'Madman' they called me.
When I was a young lad, I had become swept up in the fandom of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. And who didn't back then? Only the people who never tried it, that's who! And I wasn't one of those people that got 'converted,' oh no. I knew what it was, but I brushed it off at first. Little by little, curiosity got the better of me.
'Curiosity killed the cat' they said.
It was only a small appreciation for a simple thing at first. But then, as for so many others, it became an obsession. A raging lust for all things pony. That old meme picture of Rainbow Dash straining and the caption that read 'NEED MORE PONY' comes to mind.
Now I had never been the type to be obsessed with anything. And you might think that any sort of obsession like that would eventually run its course.
But you'd be wrong.
While it's true, most ordinary fans eventually lost interest. Who can blame them?
'It's just a cartoon' they said.
I'm the last fan alive. I should know, I checked. And I'm 82 years old. Believe me when I say, I have met my fair share of diehard fans like myself. I couldn't tell you how many cutie marks I've seen tattooed on wrinkly old asses.
'I totally don't have Big Mac's cutie mark tattooed on my ass'
All those good people are gone now... But most of them helped me a great deal in my endeavor. Well, it started as my endeavor, then became ours. It was for all the bronies and pegasisters and even the girl-bronies that didn't like being called pegasisters. I even married one of those. Oh, Patricia…
'We can do this Dane, you and me. We'll do it!' She said.
I was amazed at how many like-minded people flocked to be of assistance. Once we had even a semblance of a workable theory… yes, just a theory… we had everything we could ever need to make it happen. Money, technology, hell, even entire teams of scientists and researchers were donated to the cause. Even the land that this giant facility was built on, almost 50 years ago, was a gift from one rich brony. Gabe Newell, I think his name was. Nice fella, can't remember for the life of me what he did for a living. Dead, long since, just like everyone else.
We even got funding from the US government for a time. Once they found out we had some semi-working prototypes, they hounded us. We eventually caved, we knew they'd probably try to take our tech and our ideas, and maybe even kill us for the trouble if we denied their contracts. Of course, we only showed them a tiny portion of our actual results. Eventually Uncle Sam gave up on us and cut funding. Not that it mattered, we were swimming in money by then. Almost all of it is spent now. The last ten years or so have been real rough. Everyone was either dying or losing interest. Almost no one left to help now, and absolutely zero people dedicated to the cause anymore, the few people I have on staff are just employees now. Young’ns who wouldn't know a G4 pony if it bit them!
'This man knows nothing about physics or even science in general! He's just a con man!' They said.
While it's true, I don't have the most brilliant mind in terms of book smarts, I make up for it in problem solving abilities, reasoning, and the occasional stroke of genius. Besides, we hired physicists, by the dozen. We had a pool of genius minds, with mine right at the top, controlling everything, processing every idea. I may have had only two years of college, but I'll be damned if I don't know more science now than the smartest pencil neck on the planet. And math. My dear sweet Celestia, you would not believe the amount of math behind all this.
What was I getting at anyway? I think I'm having a senior moment. You know I may have Alzheimer's… but at least I don't have Alzheimer's. Hehe, love that joke. Gets the grandkids every time.
'Grandpa, tell us a story from another dimension!' They would say.
And I would regale them with an amazing tale from any one of the other worlds I've seen, not necessarily ponies. Some time, about maybe 35 years ago, we succeeded in building and using the Alternate Universe Viewer. It's an incredibly huge and complex machine and it required its own nuclear power plant to run it. You would not believe the paperwork we had to go through to build that!
You ever heard the theory that there's an infinite amount of alternate universes? Well it was right. Any idea how long it took to look through an INFINITE number of parallel dimensions? Well actually not too long. We eventually had to give up on just looking and spent a good few years developing algorithms and software to sort of search them for us. We managed to par it down to about half a million. That's right, half a million dimensions of ponies. Eventually we had found that these universes follow roughly the same time line as our own does. This lead to a whole new problem. It was already well in the future of the ponies we knew and loved. Many of us got to watch them live their lives out… to the end. But amidst the tears a solution was found. Compared to everything else we had accomplished up until then, it was actually pretty easy. While we were hard at work, trying to figure something out, my wife Patricia had a little stroke of genius. Amazing how sometimes a small idea can have a profound effect. I won't go into details, but with another year or so of R & D, we were able to effectively add ‘rewind’ and ‘fast-forward’ buttons to the Viewer.
And while we sorted through the different universes, we eventually developed another technology essential to our goal. Teleportation. My, that was a monumental day for us. Naturally, we kept it a secret… from the world. The last thing we wanted was for it to be abused, or for it to be stolen and our throats slit to silence us. But I wouldn't be exaggerating when I said we partied that night. A lab full of scientists and old bronies, some of them both, got shitfaced and rocked that lab.
'We're close, so close I can almost taste the hay' Ray said.
He died almost a year ago. He was the last. Besides me, that is. The young’ns I have helping me around the place now just think I'm a crazy old man. A rich, brilliant, crazy old codger who's obsessed with a cartoon as old as he is, and who happens to have technology under his thumb that the rest of the world thinks will never exist.
They put up with me though. I know I'm a grumpy old fart. The world's beaten me down, and I'm downright spiteful. I hope they can forgive me for what I did…
It doesn't matter now. I'll never see them again. I made sure of that.
No, I didn't kill them, if that's what you're thinking.
"Dane, sir, we… we did it! We actually transported an object to dimension alpha six-zero-four!" Tyler was jumping for joy.
That strapping young lad was brilliant in his own right, he solved a lot of problems, things only a young mind could think its way around. Of course, I just about shit myself when he gave me the news. Not only had we successfully transferred matter to another dimension, but it was MY target dimension. I kissed that kid like I had never kissed a man before.
I regret nothing.
I hobbled my way through corridors, and into the 'Ring of Fire' as we called it. A gigantic ring shaped building, the diameter of seven and a half football fields, it housed the actual Ring of Fire. It was a device that basically shot a single hydrogen atom in a giant circle, the point of the ring. I like to think that it goes a little faster than the speed of light, but we were never able to measure it accurately. The physics behind it are complex, but basically the near- or super light speed travel could be used, indirectly, to create a sort of… worm hole, for lack of a better word, to the dimension of our choosing. The Viewer let us choose the dimension, and could approximately line up the times of the two universes to be connected, with a shitload of math and computers, and an unbelievable amount of energy, the wormhole would be opened at the center of the ring, and would last just about one second.
When I got to the lab near the center of the Ring, the team was all jumping for joy, they sat me down and showed me a monitor connected to the Viewer. What I was looking at was nothing more than an empty aluminum Pepsi can laying in the grass.
Not just any grass… the 'greener' grass, as is said.
While I sat there having a stroke, they all looked upon me expectantly.
"You've all done a…" I choked up as a tear slid down my cheek, "a fine job. Can I… see it in action?"
"Of course!" Tyler went into the control room and got ready. I tried to stand up but I had trouble. Some of the kids helped me up, and walked me over to the control room.
'No more than one person in the control room while the Ring is active.'
That was a rule I made, for 'safety.' Or so that's what I told them. But the team was happy to let me break my own rule and I joined Tyler at the controls. He opened the blast door that lead to the dead center of the ring and stepped in. He practically skipped up onto the giant round platform. I never knew why it was so big. Bob designed the platform, was he planning on taking a school bus with him? When Tyler got to the center, he placed a very small potted plant on the platform. Likely 'borrowed' from someone's desk.
He skipped back to the control room, and shut the blast door behind him. I knew the basics of the controls, but I examined his every move. He finished pushing buttons and just stepped back. We both stood staring through the small window with baited breath. After about two minutes of warm-up the machine finally started doing its thing.
The center room with the platform began to grow dark. It was lit just fine, but we were more or less creating a black hole. Sort of. It's complicated. But it sucked up the light just the same. The tiny dot of black that created darkness around itself floated about four feet above the plant. It got darker and darker in the room until the dimensional rift practically exploded, in an amazing mixture of darkness and light, for just a split second. When it settled down, and the whirring of the Ring slowed down to silence once again, the platform was empty.
Tyler pushed some buttons and turned a monitor to show me. The Viewer, still looking at the Pepsi can. We both waited some more. I knew we could only line up the time so much. According to the math there was a roughly five hour margin of error.
The screen went blank, completely white, for just a second. And then, a little potted plant fell on the grass, a couple feet away from the can.
It was beautiful.
"Tyler, this is amazing! Get a lab rat, we have to test it on a live animal!"
"B-But sir!"
"No buts! This is for science! Now go!"
I shooed him out of the control room. And closed the glass door behind him. I smiled at the team through the bullet proof glass wall next to the door. They were happy. I was happy. We did it. I did it. I started this all 55 years ago. My life's work. I'd probably go down in history. Tears started coming out. Not happy tears. Sad tears.
For what I was about to do to them.
"Computer, seal control room door, protocol twelve-twenty-eight."
I heard the locks on the door click into place. I'm not sure the kids heard it. I went to the controls, and did everything Tyler did, followed the sequence as best as I could remember. The Ring started whirring, and that's when they noticed. I looked back briefly at their panicked and confused faces, some of them rattling the door. I couldn't bear to see them. At least I could barely hear their muffled yelling through the thick glass.
'Screw them.' I told myself bitterly.
They would have me wait months before even trying to send a chimp through. I'm an old man, I could drop dead any minute. And knowing my luck, I probably would, before getting to go through, if I'd let them have their way. But I wasn't about to. I was seizing the moment. It was mine. My entire life spent for this one moment of time.
There was no way in HELL I was going to let it slip through my fingers.
I finished setting up the controls, I had a little more than two minutes now.
"Computer…" I choked. "Initiate self destruct sequence eleven-oh-nine."
"Confirm self destruct sequence one-one-zero-nine?" The facility's control computer asked, in her horribly cliché female British robot voice. I hated that damn voice.
"Confirmed."
"Self destruct sequence activated. Facility will self destruct in twenty minutes."
I looked once more to the team of kids behind the glass. Panicked and running around, the room was emptying. 'Good,' I thought, 'hopefully they'll just get out and not try to save this place.'
There was only one of them left. Tyler. He looked at me, holding a little cage with a white rat inside, and he mouthed the question 'why?'
I mouthed back, 'You know why,' making little hand gestures to get the words across. After a little pause I waved goodbye and then made a gesture to tell him to go. He reluctantly obliged.
I pulled the manual override lever on the blast door, it opened and I hobbled through. I pulled the lever on the other side and the door closed behind me. I walked as carefully as possible, I did have time, and the last thing I wanted to do was fall and break my hip.
I finally set my cane on the platform and stepped up onto it. The rift was starting to form. I made my way to the center, and I sat down right beneath the dark black orb. I hurriedly took my glasses off and put them in their case. I clutched my cane, and closed my eyes.
It wasn't long before it became silent.
And here I am, floating in the dark silent void. I think this is only my consciousness, I can't feel my body. It feels like it's been hours now, just alone with my thoughts.
Suddenly, I feel tired.
I let it embrace me.
Pain. Pain everywhere.
But that means I'm alive.
I'm alive!
I struggle to open my eyes amidst the pain. I can't see much from my old eyes… but I make out some green.
Grass…
I'm home.
I close my eyes and promptly pass out.