“Perhaps that’s true,” Fornax conceded. “But how do we define 'better?' They had all the food they could want, but farms turned into mechanized factories making pre-packaged food so full of preservatives it’s still edible today. There wasn’t less work to do, it just shifted from fields to assembly-lines. That industrial society and its consequences was a disaster for the Equestrian people. We poisoned the land with waste, expanded without caring about the health of the earth, and then, finally, blew everything up when our lust for more and more led to a war against the zebras.”
I tilted my head. “I mean you’re not entirely wrong, but in case you haven’t noticed, you’re about, what, ninety percent robot?”
“Something like that. I am the endpoint of pony evolution. My body is one with the machine. The Green isn’t nature at war with technology, it’s nature and technology together, stronger. Machines keep the trees alive, and the trees supply the machines with solar power and bio-energy.”
He gestured, and the overhead lights snapped on. There were auto-doc pods along the wall, and they opened up, forcing the ponies inside out. They clearly weren’t in shape for a fight. They looked like stragglers from the fighting upstairs, covered in burns and damage. Some of them had been in the middle of surgery, and were just barely stapled together. Two of them were missing entire limbs, the stumps trailing off to loose wires.
“In the world I am creating, the law of nature will be enforced,” Fornax said. “The survival of the fittest. Is there anything more fair than that? A true meritocracy! Ponies will be able to grasp whatever they want as long as they’re strong enough to hold it in their own hooves! This is your last chance to join me.”
I shook my head. “You steal ponies from their families and make them your slaves. Equestria doesn’t need somepony like you to save it.”
“Fine. Enough talk, then. Have at you!”
The raiders opened fire. The ones who had guns, anyway. Three of them ran right at me. Destiny popped up a shield to deflect some of the gunfire. I charged the nearest pony, the one with an axe in his teeth. I just tackled him, bowling him over and knocking the weapon away. He scrabbled for it, and I stabbed my hoof-blade into his shoulder and used it as leverage to lift him up, holding him between me and the other raiders. Bullets thudded into his flesh and he screamed, the armor bolted to his hide only keeping the rounds from punching through to hit me.
“I’ve got a plan,” Destiny said. One of the raiders tried to circle around me. I threw my dying shield at her and launched a rock at the next raider, cracking their skull open and leaving them bleeding on the ground. I took the opportunity to duck behind one of the swollen, infected Auto-Docs. Bullets bounced off the wall and floor around me, the raiders either trying to pin me down or just hoping I’d pop out right into the line of fire.
“I’m not going anywhere. What’s the idea?” I asked.
“The Auto-Docs are all down here, and even if they’re infected, they’re still Stable-Tec junk. With them wired into everything I can use them as a back door to get into the system and shut all of this down!”
“Will that stop Fornax?” I asked.
“From the look of it, he’s on life support. When we shut the system down, he goes down too.”
“I like the sound of that,” I said. My skin started crawling. I risked a glance over at Fornax. The air was glowing around him with a swarm of glowing green lights.
“His SIVA field is back online!” Destiny warned.
“Yeah, but what can he do with it while he’s stuck in there?” I asked. The glow built up, more and more motes of light swarming around the High Priest.
“I don’t think we want to find out! We need better cover!” She hesitated. “Get into the Auto-Doc!”
“Destiny, it’s infected with SIVA and turns ponies into monsters!”
“Don’t worry, I’ll shut it down! Just get inside!”
Despite my best judgment, I ducked into the pod. The metal arms overhead were twisted and had bundles of cable like bare muscle wrapped around the skeleton of the steel. They started moving ominously before the door shut. I ducked down, trying to keep out of the way as a tiny circular saw advanced towards me with an uneven, metallic screeching.
“Destiny!” I yelled.
“Hold on!” she shouted back. The entire pod shook and tilted, almost toppling over. The lights inside turned off and I was left in darkness, that saw still buzzing away. The blade hit the top of my helmet with a sound like a knife scraping along a plate, trying to burrow through. The door popped open, and I rolled out, the arms still trying to grab me.
“I thought you could keep it from activating!”
“Yell at me later,” Destiny said. “Look!”
One of the raiders was right in front of me, frozen in place. He looked like he’d been dipped in molten bronze. In some places it had burned right through him and left holes, and almost his entire body was covered in cratered, cracked metal that bled around the edges. The other raiders were the same, frozen in poses of horror and fear where they’d been standing.
“How is this survival of the fittest?” I shouted over to Fornax. The wall of transparent metal was torn apart, melted right through by the SIVA micromachine swarm.
“If they were strong, they would have survived,” Fornax said. “As you did, annoyingly.”
“It was a good last-gasp attempt,” Destiny said. “But I’m not going to let you do it again. Nighty-night.”
DRACO beeped, and the Auto-Docs in the room beeped in unison. The lights flared and the infected pods all shut down, the screens and glowing tubes around Fornax going dark. The High Priest screamed and slumped, spitting up black oil and going still.
“...is that it?” I asked, looking around. “Is it over?”
“No,” Fornax gasped. He shuddered and forced himself to move, tearing wires and tubes from his hooves. “It’s not over! Not yet!”
The wall behind him bulged and broke as something massive forced its way through. It was hideous, like a huge spider with four steel legs and a bulging abdomen of rough copper plates bolted together on top of each other like a huge metal rose. Fornax was attached to it, his upper half taking the place of the spider’s head like he was some kind of spider-centaur-pony-demon. There’s no real language to describe it but take my word for it, he was ugly as Tartarus and looked like he belonged in its deepest pits.
“Uh,” I said, absolutely not prepared for this.
“Um,” Destiny contributed, also at a loss.
Fornax screeched, the sound not something a pony could make, more like microphone set too close to a speaker. He clambered up and out of the chamber, trailing more wires and rubbery tubes.
“It must have been growing that in the wall the whole time! That mule was stalling us at the same time we were trying to stall him!”
“At least I won’t feel bad about fighting him now,” I said. Maybe the Companions were rubbing off on me a little too much. Something about just switching off a pony’s life support hadn’t felt all that great to me. This was more… honorable, I guess?
The petals on the spider’s bulging abdomen spread, and something popped out. I blinked as an egg floated through the air on a spinning prop.
“Watch out!” Destiny yelled.
“Huh? Why?” I asked, just before it got right overhead and exploded. I flinched, but instead of a blast of force and shrapnel, a steel net drifted down around me. “Okay, weird, but It’s not like I can’t just cut--”
And then the electricity hit. Some combination of having a robot arm and a computer in my brain made that shock hit me like a truck. It wasn’t as bad as a dedicated shock grenade or else I would have been too busy having a seizure to compare the two objectively. The charge paralyzed me, half my body going totally limp and sending me to the ground, kicking and twitching.
“Hang on!” Destiny yelled. “I’ve got you, Camomile! Just stay calm!”
I couldn’t control my mouth well enough to tell her he was going to get me first. I felt the magic run through my body, along my spine and into my head, and a bolt of force cracked through the air and destroyed the tiny drone that was shocking me.
“Can you move?” Destiny asked. “Please tell me you can move, because I need you right now!”
I shook myself, trying to force myself back into action. I felt lag, like my mind and body weren’t in sync. “I’m… a little out of it…” I grunted. “Still here.”
I looked up at Fornax. The High Priest tilted his head, and a bolt of force lanced out at me. I flinched, but Destiny saved my hide. Her crimson aura popped up in another magical shield, deflecting the shot. I knew she had to be pushing herself to the limit. That shot she’d fired had to have drained most of her tiny store of magical strength.
“That’s not going to work!” Destiny yelled. “You have no idea who you’re messing with! I’m the one who built this technology you’re sitting here and worshiping like a cavepony seeing fire for the first time!”
Fornax hesitated, freezing up. “What?”
“That’s right. My family invented SIVA! We built the Exodus Arks!” Destiny shouted. I got back to my hooves. The cobwebs started to clear up and my mind sped up to match my body. I didn’t feel like I was underwater anymore.
“Then prove it! Show me you deserve to survive!” Fornax lifted one of his huge spider legs and brought it down towards us, the tip shaped like a chisel. I caught it, straining to hold back the huge weight and force behind it.
“Give me everything we’ve got in strength!” I yelled. “I need more!”
The armor settled around me, getting heavier. I forced the leg back a little more. The beating, pulsing sensation of the SIVA signal started pounding through me in painful waves. I managed to shift the weight, shoving Fornax back.
He reacted with shock, and I held onto his leg as the pressure eased, shoving back and knocking him off-balance. He’d gotten the legs less than a minute ago, and wasn’t nearly in sync with them. I twisted and ripped, and the entire limb tore free with a screech of metal.
The High Priest toppled over, and I pounced, launching into the air and coming down hard on his spider half.
“I’m not sorry about this,” I said. “You talk a lot about nature and survival of the fittest, but it’s just an excuse so you can kill everypony you want!”
He roared, and his three remaining spider-legs stabbed at me from all directions. He was uncoordinated and not thinking clearly. I stomped on one of them where it joined the body, snapping it, and used my blade to slice through the two others.
“You done?!” I snapped. “This is what you want, right? The last pony standing deciding what’s right and what’s wrong?”
He coughed up black oil, spitting it at me.
“That’s what i thought,” I said, bringing the blade down again.
It was a long flight back to the hospital. I’d escaped any really serious injury, but just about every part of me was sore and bruised. It had been a long day already and, to be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to the next step. I hadn’t been thinking about it because I’d have preferred to think about almost anything else, but now it was practically right in front of me and I was getting butterflies in my stomach.
“I, you know…” I didn’t know how to put it into words.
When we’d gotten back down to the one uninfected, working Auto-Doc, we’d put Fornax’s head into the machine and Destiny had spent a while fiddling around with scanners and programming instructions while I’d had too much time to think.
“You’re worried about getting more brain surgery,” Destiny said. I’d already taken the armor off, so she was floating in front of the pod. I was sitting on the maintenance workbench. The concrete floor was just a little too cold to be comfortable.
I nodded.
“I… actually understand. I’ve felt the pre-surgical jitters too. You know how the hardware inside your head used to be mine?” She waited for me to nod again. “I never told you about why I got it.”
“I figured you probably didn’t remember,” I said with a mild shrug.
Destiny shook her head. Helmet. Whole body? “Nope. During the war, everything was super competitive. Enough was never enough. Even a genius was lucky to get fifteen minutes of fame before something else pushed their latest discovery out of the news. If you wanted to really be noticed you had to be the best. Better than the best.”
She floated from side to side, like she was pacing.
“When you’re competing like that, everypony wants an edge, and ponies weren’t shy about using drugs. Mint-Als were my drug of choice, and I highly recommend them. Great stuff! Mildly addictive, but what isn’t? Even sugar is psychologically addictive! But that just raised the floor. Everypony used Mint-Als! You had to. Otherwise you were thinking with one hoof tied behind your back. Once it was standard, we all started looking for another edge. Something to push us a little further.”
“And you got the…” I tapped my forehead.
“Yeah. Improving Mint-Als wasn’t something I could do. I wasn’t really into pharmaceutical research, just computers and engineering. I heard attempts to make them stronger didn’t go well anyway, so it was a dead-end. But improving the brain itself was entirely possible! Cybernetic augmentation would attack the problem from a different angle. Better, I could use it and Mint-Als at the same time! My Mom was the best at processor design, so I got her help prototyping it.”
“The way you talk about it, it sounds like you were having fun.”
“I was. That’s how a lot of projects start out. You come to the table with an exciting new theory and there’s a visceral rush to actually making it work. We built circuit boards and processors with super-tight tolerances because they couldn’t generate a lot of heat, they had to survive with no ventilation and constantly surrounded by the body, and a few months later we’d come up with something small enough to fit and powerful enough to be worth fitting, and then the exciting part was over and the reality of it set in. I was holding something in my hooves that I was going to put into my own body. When we wrapped up the design phase, everypony else went back to their projects and I spent the night alone, feeling just like you are right now.”
“Really?”
She bobbed in a nod. “Even though I’d designed it myself and I had the best doctors… I was still worried. Part of me was worried that if I messed with my brain I wouldn’t still be me. I’d go to sleep on the table and wake up as somepony else.”
“What did you decide?”
“I ended up going through with it. You know that already. What I realized was that I was changing all the time anyway. When I was a little filly I wanted to be a ballerina. And a fire-fighter. And maybe a Princess. My dreams changed when I grew up. Even the way I thought changed. Stallions stopped being icky and started being interesting. I found out I hated dance practice, but I loved building things with my own hooves. No matter what I did, I was going to change again. This time, I was going to get to choose how I changed! It wasn’t just going to be random chance, I’d really be a self-made mare!”
I could feel the smile.
“When I woke up, everything was crystal clear. I was still me. I was a lot better at math and I could practically speak a few programming languages, and maybe my memory was a little sharper, but I was still Destiny Bray. Just like you’re still Chamomile. And after this, you’ll keep being Chamomile.”
I took a deep breath. She was right. I was still worried, though. I needed to open up and tell Destiny what was bothering me, even if it was really hard to talk about. “I…” I swallowed. “I’m also really worried that…” I needed to be brave and bare myself to her. “I’m worried that I’ll look stupid with a big metal hat!” I spat out, forcing myself to reveal my innermost truth.
Destiny floated in silence for almost a full minute.
“Be honest,” I said weakly. “I’ll look like a total dweeb and it’ll be part of my skull so I can’t even take it off!”
“What are you… we’re not installing his bucking hat!” Destiny groaned. “Stars and garters, Chamomile. The cortical control node is about the shape and size of a pencil with a grape stuck on the end!”
“...It is?” I’d like to state for the record that my confusion was perfectly understandable. At no point did Destiny ever actually tell me how big the implant would be, and it was natural to assume that Fornax’s giant metal hat was a big antenna or something that was required to make the whole thing work.
“Stop feeling mopey and actually pay attention! I can’t believe I told you something even my therapist was lucky to know about and you come back with…” she made a sound of frustration that was a lot like a tea kettle.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“No, it’s fine,” Destiny sighed. “You’re scared.”
“Scared and stupid,” I joked. “I can’t afford to lose any brainpower.”
“Let me see…” Destiny focused and lit up her horn, creating a simple, stylized illusion of my head. She peeled one side back layer by layer until it showed the skull. I could see the mark from where I’d been shot. “What the Auto-Doc is going to do is remove a section of your skull around the old entry wound here.”
A square piece of the skull popped out and vanished.
“Then it’s going to create a bio-compatible sleeve reaching down to the existing logic co-processor.” A little cylinder of grey matter popped away and I winced. “What’s going to be removed is almost entirely scar tissue. None of it is functional. The node slides in, connects to the hardware you already have, and it should be more like upgrading a computer than having to get used to a new cybernetic implant.”
The node slid into place. The square hole was filled in over it, and the rest of my head reappeared.
“After it’s in, we just close up the hole and we’re done. It's not rocket science. Just brain surgery, and that's simple by comparison. Nothing even tries to explode if you get it wrong.”
“Okay. Let’s do it,” I said. “I don’t really know enough about it to tell how risky it is but… I trust you.”
Destiny bobbed. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you. I promise.”
I hopped off the table and faced the Auto-Doc. “Let’s do this thing.”