III. The Earth’s Voice
Nimrod, that curious champion,
Deviser was of that dungeon.
Nathing they spared their labors,
Like busy bees upon the flowers,
Or emmets travelling into June;
Another dream, the world ending this time in stone. A Gorgon’s curse, creeping out of the dead lands of the west, capturing everything. Around her, some fled before the spread. With the petrification came a sort of absent despair. A heavy cloud. There could be no escape. Too much had been lost already, and what life could be eked out—even if the whole rest of the world would be saved—would be short, brutish, and empty. Living in delicate arcologies short on everything until the inevitable systems failure and then suffocation or famine.
She read a book next to her parents' pool. The petrifying curse overtook their house. They were long gone for the eastern coast. Out of the house strode the stranger, in striking robes out of antiquity, her vibrant purple hair in perfect coifs, gold dangling from her hands and ears, Gems adorned the web of necklaces that lay across her ample bust. Her feet were burnished bronze, dazzling metallic sandals, and her skin was petrified, pure marble that moved.
“You do not like the suggestion that what you are building might, in fact, be a sort of God.”
“A Civic Spirit, maybe,” Twilight suggested flatly, not bothering to look up from her book.
“There’s a difference?”
“Absolutely.” She turned a page. “A civic spirit is not a personality. What I am building is not designed to be human, after all. To assign anthropomorphism to it would be foolish. Incorrect. Boring, actually. It’s so limiting.”
The Stranger circled her. The curse swallowed the house. The red sky, the sun sinking, the clouds retreating, they all seemed to drain of color. But she refused to give it all the time of day. Twilight turned another page.
“What are you reading?” The stranger asked.
“I am reading a book on old myths, ironically. It was not what I was reading before I fell asleep. Darkness Visible: A Study on Rowan Oak’s Aeneid. It’s good, actually. I’ve read it before.”
A hum. “What do you like about it?”
“I like that he finds the obvious readings of the text as boring as I find them. It is so easy, and so boring, and so fundamentally missing the point to read the poem as a straightforward heroic tale.” Twilight swallowed. “It is too obviously a work of art over mere propaganda. It doubts, it asks questions, it accuses, it despairs. It has depths. Its purpose is to have depths. To not see them is to deny the existence of the evidence of one’s eyes—and yet, obviously it is also an adventure story. Prince Worthy’s descent into Tartarus, meeting the ”
“So you’d said already.”
“I thought it was important enough to say it twice.”
The Stranger touched the table beside her, the one where her mother had sat so many summer days reading by the pool as Twilight now read by the pool. The table turned to stone in an instant. The parasol attached to the center, unfurled for no other reason than whim went with, shaking slightly as it did until it could no longer move.
“This is your parent’s home. Did you grow up here?”
Twilight, finally, stopped trying to read. “Yes. I grew up here, but they don’t own this house anymore. They moved when I was at University.”
“So you’ve come back to your roots, where you began, at the end of things.”
“No, I came back here because I liked this pool, and this house, and I have fond memories of my mother reading analog books as I swam laps and my father grilled and my brother and his girlfriend flirted. It is a strong memory, and it doesn’t have any code-overwriting on it. Well, it has a single line of Form 6. But it’s easy to ignore that. It’s just a string of spatial coordinates.” Twilight swallowed again. “I’m curious. Will I turn to stone if I look at you? Are you a Gorgon, then? It would fit what I’m reading presently. Ancient legends and the like.”
“I’m unsure. This is your dream, not mine. You made it.”
“Is it mine? How would I know that it isn’t yours?” Twilight challenged. She shut the book and laid it in her lap and stared at the neat fence surrounding her parent’s old backyard.
“I do not dream as you dream, or as anyone else dreams.”
“Ominous, mysterious, borderline nonsense.”
“An acidic tongue is a powerful tool, but not when it is used out of beat, Twilight. I speak the truth. I do not dream as you are dreaming now. You cannot understand my dreams.”
“Why?”
No answer. Twilight looked up, and her skin petrified.
It turned out that none of the vocal samples Twilight had acquired felt right. She was frustrated.
The spur-of-the-moment suggestion that the interface have a verbal component had been a mistake. With her own voice decidedly out of the question, she’d found herself with no one else to give the task. Celestia had quietly encouraged her to treat the whole thing seriously, and Twilight suspected it was a ruse to get her to rest.
Which… was fair. She’d been forced to moderate her own stance on this. Overwork was not helping her. More than that, even though she had taken a brief rest around the time of her first dreams, there wasn’t actually a lot for her to do directly at the moment. Physical construction on the Tower had slowed as great machines moved delicate components, and the foremen had been very convincing in assuring her that nothing could be done to speed up the process.
The nature of the Tower’s actual workings involved complicated networks of systems. Things needed to be activated in proper sequence, and all while not overwhelming the power supplies on hand. Simulations could only give her so much. She needed the physical body of the tower to realize its insides.
Returning to her notes on the vocal interface, Twilight heaved a great sigh. She was glad most of the shift was gone, all on leave while the project stalled. It would give her space to just… play samples to the open air. She had moved from her office into the main working room, the one with the cold window and the view of the glowing tower that hung in the void.
She selected the next sample. The woman on the other end introduced herself briefly. Maple.
“Welcome to the Tower Interface. Please state the nature of your inquiry. Welcome to the Tower. How can I help you? Welcome to the Tower Interface. Welcome—”
Twilight’s vision swam as her mind decided to take a permanent holiday elsewhere.
Princess Celestia sipped at her tea. Twilight watched her with rapt attention, as she always did. It was silly, but for some reason ever since she was a child she had been unable to ignore even for a moment anything that Celestia did. Surely as the arcane forms were burnt into her mind and heart, so Celestia’s mundane doings were probably forever a part of her, for good or ill.
“You’re quiet today,” Celestia said.
“It’s been a long week,” Twilight replied with practiced grace. Specifically practiced, in fact. She had practiced excuses for the bags under her eyes as soon as she had noticed them. Celestia noticed such things, a small crack in her radiant facade, that she cared about trifles.
“I’m sure,” Celestia relented. Twilight checked that off the list in her head.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t looked forward to her periodic evening with Celestia. Just… she was very tired, these days. And litigating that to person after person after person wore on the will.
Celestia, as if she had heard all of these thoughts, continued. “I’m sure you are resting when you can. I know what it is like to burn the midnight oil so often that you’re not sure when up is up and what time it is.”
Twilight cracked an honest smile for a moment. “I do get enough sleep, at least. Not all of us can forgo the mortal coil and its restraints. Yet,” she added, after a pause.
“Yet. Though I have striven to keep myself as close to mortal rhythms as possible. I didn’t always,” Celestia said, and now she looked off, at nothing. She held a teacup in a perfect saucer and stirred with the other hand, and Twilight wondered absurdly how she managed to do that without looking and not worry about spilling the tea on her beautiful white robes. She could see the tea spilling in her mind’s eye, but it did not spill, and Celestia had continued.
“I strove and strove. I stayed up for days. Two thousand years ago I did not sleep for fourteen years. I had too much to do. Griffonia had imploded into war, and the Minotaurs had been drawn in. General war was the business of the day. I campaigned ceaselessly for a decade in Griffonia, battle after grisly battle, years of long brutal marches. And only when my fearful ponies begged me to stop did I relent. They were weary unto death. I could only watch and realize what I had done after it was, well. Done.”
A sip.
“War is an extraordinary circumstance,” Twilight said, despite knowing nothing about it.
“It is,” Celestia agreed simply.
“Sometimes I wish I could forgo sleep,” Twilight admitted. “Not that long, obviously. But for a long time. A few weeks, maybe. A month. Life would be easier.”
“Easier if you had the time?”
Twilight nodded. “So much easier.”
“Is it truly time you seek?” Celestia asked softly. Her burning sun’s-corona eyes were back. They always filled the room. Twilight felt momentarily naked before them. Her defenses, prepared and measured, began to melt away.
The experience was unpleasant and frightening. Not only did she fear the feeling, but she feared her own fear. This was Celestia! Why should she feel worry in the presence of Celestia? In that moment the distance between them felt a galaxy wide.
“I’m not sure I understand,” she said carefully.
“It’s not a trap, or a trick. I mean what I said, silly. Is having more time so important to you?”
“I suppose it is.”
“I’m always interested by that sentiment. I have had more time than anyone else, and I am not sure ‘more time’ is as nice or as useful as people seem to think. What you imagine, Twilight, is a kind of longer overnight work session. You imagine something that lasts a night at best, and you extend it outwards. But that is not how time works. Even without exhaustion, without sleep, fickle time is moving. We give time its meaning, and we describe its structure, but it is still a wild thing that cannot be as of yet tamed. More time will always look like paralysis, in the long view of history. More time for more rest, for more indecision. Time for more weariness.”
Twilight swallowed. “Shouldn’t that be avoidable?”
“Slowing down?”
“If you weren’t exhausted…” She gestured with one hand in a rolling motion. “You’d just keep going.”
Celestia’s smile was genuine, but it still felt oddly chilling.
“You’d think, wouldn’t you? Only engaging when you wanted to, only expending energy or care when it felt necessary. You could husband your strength for an eon. But the world is not a few connected empty rooms, is it? There’s all sorts of things in it. Always moving, they are. Always yelling and wanting to be seen. A million million souls hurtling from void to void,” Celestia said, returning to her tea. “A million souls desperate for some mark on the face of time, and almost none of them even get close, and even without knowing them you know they exist. Time impresses its own knowledge on you. It is… tiring.”
“That… that sounds tiring.”
Celestia hummed. “I surrendered my true power when the Union was formed, Twilight. I did so with grace, so I’m told. The truth was that it took all of my effort not to kiss the feet of those who took it from me.”
Twilight processed that. Or, rather, she tried to process that. It was a lot to think about. Perhaps Celestia sensed this. Perhaps she just knew from experience what it did to those little flames in her presence when she revealed even the smallest of secrets, for she smiled.
“I’ve brought the mood down.”
“No, not at all! You’ve just been thoughtful,” Twilight said quickly. “It’s me. I think.”
“Are you satisfied? Happy with what you are doing?”
Twilight bit her lip. “Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, I think so. I think that I am. As much as those words have meaning for me.”
Celestia sat back in the plush chair. “Then that is enough. Though, on reflection, I’ve said so once before. And yet…” she shook her head. “But for some reason, I cannot shake the feeling of time tonight, Twilight.”
Twilight shifted on the loveseat. Celestia’s study was far more welcoming in the morning, as the sun brightened very corner, but even in the dead of night, Celestia herself was a kind of sun.
“A melancholy mood?” Twilight asked, prodding with curiosity despite herself.
“Perhaps, yes. I’ve not had a good week myself, Twilight,” Celestia said with a little flourish over the table between her seat and Twilight’s loveseat. A small holo-projector there cast images in the air and Twilight’s practiced eye for detail made quick work of things.
“The shortages…”
Celestia sighed. “Yes. The shortages. Still ongoing, on the fringes. But now its spreading. I’ve been able to stem individual shortfalls with my personal arcane power, but how long does that last? Despite what many believe, I cannot be everywhere.” She cracked a small smile across the fuzzy images of angry townspeople crowding an ornate old-style cityhall. “And it takes time for even my teleportation to translate from here to somewhere as far as Hoofington. A few hours, in fact. Things obviously improved after I did arrive, but…”
“Too many moths smother the flame,” Twilight murmured.
“I hate that metaphor. I told you I did. Power is not the problem. Supply is. A system which grows outwards and in complexity inevitably becomes too much to handle unassisted.”
Twilight nodded. “I remember.”
“I still believe in technology, Twilight. I believe it can provide solutions to the problems it's created—I resent even that framing! What is the problem, exactly, in power? We have lit up the night and shielded ourselves from the sun’s excess. The wingless fly, the lame walk again. As information accumulates every person on this planet who has access to the web we create becomes more. A planet of people whose souls expand beyond their bodies into a great, heaving, information-filled mass. Culture and science and passion throwing us all forward… I still believe in it as I did the day the first reactor was fired. But the problem of complexity is still vexing. We made our stand on the idea that all things inevitably come out in raw numbers, Twilight. And I know it will, but…”
“It’s taking longer than you’d like,” Twilight said, and wanted to retreat. But this wasn’t about her. It wasn’t. She needed to know that.
“And longer than you would like, I’d imagine,” Celestia said with a laugh.
“Well, yes.”
Twilight settled again. She felt a little more at peace in this vein of reasoning. Not a complaint, not a condemnation. She was safe. And Celestia had always liked engaging like this on quiet evenings. It was practically a return to adolescence. She cleared her throat.
“The system, the equation, must be balanced out. If it weren’t destined to be, nothing before it would have worked. We know that our reasoning is sound. There is a solution to something like energy distribution, but more than that problems to the many other resource problems. A solution that does not require reaching for the stars, or wandering into the seas. One we can work out ourselves… with some help. A solution that does not privilege one over the other, food and energy and comfort and justice in full measure.”
“For everyone, everywhere, and all at once.”
“That was the original motto you suggested,” Twilight said, remembering back to those early meetings.
“Cutie Marks would be pleased,” Celestia replied drily. “I wish you drank, Twilight.”
Twilight blinked. “What?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s just…” Twilight could not believe it. An embarrassed Celestia. The world was on its way out. “I can’t help but feel, sometimes, as if I am living in a dozen times at once, and then all of a sudden am in none. Adrift, for a while, in a moment that I cannot share. A drink would be nice.”
Twilight mumbled something to the effect that she could, if it were important, and Celestia half-rose from her seat to touch Twilight’s hand.
“None of that, dear. You’re alright. Forgive the silliness of an old woman, and say nothing of it. Besides, there are much more interesting things to talk about!”
“Like what?” Twilight asked, feeling a bit of whiplash.
“Like the voice. You mentioned you were still trawling through vocal lines.”
Twilight groaned. “None of them work. I don’t know why. It’s irrational, and I hate that I cannot let go my gut responses. It’s so… it’s so unprofessional! I don’t want it to be me, or you, or any of the voices I’ve heard! It’s just…”
Celestia laughed. “Poor Twilight, struck by the artist’s madness.”
“Hardly.”
“If we knew it was going to be truly alive… we could simply let it choose.”
Twilight groaned again. “Alive is such a complicated word.”
“Oh, I know, I’m not here to badger you about it. Just an idle thought. It would solve the problem.”
And Twilight had to admit that it would, wouldn’t it? If the Earth itself was to have a guiding hand, it would make sense for it to have its own voice. And as they talked, she couldn’t help but imagine what it might say… and in place of a voice she had not chosen, she chose the voice of the woman who walked her dreams.