//------------------------------// // 2-4 // Story: Heroes Never Die // by Shimmerist Ari //------------------------------// “You know what a lot of you humans say to me?” Ragnarok asked. “That Sunset Shimmer robbed me of my humanity. Bullshit. It was gone long, long before she showed up. “You want to know what robbed me of my humanity? Working sixty hours a week doing meaningless work that benefits no one for the right to just barely exist with zero security. That robbed me of my humanity. Living in a society with zero sense of community, where you can just walk over the body of a collapsed person, where we spit on those made destitute by our excess, where you’re fucking lucky to get to see your friends once a month. That robbed me of my humanity. Having our art, culture, and living spaces all bastardized for the sake of the profits of some billionaire. That robbed me of my humanity! “Let’s be honest! Are any of you really humans? Your corporate overlords are transforming all of you against your will too, you know. But you won’t get to be magic ponies who can fly around and build your own little Shimmerist utopia out in the woods like I did. No, you’ll be sheep chained to machines that pump out worthless garbage no one cares about. You’ll be lucky if the fucking NFT you sacrifice your life to produce for Elon Musk has a goddam JPEG attached to it, mark my words. “In fact, they don’t even want you to be sheep. Sheep have herds, they have friends. Our rulers want you to be completely isolated and erode whatever sense of community and friendship you have so you can focus all of your time on single-mindedly increasing the number in this hellish idle game they’ve trapped you in. “So you know what? If that’s the alternative, I don’t think I got a bad deal at all. At least I can fucking fly. What did you get for your humanity?” So… Ari had a bit of a new obsession. And that obsession was Shimmerist propaganda. It was the only thing she watched anymore. Compulsively. At all times. But the alternative of course… Twitter had gotten worse in the past week. Her cancelation had a bit of a delayed effect, took a while to leak out from pony groups to more mainstream, more human ones. It seemed mostly her fellow lefties were out for her. The left seemed at odds with what to do with ponification. They liked ponies on an economic level, but not on an identity politics level. Right now, it felt like only the latter existed. Various groups came up with various attacks on her desire to legalize ponification. It erased people’s ethnicity. It erased their neurodivergencies. It (somehow) erased transgender people by changing their sex completely. It erased, most critically, their disabilities. Ari was somehow chiefly being accused of ableism. The story was of a Shimmerism turning someone who once wanted to help the disabled into one who wanted the total mass genocide of the deaf. That was a whole other can of worms. What with ponification ‘curing’ deafness and ponies not being able to do sign language. Then there was the effects it had on autistic people… Ari hadn’t even thought of any of that but now it was all being thrown at her in the worst possible faith imaginable. And if she couldn’t come up with answers she was Hitler or something. And maybe there was some kind of cogent point in all this, maybe a stronger person really could learn something like her reasonable critics told her to but… Ari couldn’t take the pressure. She couldn’t debate these people right now. All the hate messages and negative attention were too much. Every insult imaginable rang through her head, making her just want to lie in bed with the lights off all day. And that’s what she did… Except… Of course, she had her laptop with her. She had it on all the time so there would never be silence. And the one, most cathartic thing she watched was Shimmerist propaganda. She knew it was propaganda, but what did it matter? She just wanted the comfort of seeing someone who didn’t think she was a misanthropic Nazi hellbent on the mass genocide of deaf autistic children for thinking people should have the choice to ponify. Hours and hours were spent watching Shimmerists talk. It was the only thing she did in her free time. Never going outside, never opening the blinds. Just sitting in the dark, under the covers, watching Ragnarok and all the other ponies she discovered. At least she was getting more educated about Shimmerism. There really were a whole bunch of different types. Her curiosity led her away from the SSP ponies, who were her most kindred spirits to explore the diversity of Shimmerist thought. Eco-Shimmerists were ponies who mostly just wanted to live in the woods away from humans. They argued that ponies were better for the environment, being smaller, vegetarian, consuming less transport, etc. They tended to have names like Peace Feather and Love Shine. Earth Angle was probably the most famous of them, but Ari mostly watched Harmony Song’s video series ‘Simple and Together’ which was about living… well… “What I learned,” said Harmony, sitting outside in a beautiful forest, her friends off in the background, “is that you don’t need stuff to be happy. Above all, ponies are free from the stuff keeping you prisoner. Becoming a pony means disconnecting from all that materialistic garbage and reconnecting with nature and friends... the things that really matter.” Ari had some bad experiences with religion before, so she didn’t give Christian Shimmerists, who lived down south, much of her time. She admitted that their version of Christianity was slightly better. They emphasized the parts of the Bible where Jesus said to give all your money to the poor, that rich people didn’t go to heaven. Even still, she had an even stronger instinctual distrust of that group than any other. Separatist Shimmerists rarely made videos. They tended to be the most extreme. Unlike the SSP, they didn’t want to reform the United States, but separate from it and form their own pony nation. With each passing day, Ari couldn’t blame them. They weren’t very online, but the videos they did put out listed their endless grievances against humans and the human-dominated government. “Look at this straw ban they’re putting up!” said Rip. “Conservative senators, who were so against it, suddenly want to pass this everywhere because now they think it’s good for the environment? No! The humans are just trying to screw us over, knowing this will make the lives of ponies ever so slightly more difficult. And the Secure America Act allowing them to listen in on smart speakers and other ‘hands-free’ devices specifically? It’s all the same! “Why do we need to be part of a nation that actively despises us like this? Why are we the ones constantly being told to reconcile with these ghouls while they’re the ones taking actions to make our lives worse? Do you really want to eternally shackle ourselves to our oppressors?” Ari had been a bystander casualty in the whole straw fiasco. Made going out to eat way harder, not that she had the money for it anymore. Ari hadn’t even realized all the little needles the government was putting under the hooves of ponies trying to get them to rehumanize until seeing these videos. Even still, she preferred the SSP’s goal of taking over the government and replacing it with ponies to them. The techno-Shimmerists briefly caught Ari’s interest when she heard they were 90% human, the reverse of any other group. Turned out they were transhumanist libertarians who saw ponies and transformation magic as the next big thing. They were led by a ragtag group of millionaires and sometimes billionaires who wanted to legalize and commercialize transformation magic. Specifically, ponification, which they saw as a major step forward in humanity’s evolution. Ponies were ‘hyper-specialists’ as they put it. The evolution of society was moving towards more and more specialized roles for individuals and cutie marks were simply the ultimate realization of that. Overall, they were more practical than idealistic. Ari wasn’t dumb enough to think their leaders cared about much more than the money they could make from selling ponification. But if they did find a way, Ari would pay all of her money for their ponification injection. So even though they were kind of sus, Ari still liked watching them. Partially because seeing other human Shimmerists scratched a certain itch. It was validating. Probably the same way you felt the first time seeing your demographic represented on TV. Super Cycle (one of the rare pony techno-Shimmerists) was the most hyped-up of them all, with over ten billion dollars in funds gathered already, though she also seldom made public appearances. So Ari had to settle for the likes of Crypto-TF who maybe weren’t so bad if you ignored his NFT obsession. And was a human who wanted to be a pony! So there was that. “So looking at this through an effective altruism lense,” said Crypto-TF, “research into ETS is the single most effective use of your money. Right? You can donate your money to cancer research or Alzheimer’s or… you can put your money towards something we know can cure all of these diseases. Something we pretty much already have our hands on.” That argument made sense, at least. Ari nodded along wearily in the dark. “We already paid a massive, massive cost for ending ETS the way we did,” said Crypt-TF. “It is estimated that over a hundred million people will die over the next three years as a result of ending ETS. I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been stopped, obviously.” Obviously. “But.” But. “It did come with a steep, steep cost of a hundred million deaths. That’s more than COVID and World War 2 combined. More importantly… that’s a progressive number. Every year we don’t make ETS available is tens of millions of additional people sacrificed for the sake of not wanting to look ‘misanthropic’. I mean, I’m a human and…” Yeah. Ari heard that one before. She’d seen cheeky images claiming Sunset saved a billion lives (ending global warming) and Twilight killed a hundred million… and would have killed billions had she come a few weeks earlier. Everyone with cancer or whatever would have had it healed had they become ponies. It was one of the more controversial arguments, the kinds ponies couldn’t really say out loud but a human might just be able to get away with. Relatively speaking. Ari resisted the urge to check the latest batch of hate mail. Realistically, it was more like 40-100 million excess deaths due to ending ETS. Probably around 60. But of course, this guy would exaggerate to the high end. But the argument wasn’t without merit. Lots of people were on their deathbeds wishing they could become ponies instead but apparently letting them die was the ‘right’ thing to do? All her Shimmerist friends low-key believed in this line of thought but only said so out loud on Discord, in private. Spring Breeze herself said it would have been best for them to just let ETS go on for one more week, that way anyone who didn’t want to die could get infected. And anypony who changed without wanting to in that time could just rehumanize so was it really that big of a deal? “I’d go back to being a human for a week to save tens of millions of lives. Would you really not be willing to be a pony for one week to do the same?” Spring Breeze asked. To a non-Shimmerist, the answer was a resounding ‘yes’. But a fellow Shimmerist like Crypto-TF… Had she been seeing this guy as a ‘fellow’ Shimmerist this whole time? Ari lay on her back, looking up at the dark ceiling. “Am I Shimmerist?” A knock at the door! Ari jumped off her bed! Her first thought was that somebody had found her! She was getting swatted! “No! It’s gotta be…” What could it be? Ari carefully approached the door. Ari answered to find a man who was a little too well-dressed. “Hello. Are you Ari Webber?” He asked. “I’m with the rehumanization bureau.” Oh no! This was it! “But I’m already human.” “Yes, but you are a partial.” He gestured to the green in her hair. “Rehumanization can reverse the changes that were forced on you. It’s always free and I can schedule you to visit right now.” Was this seriously happening? “I like the green,” said Ari. “Are you sure that’s your genuine opinion?” He asked. “What are you even talking about?” “We know ETS has profound impacts on your psychology. It forces you to accept the changes that it makes and we’re not entirely sure what effects that might have in partials. It’s possible you only like your highlights due to brainwashing.” “You’re worried I might have been brainwashed into liking my hair?” Ari asked flatly. She reminded herself that these guys got a small commission for every person they signed up to rehumanize. “Don’t you find it disturbing that you may be forced to think the green in your hair is a good thing?” “No? Why would I even care if I’m brainwashed into liking my hair?” Ari shook her head. “There are other concerns. We don’t know the health effects of this sort of thing. Being a partial could cause cancer for all we know.” “Oh, it ‘could’, huh?” Ari was just about done with this guy. “What even are you? The fashion police? There are hundreds of homeless people out here and we’re spending how much to pay you to convince me to ‘fix’ my hair?” “You are allowed to choose to keep the changes if you want,” he backed off a little. “All we want is for everyone to have a fully informed choice.” Like fucking hell they did! Ari’s eye twitched. She wanted to shove this guy over but retrained herself. “My choice is no.” “That’s alright.” Seeing her anger, he backed off a little. “I do need you to sign this paper saying that you were informed the option to reverse it is available whenever you want.” He held out a pen and clipboard. Ari grumbled and pulled her hands out of her pockets. And after a while of explaining that her hands were already like that and she wasn’t brainwashed into thinking her hands were always like that, Ari finally managed to slam the door in that guy’s face. Then she ran back to her room seeking the sweet relief of more Shimmerist videos. At least that was over with. Wasn’t as bad as she feared. Only… A meme she’d seen a few times came to mind. ‘Of course he’s not gone. He’s never gone!’ A chill overtook her. “They wouldn’t. Would they?” Ari shuddered and looked back in the direction of the door. “Oh damn. Of course they would.” Her face fell forward, onto the keyboard. She turned her eyes up just a little to see a new notification. Thankfully not one from Twitter. Ari opened it and saw something that lifted her spirits. She got in! Her request to join Whisper 3, the pony-oriented social media app, had been approved! Still in beta, humans needed a referral to get in. Spring Breeze’s recommendation must have pulled through. Forgetting her recent encounter, Ari buried herself in registering for this. Once she was on here she’d delete that stupid Twitter account and move on with her life!