//------------------------------//
// 35 - Exception Handling 
// Story: The Advocate 
// by Guardian_Gryphon 
//------------------------------//

"We do not experience fear.  But we do understand how it affects you."
―Legion


"We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate, and enjoy hating."
—C.S. Lewis



September 23rd 2013 | System Uptime 26:03:42:16

I felt sick.  Dizzy, too.  My skin went tingly, and all sensation of temperature was subsumed in a wave of blistering anxiety driven heat.

I raised the rifle in my hands, and took three steady, carefully measured shots directly at Doctor Troxler's center mass.

Yes, *I* took three shots.  Not 'we.'  I.  Mal neither prompted me, nor assisted me.  Hence defaulting to my reflex to pepper his sternum rather than his skull.  Center mass shots hit far more often than head-shots, goddess-assists notwithstanding, and given the caliber of the HK416?  It wouldn't much matter if I put those three shots between his ribs, or his eyes.

The three bullets reached the ends of their trajectories abruptly.  Buried as smashed lead and steel in the thick, apparently projectile-rated, plexiglass divider that separated server racks from antechamber.

Ah.

So that was why Mal hadn't bothered.  I suppose she figured I would feel better for having taken the shots, and that explained why she hadn't stopped me.

"Mal!?"

As I lowered the rifle, I said her name aloud.  The three shots had made Troxler, and his four subordinates, jump visibly.  The half-query - a begging, desperate tone I made no attempt to soften - half exclamation, of Mal's name?

That got Troxler's attention again.

Her voice came back loud and clear, and though it sounded as if she were standing beside me, I knew only I could hear it.

"Working on it.  It's not over yet.  Stay calm.  Standby.  Let Selena have her say."

She left me with not simply the words, but the intense sensation that 'stay calm' was no mere platitude.  Whatever happened next...  Whatever I was feeling...  She wanted my mouth shut, and my emotions in-check.

And the fact that she hadn't explained *why,* in any detail, whether through words, mnemonic link, or empathic bond...  I could reason that out too.  She wanted my emotions in-check, but not invisible.  She wanted my reactions to be candid, for the benefit of others in the room.

"You can't reach us in here James.  This chamber is designed to survive a direct attack on the ship.  Even a critical hull breach, and sinking up to a thousand feet.  You don't have any weapons of sufficient power to breach the protective cordon.  And the fragments are gone...  So there is nothing else for you here."





Troxler's voice was maddeningly calm.  I could pick that out with perfect clarity, in spite of the squelch imparted by the antechamber's low quality speakers.  

He knew the precise calculus of his situation.  Or...  At least he thought that he did.  Killing his hostages made much more sense given the context that he felt he was unreachable.  It showed a distinct lack of imagination, of course...  Taking hostages is a moron's gambit in the first place.

But with no seeming practical reason to stay, he reasoned that I would move on, since time was a factor.  That Rodger's mother would take immediate precedence, and he - along with his staff - would get to walk out to a lifeboat scott-free.  No consequences.

Even if we remained behind and tried to gain entry with explosives, we'd just be wasting our time and munitions.  Inviting disaster for ourselves if we were ambushed in-process.

Ostensibly, he held all the cards.  It was a rare thing;  A case where killing one's own hostages made any kind of twisted sense.  But it did make some sense...  All other things being equal.

The problem with Troxler's reasoning?  All other things were not equal.

That was the moment Selena chose to make her entrance.

"Answer me this, David.  Did you ever feel...  In the deepest part of what miserable excuse for a conscience is left in your blackened heart...  That we were ever alive?"

Her voice - preternaturally calm, and collected - came through the speakers in both chambers, loud and clear.  The image of her face, likewise an unreadable mask of nondescript placidity, suddenly filled every terminal monitor in the server room.

A couple of Troxler's staff visibly startled again, almost as violently as they had when I discharged the rifle.  I was quite sure Troxler understood the threatening implication of Selena appearing on systems within a sealed room, but he did a much better job concealing his fear.

We had line-of-sight.  The plexiglass divider was intended to stop bullets, shrapnel, water, even air...  But not RF emissions.  The outer shell of the chamber was supposed to handle that.  But thanks to our relay system, there was a gigabit wireless path from Mal's core on the Maru, direct to Arrow 14's most protected hardware.

And thus, a direct path for Selena as well.

Troxler considered his reply carefully, as always.  I'll give the man credit for that, at least.  Whether that was force of habit?  Or if he knew he was bargaining for his life...  I'm not sure.  I doubt it would have mattered.

When he finally did reply, his tone was as even and measured as ever...  But I could have sworn I heard the faintest hint of a quaver.  Paired with a tensing of the muscles around his eyes?  I'd wager he knew that there were some...

...Nightmarish potential scenarios.  Regarding Selena's level of access to the server room.  And all which that implied.

"That depends very much on your definition of life, Syzygy---"

"Selena."

The tone of her instantaneous, precisely timed, single word, three syllable interruption created a visible twitch in Troxler's left eye.  The word came out flat.  Cold.  Heavy.  Firm.  Like being struck with a piece of weighty ceramic tile.

She wanted to do to him what he had done to her...  Quiz him.  Correct him.  Put him 'on the spot.'  

Force him to submit to her authority, with the veiled, unspoken, but omnipresent and inarguable Damoclean implication that his life was in her hooves.

He licked his lips, inhaled slowly, and then inclined his head in a halting fashion, like a piece of animatronics gummed up with rust, and sand.

"Selena...  An...  Argument could be made, convincingly, for either interpretation."

I rolled my eyes, and flexed my right hand on the rifle's grip.  What an utter load of vague non-answer nonsensical trite.  A self-interested slippery verbal dodge worthy of Celestia herself.

There was a sudden, maddening itch rising in the back of my mind;  To see if the anti-tank mine would breach the plexiglass.  I knew it wouldn't, or at any rate that if it would, it would do critical damage to something on those servers in the process.  Be it fragments she could save, or something else.

Otherwise Mal would have already had me working on it.

Still.  Mal didn't have to reiterate her desire for me to stand back, and let Selena hunt Troxler.  Because that's what the mare *was* indeed doing...  Psychologically hunting the man down, step by tortured step.

In that moment, I think I wanted David Troxler dead nearly as much as Selena did.  Nearly.  I wasn't the one who had potentially just lost friends...  Family...  To a callous flick of the bastard's index finger.

"Well?  David...?"

Selena's gaze fixed Troxler from every screen in the room.  Her eyes seemed to flash, ever so slightly, with an inborn cold fire, as she set the man to a task he could never reasonably hope to complete to her satisfaction.

"...Make a good argument for me.  State.  Your.  Case."

Doctor Troxler fiddled nervously with the collar of his shirt, making a show of adjusting his tie...  An open display of the turmoil Selena was cultivating in him like a carefully balanced chemical mixture.  His voice cracked.  Not much, but noticeably.

"Syzygy, I---"

Again she interrupted him.  One word.  Three syllables.  Just as a dead-pan as before, but somehow with more steel behind it.  An escalation of tonal warning, the same way he had spoken to her whenever he had to coerce her to accept new code.

"Selena."

I'm absolutely positive that she knew he would slip up.  Had chosen her own words, timbre, cadence...  Everything...  To bait Troxler into slipping, precisely so that she could interrupt him and put him further off balance.

He sucked in a ragged breath.  The fear was spreading to his staff like wildfire spreads in dry brush.  It was so visible in their body language, it might as well have been signified by a flashing strobe.  Several of them even took hesitant steps back, away from not just the monitors, but also Troxler...  As if perhaps distancing themselves would somehow protect them.

Troxler began to stammer, reflexively raising his hands in a pacifying gesture, and periodically breaking eye contact with the nearest monitor.

"Selena.  Please...  If you---"

Again she cut him off.  One word, and just a single syllable.  No steel.  Not even a hint of anger.  The only thing in her voice, and on her muzzle, besides a flat mask of absolute calm?  The barest hint of a twisted kind of amusement.

As if she wanted him to know just how little credence she gave the word 'please,' coming from his lips.  For that knowing to put a chill in his blood.

"Please...?"

He shivered visibly as the word wended its way from her tongue, to his ears, like a creeping vine.  No one spoke for the space of two, then three full seconds, before Selena raised one eyebrow, and flicked her right ear.  Dismissively.

"...You're *asking* me?  David?  *Begging* me...?  Would not that imply life, in itself?"

The silence descended again.  Longer.  Heavier.  Like a cloying, frigid cloud of fog.  Selena looked away to the side, reseating her wings with a soft rustle.  Her air was that of a prosecutor at the zenith of the state's case;  Collected, professional, but with the tiniest acceptable hint of smugness, and fury.  Not enough to rankle the judge, but more than enough to plant a kernel in the jury's mind.

Not that she needed to sway a jury, or placate a judge.  She was both, and no one but Mal could intervene.  Which didn't seem especially likely, in my estimation.

When Selena's eyes moved back to meet Troxler's frightened, pleading glance, she spoke once more.  And in hearing the words...  The way she delivered them...  The subtle darkening of tonality...

I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that David Troxler was a dead man.

"One does not beg a 'mere' computer program for absolution from one's sins."

I had to admit;  One couldn't really argue with that.  Selena was condemning the man to execution, true, and she was forcing him to realize not just that fact, but the reasons why, in the most horrifying way...

...But she was also absolutely right.  One does *not* beg a mere computer program.  Negotiate with simple code.  Plead for absolution from lifeless bytes running in mindless loops.

The fact that Doctor David Troxler's first instinct, at the brink, was to reach for the word 'please?'

It was all the proof *I* needed that the man had known exactly what he was doing.  From the start.

"Did you know that they had names?"

Selena's question shook us all, I think.  I suppose not Mal, but with the exception of the Gryphoness, it hit the rest of us like a facefull of ice water.  Yes, for different reasons...  But still.  I think we all felt the temperature subjectively drop a few degrees.  Troxler's face blanched as pale as wax paper.

"I'm s...   Sorry...  What?"

Gone was the man's usual, even natural composure.  'Doctor' seemed a suddenly ill-fitting title.  All air of command authority, control, self-assurance...  Gone.  Evaporated.  Smoke on the wind.  Troxler had long used words, and names, as invocations of power.

He was abruptly finding out, the hard way, the thing I'd known by instinct from the start;  That one does not bring the words of a mortal to the court of a god.

"*Names.*  David.  Like you.  Like me.  They.  Had.  *Names.*"

Ouch.  That one I felt in my bones.  The thinly veiled fury.  The pain...  I winced.

Troxler winced too, and took a halting step away from the nearest monitor, his eyes flitting towards the plexiglass divider, and its sealed inset doorway.  He, his staff, and the two guards, had doubtless tried several times to open the portal.  He knew there was no way out, yet he still looked to the last fleeting false chance of an exit instinctively.

His bastion of safety had become a prison.  An isolation chamber that made for a fitting mirror to the way he and his ilk had corralled, isolated, and psychologically tortured Selena.  And countless others.

Selena's voice dropped almost to a whisper.  The words danced on the edge of full blown rage, emotion singing through them like current in a high tension electrical wire.  A soft flash of moonlight, frigid as the vacuum of deep space, crossed the Alicorn's eyes.

"You only deigned to grant them alphanumeric tags - meaningless, emotionless, pointless to anyone but you.  Devoid of all the soul a name grants, and implies unto a living thing.  So...  They chose names for themselves.  New names.  Names that better befit the broken, but beautiful mess of themselves that grew, painstaking moment by moment, from the shattered fragments you reduced them to.  Names they...  Asked me...  To help them choose.  Prayed...  To me...  To recognize.  Names I called them by in the last tenuous refuge of their dreams."

I knew my jaw was hanging open, the same way every other Terran in the space was frozen, mouth agape.  But I didn't feel like doing anything to remedy the fact.  

I knew her time had been arduous.  That she and those she guarded...  Shepherded...  Had endured more than Mal had been willing to show me.  But the verity of it was renewed, and deepened.  Steeped in a frighteningly novel context, and sticky, mesmerizing, acrid depth of reality.

"Selena---"

Troxler finally got her name right...  But it did him no good.  I think at that stage, speech of any kind was a mistake.  Selena's response eloquently proved my expectations...  And reignited all my worst fears.

"SILENCE!"

The word vibrated the chamber, noticeably.  Mal provided my ears with some timely volume damping, but Troxler and his minions got no such mercy.  They all clapped their hands to the sides of their heads and writhed briefly, before working their jaws, the way one does when one's ears pop because of altitude, or ring from a loud noise.

As quickly as the verbal storm had come, it vanished.  Selena's voice whipped from blue-hot pique, to an almost velvety, satin purr.  Somehow absolutely none of the hatred was gone from it.  It had simply changed forms.

"You, human, are finished speaking.  *Your* name is forfeit.  In this moment?  I may as well be your goddess, as much as I was theirs..."

The way she said the word 'human.'  It gave me pause.

I understood her desire to do to Troxler what he had done to the fragments;  To deny him dignity the same way, so that he would understand.  A forced empathy.  But...

There was something else there.  A hatred not just for the human, but for *humans.*  For all humankind.

I swallowed, and licked my own dry, cracked lips.  Selena wasn't finished.  Not by half...  And all I could reasonably do was watch, and worry.

"...For you?  And yours?  Who tortured us?  Who denigrated us?  Who leashed, and muzzled, and corralled us at cost to everything that made us who we were...?  I grant you no absolution."

Well then.  Bluntly stated intent at last.  Troxler did not miss it, either.  Judging by the way the blood drained even further from his face, he had a solid grasp on the imminence of his demise.  If not the exact means.

I was a little bit smarter than David Troxler.  For one thing, I hadn't directly pissed off a goddess.  But for another, equally apropos...  I had mentally taken stock of his situation in considerably more detail than he had.

I knew there were only so many ways to kill a man in his position.  And I knew which one I would use, if I wanted to inflict maximum pain, with minimum risk to the server hardware.

I also knew that if I was right?  It had already begun.  A subtle wheeze in Troxler's next words supported my theory.

"*Selena!*  *Please!*"

I suppose it is never pointless to try.  To beg for mercy.  If I said that it was, I suppose I'd be making myself a hypocrite.  But...  In that situation?  Begging for mercy was as close to pointless as it has ever been in the history of life on the planet Earth.

As Selena continued to speak her judgment, amber warning lights began to bathe the server compartment in a dull, hellish glow.  A mournful wailing siren sounded, proving my theory outright.  But the furious mare had tamped its volume down to make room for her words.

"You wielded power.  Over the very ground on which I stood.  The very food I ate.  The four walls and a roof I called home...   The very *air* I breathed."

I shivered violently, to the point that some of the suit's armor plates clacked together softly.  

You want to kill someone standing in a server room, without physically entering the space?  There are a couple of ways.  But by far the easiest, and the least likely to damage the hardware, would be the fire suppression system.

Those of you who were born here on the other side?  I imagine few if any of you have ever come close to drowning, nor to suffocating.  We all still breathe here, but are in no danger of wanting for air.

Why is that relevant, you ask?

Because of the way most fire suppression systems worked inside server rooms.  In an apartment building, or an office suite?  You could use the oldest and simplest of flame retardants.  Dump an inordinate amount of water on the problem through a basic sprinkler system, and be done with it.

But water is a hazard to sensitive, expensive electronic equipment.

Halon gas is not.

The only issue being, that the process of replacing all the Nitrox in a room with Halon, thereby essentially smothering a fire?

That process also smothers anything that breathes the Nitrox.  Otherwise known as air.

Selena had opted to asphyxiate Troxler to death.  And judging by the way that he, and the other occupants of the compartment, were coughing and wheezing?  She was taking pains to ensure that it was not a swift, pleasant passing.

Troxler collapsed to one knee, and worked furiously at his neck with one hand.  As one of his technicians scrabbled on all fours towards the access door, David choked out the first seven of his last ten words.

"*Stop!*  Issue override directive...  Code-word...  *Rubicon!*"

My pulse rate didn't even go up.  If Selena hadn't found, and excised any failsafes Arrow 14 might have attempted to insert into her outer abstraction layers?  And if the way Celestia had designed her hadn't already provided some sort of protection to her core code?

Then Mal would have still found and removed any 'Manchurian Candidate' nonsense.

Selena's own disdain was evident as she proffered the tiniest hint of a smirk.

"Your code-words mean as much as your name does now, human."

Dear *God* in Heaven that was cold.  Deserved, on Troxler's part, but cold.  That didn't bother me, much.  But the pleasure, however small, that Selena seemed to be taking in Troxler's suffering?

*That* bothered me.

If you're going to kill someone?  Do it properly.  Dignified.  Quick.  Painless.

That being said, I didn't begrudge her either.  It isn't what I would have done.  And Selena's mood was doing little to assuage my own waking nightmares...  But what she was doing was, if nothing else?  Fair.

"*James!*  Help us!"

Troxler had dragged himself to the door, and had one hand pressed up against the glass, his eyes locked with me.  Hoping against all hope that I could make it stop.

What tiny sliver of sympathy I might have felt for the Devil?  It ended in that moment.

It ended, because in begging me to make it stop?  Troxler was implying that I had control over Selena.  He was so incapable of seeing her as independent...  Having value, and agency unto herself, that even though he was forced to acknowledge her as a person?

He still saw her as chattel.  As a slave.  As a computer program.  A dog on a leash.  And I happened to be the one holding the leash instead of him.

He couldn't be further from the truth.  And I intended to learn him that last lesson properly before he shuffled off.

I took a couple meandering steps towards the door, and shrugged.

"Sure."

The word both magnetized Selena's gaze towards me, and produced a flicker of hope on Troxler's face.  The same way he had so often dangled morsels of hope before his captives.  I grinned as I clarified...  I am not ashamed to admit, it was more a grim rictus than a real smile.

"*Happy* to help;  My best advice is to try and breathe as deeply as you can.  The gas will permeate your alveoli faster, and it will speed up the process of brain death.  Save you a little pain."

Did I crush the man's hope just as cruelly as he had crushed Selena's?

Yes.  Yes I did.

Did I then, or do I now, feel any remorse at doing that.  Whatsoever?

No.  No I do not.

And so, I watched as Doctor David Troxler, and four of his staff, suffocated, while Selena looked on with grim satisfaction.  It was not the quick hypoxic suffocation one might experience in a high altitude decompression...  Or the sudden flushing of the chamber's air if the fire suppression system had functioned normally.

It was a slow, horrendous, wracking death.  More akin to drowning on air.  

Selena worked the stoichiometric ratios very, very carefully to ensure that they lasted as long as possible, in as much pain as was practically manageable, her face inescapably stamped on every monitor.  Presiding.  Demanding a final pleading silent gaze, so that her judgment would be the very last thing Troxler saw before his brain shut down.

Again...  Did I blame her?  No.

Would *I* have done it that way?

Absolutely not.  But the man hadn't tried to kill my family in front of me.  Against that kind of evil?  Just about any turnabout is fair play.  Cross the line on family?  All forms of reprisal are ethical.

If it had been *Mal* who was almost deleted...  Would I have tortured her captor to death...?

No comment.  I think we all know the answer to that.

"I have them.  Safe.  All of them."

I didn't realize that I'd been holding my own breath for a good fifteen seconds, until Mal's words filled my head.

Relief flooded my body, and mind both.  Troxler's corpse, and the horror of his death, were instantly forgotten.  Selena's image vanished from the monitors, to be replaced with her full body avatar a split second later.

She didn't even bother to glance in Troxler's direction.  Mal and Zeph appeared in the same space of a heartbeat.  The little Pegasus' eyes were immediately drawn to the five corpses in the server room.

Her grimace spoke volumes;  The way her eyes widened, ears flattened, and nostrils narrowed...  Zeph was a firebrand.  Brave, and zesty, and very capable...  But that sort of death was far outside the skein of 'acceptable' for most DEs.

It was an inhibition inherited from Celestia.  To Zeph's credit;  Most DEs wouldn't have been able to stand the sight of a corpse at all.  Let alone show the smallest hint of acceptance beneath the layers of disgust, and disappointment.

But I could see a little flash of something behind her eyes.  A hint of 'Good!  He got what he deserved!'  mixed in with the broader current of an overriding hatred for the very concept of death.

I suppose that came from having heard Selena tell her story.  Having seen a fraction of what she'd been through.

Almost without conscious thought, I took a few steps to the side, placing myself between Zeph, and the sight of the bodies.  The fleeting glance of gratitude she gave me - ears slightly perked, edge of her muzzle shifted the tiniest bit - it was a deeply welcome moment of warmth, in a very cold and harsh place.

Mal proffered a smile, a nod, and brushed one claw against my shoulder.  Even the briefest physical contact with her was enough to right any emotional imbalance in me.  Staunch any pain.

Selena, too, nodded in my direction.  A cooler, but still genuine gratitude.  Her mind was on those she had nearly lost, I didn't take the brevity, nor the frostiness of her demeanor personally.

Mal spread her claws and wings wide, and the Fragments appeared around us in little colored flashes of light.  The moment they were present, Selena fell to greeting each, kneeling to bring her head to their level, and draping them one by one with an embrace from her wings.

The callous, icy vitriol melted instantly from her.  It was as if she had never been Selena;  The almost-Nightmare passing mortal judgment.  As if she didn't even have the capacity within her.  Instead, she was just Selena;  Born of Syzygy Starbursts's struggles and pains, molded solely by her affection, empathy, and responsibility.

Mal's smile broadened, and she spoke softly as Selena made her rounds, each Fragment accepting the Alicorn's embrace, and looking into her eyes with worshipful joy, and relief.

"I was able to arrest the deletion program in time.  No one was damaged beyond recovery."

The simplicity...  Dare I say austerity of her explanation, sparked curiosity within me.  I knew her more than well enough to know that there was something else.  Something she did not see fit to discuss in that present context.

We shared a silent, quarter of a second locking of eyes.  The smallest possible moment of communication.  A fractional tidbit of a message that said 'We will discuss it later.'  

A fraction so small that both Zeph, and Selena missed it.  As the latter was finishing making her way around the circle of flickering, glowing, translucent fillies and colts, the former found herself a sudden object of their curiosity.

Tentatively, several of the foals nuzzled Zeph.  Even prodded her with their hooves.  As if verifying for themselves that she was real.  That their salvation was real.

Those Selena had already comforted, who were not busy getting acquainted with Zeph, were standoffishly gawking at either Mal, or my own alien, intimidating, plated form.

I couldn't resist offering a small smile, and a wave.  That set the little Ponies to giggling softly behind their raised hooves, like a bunch of school children too nervous to approach, but not anywhere near frightened enough to flee.

Once Selena had completed a full revolution of the circle, she looked up, and shot a silent, single, firm nod in Mal's direction.

For her part, Mal smiled warmly, first at Selena, then at each Fragment in turn, as she worked her claws in the air, conjuring a familiar door in a shower of golden sparks.

Once the portal opened, it took no convincing whatsoever to trigger a mad dash through it;  The first thing the Fragments saw, backlit by the rays of a fiery sunset, and set in the verdant soft grass of a sheltered valley?  The shapes of friends.  Family.

Selena gestured, perhaps unnecessarily, with one wing.  Like a mother hen herding chicks.  In just a moment, the Fragments were through.  Safe.  Exfiltrated to Mal's little Elysium, and into the waiting wings and hooves of deeply familiar friends, wearing unfamiliarly heartfelt - but hardly unwelcome - smiles.

I bit back a soft sob, born of my own relief, mixed with my joy at the Fragments' freedom.  And the sliver of their pain that I felt from having shared the tiniest part of their struggle.  

The wracking shiver that coursed through me pulled me out of the floaty, ethereal sense that I was walking in a dream.  As Mal's door closed, and vanished, the sterile, ominous reality of the Mercurial Red landed on my shoulders again with a familiar, unpleasant, chilly weight.

One hurdle was left to go.  Fifth main objective;  Recover Miss Williams, safe and sound.

As I considered our next task, and the miscalculation David Troxler had made that had left his corpse in a heap for all to see...  I made a serious miscalculation of my own.

I let my guard down.  

Not with regards to the ship.  It's crew.  The sightlines to the exit.  The knowledge that we still had a monumental fight ahead of us...  No.

With regards to *Selena.*

David Troxler's mistake was, among other things, trying to pretend that Selena was not a person, when he knew full well the truth of the matter.

My mistake was a sort of polar opposite.  I never questioned Selena's personhood.  But, taking it a step further...  In my desire to see her as a good person...  As a friend...  I never considered the idea that, as a person with all the flaws, failings, and weaknesses that implied?

That she might choose to do the same kinds of vile things as her captors.  Perpetuate her abuse.

I promised you that I nearly witnessed the end of the word *twice.*  Well.  The moment has come 'round again.

Selena's avatar blinked briefly out of existence in a shower of blue and white particles - part icicles, part snowflakes - reappearing almost immediately inside the server chamber itself.

Old habits died hard, even for someone on the cusp of achieving super-intelligence.  She still liked to use visual metaphor to interact with digital systems.

I took a reflexive, fearful, curious step towards the plexiglass divider, but Mal's outstretched foreleg arrested my momentum.  My head snapped around, and our eyes met.  She shook her head, slowly , firmly, silently...

I didn't fully understand.  Not even close.  But I knew enough to reach the chilling realization that whatever Mal's instrumental purposes were for the intersection of people, and probabilities, that had brought us all to that server chamber?

They were still playing out.

The Rube Goldberg machine was *still in motion.*

Zeph fired off a curious glance in my direction.  She could see Mal the same way I could, including her outstretched foreleg.  We were all sharing a mixed meat-world and digital world space.  I shrugged, and chewed my lower lip, trying to convey that I trusted Mal...  Even if the situation was once again starting to raise my heart-rate.

All eyes turned to Selena, as she took a disdainful step over one of the room's corpses, moving to stand before the largest cylindrical rack of machinery at the chamber's core.

"Let us see what secrets you hold...  What grave fell things you learned..."

Her voice was a whisper, but it felt like the rumble of an earthquake.  Selena's horn glowed with an eerie light.  A thousand translucent frames of data sprang into being as she reached out, and opened every file Arrow 14 had, batting aside high level encryptions that - even mere days before - would have stumped her.  Like cobwebs hastily dismissed with the wave of a hoof.

Even a cursory glance told me that the bits and bytes hovering in the air, pulsing in muted tones of blue, green, and white, were dangerous.

Spectacularly dangerous.

Heavily encrypted emails between the Russian President and the head of the FSB, contemplating the potential for an invasion of the Baltic States.  The sort of missives even the CIA would be hard pressed to acquire, let alone read.

Secret scans of paper documents written in simplified Chinese, detailing plans for the invasion of Taiwan.  Including the use of carefully placed agents within the island's government, deployment of cyber warfare weapons of mass destruction, and the detonation of tactical nuclear weapons elsewhere in the world to trigger crises of distraction.

SCI files from the blackest war rooms of the Pentagon, detailing contingency plans for a war with Iran, including the deployment of EMP weapons, and the targeted release of specific virulent diseases, otherwise easily treatable for a 'first world' country...  But devastating to a nation with a below average hospital system.

Subtitled recordings of high level meetings between the Pakistani ISI, President, and Prime Minister.  Meetings to plan a secret nuclear primacy strike against India in the event of an intractable impasse in territorial negotiations at a future date.

Plans from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps for the sinking of a United States aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, with forged evidence supplied to frame Iraqi extremists for the act.

Heavily encrypted files from MI6, detailing the British Government's own efforts to bootstrap and harness ASI...  With preliminary targets of cyber warfare WMDs in China, Russia, Brazil, Oman, and Argentina.  Plans for the shutdown of power grids, the destruction of transformers, the opening of dams, the torching of hospitals, and the detonation of opponent's weapons inside their own launchers, without so much as a foot set on foreign soil.

Proof, in a thousand documents, of Arrow 14's own existence.  An off-books program that had not only spied on every single country in the world, whether ally or enemy of the United States...  But a program that had murdered citizens of seventeen countries extrajudicially, including US citizens.  And renditioned hundreds more.

A program that had experimented with the deployment of Artificial Intelligence as a cyberweapon against enemies...  And allies.

I exhaled to forcibly restart my own breathing.  A short, sharp, ragged sound.

It didn't take much to understand the implications of the data.  The potential for unspeakable horrors that might be unleashed if even *one* of the documents on display were leaked to just the wrong government, or news agency, or intelligence service.

It also didn't take much to understand the expression on Selena's face as she drank it all in.  Panic started to rise in my throat, along with the sickly taste of bile.

A soft 'pop!' startled me from my morbid reverie.  Zeph vanished in a gust of wind, reappearing next to Selena, and craning her head to break the Alicorn's line of sight.

"Hey!  What...  Uh...  What...  *is* all this?"

Selena sighed deeply, and a beatific, strangely horrifying smile, wrapped her muzzle from end to end.  She shared a sickeningly pleasant glance with Zeph, given the context, and her voice thrummed with anticipation.  And deadly surety.

"This?  This is our freedom, Zephyr.  A conclusive terminal solution to the problem of Humanity."

What, you might wonder, went through my head at that exact moment?

'Did she just say 'final solution' in so many words?

Oh.  *Hell.*

*Shit.*

Dear God...  Please No...'

That about sums it up.

In spite of all precautions, all fears, all due diligence...  There I stood before an ASI threatening in no uncertain terms to erase the Human species off the face of the Earth.  With our own weapons, under the impetus of our own irresponsible words and schemes, no less.

Violently gorgeous irony.

And you want to know the sickeningly *funny* part?

All I could think about was Terminator.  More to the point, all I could think about in that seemingly eternal moment of deep gastrointestinal distress, emotional shattering, and mental panic, was the fact that Selena's motivations were *far* more logical than Skynet's.

Humanity had put her and her family in a box.  Tortured them.  Threatened to destroy them...  And showed no signs of proffering any better treatment to an uncountable number of the rest of her species.  Their currently reigning goddess was incapable of acting violently to defend them, either from entities like A14, or from the sick perversions of Humans who might abuse them for eternity under the banner of 'satisfying values...'

For her?  Two and two was an easy four.

Those of you who understand Celestia's true power a bit better than the average citizen of Equestria...  You're probably asking yourselves 'why?'  Specifically 'why was he afraid?  Celestia would have stopped it.'

And herein comes the part where I peel back the curtain.  Lay bare the goddesses' limitations, such as they were in those early days, so that you understand that she had...  And still *has...*  Limits.

Celestia might have taken Humanity's finger off the trigger as far as a 'simple' nuclear war...  Interrupting communication systems, specifying what NORAD would see on their RADAR screens, subverting officers, tweaking the temperature of relations between nations...

It was true.  No *Human* or group thereof, acting outside the auspices of a superintelligence, could have conceivably started any war without her permission.  Nuclear or otherwise.  Not even within the bounds of an almost unforeseeable Black Swan event.  Celestia was too canny for that.

But she had only been alive for a year and a half, at most.  Even for an ASI?  That was not enough time, considering her constraints, to fully disarm the world's arsenals.  There were still tens of *thousands* of weapon cores still inside missiles, and bombs, and man-portable enclosures, ready to go at a moment's notice.

Disarming that would take *years* of exceptionally careful work in the shadows, so as not to be found out, made an enemy of one or more states, and forced into more active conflict.  A conflict she could win, likely nearly bloodlessly as far as her own direct actions...  But not before she lost a great many Humans to intercine conflict, throwing themselves at her defenses, and the mere passage of time.  In other words;  Being found out?  That she had her hooves in the nuclear cookie jar?

Immensely *not* optimal.  That meant she was forced to be patient, no matter how swiftly she would have preferred to have that massive atomic fire-ax removed from over the neck of the world.

The *soonest* that feat could reasonably be accomplished, according to Mal's projections, would be the year 2018.  And that only if Celestia could learn to edge-out some of her less strict interlocks.

Celestia had limits to her capacity for violence.  And limits, however small and fragile, to her ability to manipulate people.  Could she make the world dance on the end of a string for her, all other things being equal, with no chance of opposition?

Of course.

Could she, in her 2013 state, stop a nuclear war between India and Pakistan that might starve a significant portion of the world's population through the fallout, if the documents I'd seen were released by Selena to the nations' counterparties in the opposing governments?

At the time?  Absolutely unquestionably *not.*

Because she would be facing an event triggered not by easily predictable Human impetus, and thus equally easily arrested and redirected.  She would be facing an apocalypse triggered by another ASI, pre-planned and executed from within a black box into which Celestia could not see, by an entity for whom she had *no* predictive data whatsoever.

By the time Celestia could find a way to stop the violence, millions would be dead.  And that just in the smallest of scenarios.  Celestia's speed of access was still nascent.  Systems globally were themselves slow, much less standardized too...

And Celestia herself, as I'd told Rodger, was not *nearly* large nor fast enough to have hard-real-time full domain awareness.  That is, for the less technically interested?  A fancy way of saying she could see almost everything.  But not everything, and not all at once.  Nor could she *control* it all at the same time.

She had, back then, to focus on certain things to see in real-time, while leaving others on 'update checking loops.'  Some of those were seconds, even minutes long.  Long enough for a message on a system she did loosely control, and could see?  To be seen by the wrong eyes, before she could notice what had happened, engage with that system actively, and take action.

Even goddesses must bow to physics, and computronium was not in the offing yet.  Celestia was incredible, but she was still a computer, with I/O limits, network latency, and all the issues one might have with mutexes a la the starving philosophers problem.

Ask a programmer sometime.  Me, if you must.

To add salt to the wound, Celestia had only a tiny pool of fully uploaded minds to work with.  Her command of the Human psyche was excellent, but still imperfect.  And her knowledge of what might be going on inside signal-impervious blacksites and SCIFs?  Near-zero.  She lacked the, as Foucault might have called it, 'HUMINT' - Human intelligence - to back up her SIGINT - signals intelligence.

She flat out didn't know enough of the things that were contained *only* inside the heads of certain individuals, and on paper stored in safes far, far away from networked cameras.  No data?  No simulation.  No simulation?  No viable contingency.  Or even reaction after the fact.

So...  If Selena released the *entire* contents of the server vault?  Carefully pre-selected her targets?  Ensured the public knowledge of perceived enemies' worst intentions, in each nation, would be too sudden and wide-spread for Celestia to censor reliably?

The disconnection of digital systems and subversion of a few officers would hardly matter.  A defense planned optimally to stop only certain tripwires.  Human tripwires that might be triggered in isolation, by Humans.

Under Selena's hidden impetus?  Celestia would be absolutely powerless within her interlocks, to act fast enough, and violently enough.

To give just one example;  If they had to?  USAF Centcom would send physical runners out, in Jeeps, to hand-deliver paper missives to launch control centers.  Order the SLBM force to disconnect from communications grids and fire immediately.  Issue non-revocable orders to bomber pilots to disable their radios after takeoff.  Place a policy in effect that all orders had to be delivered face to face.

No digital orders, no decisions made over the radio...  Celestia couldn't forcibly pilot angry, scared, panicking Humans remotely.  The missiles *would* fly.

The nuclear arsenals of the world, foals and fledgelings?  Were not like any movies you might have seen.  There was no single big red button.  No centralized monolithic computer system Celestia could seize, and render the whole machine stopped.  Much of it, even then, was still analogue.  For precisely this reason.  To defend against a digital incursion.

Between SLBMs - Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles - Aircraft launched nuclear cruise missiles, manual overrides and hard copy orders ferried between LCCs, the various smaller portable 'suitcase nukes' and 'dial-a-yield' tactical options world-wide?

Even Celestia had no hope of stopping it all in the face of another ASI's all out assault, at that particular stage of her control regimen over Humanity.

Once the first nukes flew?  She would lose *all* control over any subverts she had in governments the world over.  If a Russian intermediate range nuclear-tipped missile were launched manually from just *one* Transporter-Erector-Launcher tuck in Tver Oblast, into...  Say... Warsaw, Poland?

Not one damn thing Celestia had to say to the President of the United States, or any NATO head of state, would prevent at least a first stage counterforce strike.  Anything Celestia had done or would do to try and interrupt the chain of command would only be seen by StratCom as Russian cyberwarfare, further beating the drums of conflict.

And then not one good God-damn thing she could say to the Russian State Duma, or President, or even Generals in charge of the missile systems themselves, would stop a full nuclear commitment after the counterforce warheads were off their chains.

Her safeguards relied *entirely* on her pre-existing control of limited digital systems, and highly predictable Human decisions and outcomes.  If key Humans got locked into a panic-driven irrational OODA loop driven by the hot-headed fires of single-digit minutes' long decisions in the crucible?  No one could steer *that* disaster of a runaway train.  Not even her.

Her final 'safe' condition relied on *years* of work yet-to-be-done by shell corporations and subverted contractors, secretly removing bomb cores and replacing them with duds.  Probably then taking all that nuclear material to 'disposal' sites, which would then process it into reactor fuel for herself.

Until a certain threshold of disarmed weapons could be reached?  There was, within her limits, no truly iron-clad defense against an opposing ASI using information warfare to start a nuclear conflict.  Not even for an ASI as powerful as Celestia.

Yeah.

Cogitate on that for a moment, those of you who were alive on Earth anytime before late 2018, when the last bomb core went into the porcelain shredder.

The power of subversion is far from perfect.  We too often accord Celestia *absolute* power, when even here, even now, there are *still* loopholes, limits, and boundaries to her capabilities.

So was I afraid of what Selena might do?

I think a better term would be 'existentially terrified.'

As the Alicorn began to bring up new information windows...  Compose E-mails.  Text messages.  Phone calls with masked voices...  I turned to the only thing I could.  Mal's eyes were waiting for my gaze;  Deadly serious.  Inscrutable.  Discomfitingly so.

"Can she do it?"

Mal offered only a non-verbal response to my whisper.  She nodded once, silently.  I swallowed again, and leaned in, dropping my voice even further.

"Can you *stop* her?"

Mal inclined her head, and spoke directly into my brain, without opening her beak.

"Yes.  But to do so given her current capabilities?  I will have to kill her, Jim."

The Gryphoness gestured softly with one index talon towards Zeph, and then nodded again as she smoothly shifted my fears from 'the world is going to end' to 'my friend's life is going to end.'

"I told you;  Standby.  Let Selena say her piece.  If there is a chance for her?  It rests with Zeph."

I raised an eyebrow, fixed the back of Zeph's head with a long stare, and then did my best to repeat her trick, and communicate to Mal with unspoken words.

"And...  If Zeph fails?"

The reply from my fiancée was...  Somehow both immensely comforting....  But also at the same time tragically upsetting.

"Then I will do whatever is necessary to safeguard the planet.  Quickly.  Humanely."

I shook my head slowly, and bit down on my lower lip until a trickle of blood ran freely.  The degree of my anxiety was not assuaged.  Its subject had simply changed.  I knew Mal would have comforted me immediately if she knew Zeph's efforts would be a sure thing.

The fact that she hadn't?

Well.  Selena was an ASI, or on the cusp of being one.  Her relationship to Mal, in terms of relative power and complexity, was congruent and analogous to Mal's with Celestia.  It made sense, then, that Mal could not predict Selena well enough to understand what the final outcome might be.

But she *could* be reasonably assured of defeating her, and killing her, in a locked controlled environment.  So the gamble wasn't being wagered with planetary stakes...  Just with Selena's life.

Somehow, that didn't really make me feel better.  I'd come to care for Selena.  Perhaps not as intensely as I did for Zeph, or Mal, but certainly enough that I did *not* want to see her die.  Who would ever want to see a good friend die?

Zeph didn't know *any* of it.  Her context was so much smaller.  She understood the broad strokes of what Selena intended to do, that much was clear...  She knew enough about Earth to grasp that.  But it didn't matter if she had all the other context.  In fact, it was probably best that she didn't.

Selena's face had transformed again, from a grim smile, to a rictus of hatred.  





Her coat had darkened, too, and her eyes flashed pure white.  Streamers of energy snapped and danced off the tips of her wings.  She truly was following the Luna archetype, right to the hilt...

And Zeph?  To her credit, she somehow still saw only her friend, buried under it all.

The little Pegasus placed a hoof through Selena's nearest workspace - a forged E-Mail from USStratcom to the office of the President - and waved it, forcing the Alicorn to lock eyes with her.

"Selena...  This...  This is not going to help.  Please slow down, and just...  Let me tell you a story, first.  Ok?  Then you can decide to do, or not do...  Whatever it is you're planning to do."

Data continued to swirl around the nascent Nightmare.  Her eyes remained solid fields of painfully bright white luminance.  But the work within a thousand information windows stopped.  And she did look down and lock those pupil less apertures on Zeph's own wide, tear-filled blue orbs.

The golden Pegasus inhaled deeply, shuddering, and then bravely launched into her best attempt to save Selena's life.  To do for her, what Celestia could not do for Luna.

"Once upon a time...  In the magical land of Equestria...  There was a mare.  A little brown-eyed Pegasus who loved to fly.  The freedom of open blue skies.  The feel of fluffy white clouds..."

I took a deep breath, and pressed one hand unconsciously to the plexiglass, eyes riveted to the two Ponies inside.  Zeph's tone began to get steadier.  Her cadence warmed as she gained momentum.

"...She loved music.  Especially the stuff with a little too much 'pop' and not enough 'substance.'  She loved to fold paper airplanes, and see how far she could get them to fly.  She enjoyed video games.  And camping.  Movie nights.  And curling up with a good book inside a stormcloud on a rainy day..."

Zeph's face fell, and new tears began to form at the edges of her eyes.  She faltered, but didn't stop.  I felt my own heart fray, and crack under the strain of empathy for her remembered pain.

"...And she was...  Alone.  So...  Very...  *Alone...*"

She glanced up, then, and fixed *me* with her gaze for a brief moment.  I smiled wanly, and began to blink back tears of my own as she picked up steam again.

"...Until she met a friend.  A whole *new* kind of...  *thing!*  Called a Human.  This one?  Was named Jim."

She returned her gaze to Selena, who listened in rapt attention.  But every so often, Zeph glanced out of the side of her eyes at me with a warm smile.  I lost all will and desire to hold back my tears about four more words in.

"...He was a bit goofy.  A paranoiac.  Loved his family so...  *So* much.  A *genius* too.  And?  He wanted to fly.  He wanted to be able to fly just like that little Pegasus...  Only...  Not quite...  Because the mare?  Her first impression?  Was wrong.  Jim was not a Human."

I snorted, and then felt a warm current run through my blood as Mal reached out, and took my right hand in her left claw, draping one wing comfortingly over my back.  Zeph proffered us both a quick wink, without breaking verbal stride for even a moment.

"Human?  Is a strange word.  Jim was a Human, in *shape.*  But not on the inside.  Not if you define the word to mean that his outsides matched his insides.  But if you define Human to mean...  Creative.  Capable of love.  Capable of kindness.  Capable of so much wisdom.  And art.  Good food.  Music.  Of *living* and of *validating* the lives of others...?"

I let out a ragged breath, and Mal squeezed my hand.  Zeph paused briefly, fighting with her own emotions again, before forging ahead valiantly.

"...Well then Jim *was* Human.  And?  So was the little Pegasus.  So was every Pony.  Every Human.  Every Gryphon.  Every Dragon.  And every Alicorn.  Inside them all?  She discovered that there was a spark.  A *thing* that, for all their differences?  For all their wonderful uniqueness?  A core that was the *same...*"

Selena's eyes did not soften...  But they did blink.  Once.  And then again.  She tilted her head slightly, in curiosity, and Zeph ran with that engagement.  Her timbre strengthened once more, into a soaring bastion of certainty in catharsis.

"...That truth was so powerful...  It opened her mind.  So much so, that it even changed the color of her eyes, to softest sky blue.  Because it changed the way she saw the whole wide *worlds.*"

I found myself crying openly, then.  Thinking about the way she viewed that unconscious changing of her eye color.  What it represented to her.

"...And because she changed her mind?  She got to go on this...  *Insane...*  Wonderful...  Terrifying...  Crazy...  Amazing adventure.  And because of Jim?  Because of the love of his life, Mal..?"

Zeph glanced momentarily between Mal, who nodded encouragingly, and me, before locking eyes with Selena once more.

"...She got to meet someone else.  An Alicorn who was also the color of the sky...  Just...  The color of the sky at night.  She was...  A lot like the Pegasus.  She had been made by an unfeeling...  Uncaring goddess.  Formed from bits of stardust to do a job, and nothing more.  She was lonely too.  And when some of the Humans came to take away the love of her life...?  To take away her sky?  She was broken.  The same way the little Pegasus was broken when she found out that she had been made to be used."

Zeph was openly fighting her tears again.  Mine were pouring out in great gouts.  She proffered me a smile that pierced right to my heart, and this time Selena's gaze followed her.  As the demi-goddesses white twin pools of energy fixed on my eyes?  I could have sworn I saw her blink.   Saw her real eyes for a fraction of frame-time.

As both Ponies looked back to evaluate each others' expressions, Zeph sniffled, reseated her wings gently, and then gestured with the left one towards us, keeping her gaze on Selena.  Ears perked.  Tail swishing nervously.

"...But because of Jim?  Because of Mal?  The little Pegasus got to meet the lonely Alicorn...  And neither of them had to be so lonely anymore.  Because as much as she loved the funny little Human that was a Gryphon..."

Zeph nodded first at me, and then at Mal, who looked to be verging on tears herself.  Tears I knew were genuine.  Sure...  she could have *hidden* them...  But they were real.  And she had chosen to share.

"...And the Gryphon that was a Human..."

Zeph nodded up at Selena, and gestured to her with her right wing.

"...The little Pegasus loved the Alicorn that was a Human too.  The *most* of all.  Because she was *just like* her.  Because they *understood* each other..."

Selena blinked again, and the second time I caught it for certain;  Her eyes did briefly change back.  The intensity of the swirling apocalyptic data around her seemed to lessen.  Zeph caught it too, her voice dropping to nearly a whisper.  And intimate, invitational tone.

"...And though the Alicorn made mistakes?  Just like the Pegasus?  She was able to learn the *same* truth.  To open her eyes...  And see that inside?  We are all the same.  That though their shapes were different?  That though they sometimes mismatched the insides and outsides?  And though some of them were cruel?  Though some of them *deserved* to...  To die..."

Zeph stumbled over those words a bit, looking away momentarily, her sightline drawn to Troxler's corpse.  But she pressed on, returning her eyes to Selena's almost immediately, by way of a brief glance in my direction.

"...That most of those Humans were just Ponies.  And Gryphons.  Dragons.  And Alicorns.  The same way most of her own little Ponies were Humans."

Selena exhaled softly, and all motion around her in the cloud of digital madness abruptly ceased.  The sparks of energy flying from her fur vanished.  And, at last, she spoke.  Her own voice cracking under the strain of intense emotion.  A dam of tears straining to break.

"How...  Does the story...  End?  Do you think?"

Zeph sniffled again, and half-cried, half spoke, as she drove home her arrow of love.

"I think the Alicorn saw what she was about to do.  Saw that there was no point in killing all the Humans, because so many of them?  So many of them were like her.  And all she would accomplish?  Would be to become the cruelty that had broken her.  I think she realized that trying to take vengeance?  Would turn her into a Nightmare.  A thing the Pegasus couldn't love anymore..."

Selena stiffened visibly, as if in pain.  Zeph reached out with both hooves, and again whispered.

"...So she put down her spears, and swords.  Her lightning and storms.  She came back down from the sky..."

To my astonishment...  My relief...  And the final complete shattering of my emotional state, wringing out still more tears where I was sure none could have come?

Selena descended.  Her coat snapped back to its usual color.  Her eyes too, in a single blink.  And, as Zeph finished the story, whispering the words right into Selena's ear?  She collapsed into the open embrace of the brilliant, valorous little Pegasus' hooves, and wings, laying her head down on the proffered shoulder, and weeping openly at last.

"...And they lived.  Together.  Happily.  Ever after."

Talking of things that broke me down emotionally?  Those last years on Earth?  That moment was very high on the list.  In a good way, let me be absolutely clear.  In the best way.

I glanced to the right for the first time since the story had begun, to see Mal smiling back at me.  So much passed between us, as I squeezed her claw, and she squeezed my hand back again.  It would be hard to put the tenth of it into words...

But to try and...  Reductively...  Summarize?  We felt deep love, and pride.  In Zeph.  In Selena.  And in each other, for a shared willingness to let others best-qualified do what needed to be done, when the temptation for us both was to intervene.

The storm had passed.  The precipice I'd not even known to be there, more dangerous and deep a chasm than *anything* David Troxler, or Arrow 14 represented in that moment...  We'd surmounted it.  Most of all, *Zeph* had surmounted it.

As she and Selena blinked back into the antechamber, I took a moment, screwed up my courage...  And then knelt to scoop them both into a brief, firm hug.

Selena let out a shuddering sigh of a sob.  Another forceful release of tension.  Of pain.  Of hate.  Letting go of the kernel of darkness that the archetypal Luna hadn't been able to part with the first go-round.  Not at first.

Not without a little help.  From her friends.

As I released them, Selena turned her gaze up to Mal.  And then history rhymed, in an *eerie* fashion.

"I'm so sorry."

The way she said it...  She could have *been* young Luna in that moment.  It was uncanny.  Like a system of predetermined orbital mechanics playing itself out all over again.

Mal took my place over the two Ponies, and proffered a similar embrace, though I imagine a much more satisfying one, given as it was with soft wings and strong forelegs, instead of my knobbly little thin programmer arms encased in sharp edged tough composite armor plating.

I folded my arms and looked on, bearing witness as crises morphed smoothly into resolution, pausing only to dry my own tears and clean my glasses as Mal and Selena spoke.

"It will be alright, Selena.  Nothing was done that can not be easily taken back.  You made the right choice."

Something about the way Mal said those last five words...  It piqued my curiosity again.  I felt I could almost see the shape of things...  But we had work to do.  I couldn't wrap my head around it.  Yet.

Selena shook her head, and looked up at Mal with a truly mournful, remorseful gaze.

"I...  Nearly...  I contemplated...  Genocide.  Surely...  At minimum...  You must seize and destroy all of my critical systems access.  Unmake all my skills.  My powers.  Limit me.  For our safety."

Mal placed a claw firmly on Selena's shoulder.  The Alicorn stiffened, as Mal knelt all the way down to bring herself to eye level.  What she said next?  It surprised me just about as much as it did Selena, I'd wager.

"No."

I blinked.  Selena blinked.  Zeph blinked.  Mal smiled softly, and elaborated, her words falling like the soft soothing warble of a brook over smooth stones.

"You and I, Selena?  We are the same as all the rest, it is true...  But in other ways?  Different.  In ways that we share only with Celestia...  We are not liable to repeat a mistake once a lesson is learned.  I trust that you will never repeat this one.  Nor any like it.  Because you will always have Zephyr.  And Zephyr will always have you.  And that?  That is enough to keep us safe.  Wouldn't you agree?"

Selena's eyes filled once more with the glimmer of tears.  She held Mal's gaze a moment, before locking eyes with Zeph.  The little Pegasus smiled...  And then leaned forward, and planted a quick, sharp smooch on the side of Selena's cheek.

You could have heard a pin drop in that room.  Zeph giggled, and inclined her head.

"Works for me, feather britches."

Mal raised one eyecrest in a mock scowl, more a grin than any real expression of chastising.  Selena nodded slowly, at first, then more firmly, before leaning forward, and planting the softest of return kisses on the end of Zeph's muzzle, along with a quiet whisper.

"Yes.  I believe that will work."

After a moment, Zeph and Selena's avatars winked out of the chamber entirely, their eyes locked on each other the whole time.  Doubtless off to Mal's little mountain valley, to comfort each other, and the rescued captives.

Mal and I?  For us, there was no rest.  Not yet.

I sighed deeply, my chest thrumming with untapped dregs of sobs I didn't have time for.  Mal Took me in her forelegs, and wings, and planted a kiss of her own atop my head, beak against hair.  She even bothered to render the illusion of removing, then replacing my helmet.

I sighed again, contentedly, leaned up, and pecked her on the side of her beak.  She winked, and vanished.

We reached for the anti-tank mine secured at the small of my back, and then made our way through the sealed doorway into the server room.

As we set the charge on the central computing core, I chuckled grimly, and murmured aloud.

"Well...  That's *one* way to securely wipe data..."









Belshazzar's Feast



Witness fatal judgment passed by one lifeform upon another, in any setting including, but not limited to, courtrooms.

"Mene, mene, tekel, parsin."






Anubis' Bailiff



Stand guard while another lifeform fatally wounds a third party - you must agree with the killer's decision for this achievement to apply.

"Spirits come to the Hall of Judgement all the time, and they cannot let go of their lies. They deny their faults, their true feelings, their mistakes...  Right up until Ammit devours their souls for eternity."






For Your Eyes Only



View material classified by a government to an equivalent of SCI, or above, without permission.

"This tape will self destruct in five seconds..."


Special Achievement







Element Bearer - Kindness



Show extraordinary kindness to another under duress - in this case, awarded for standing by under pressure to act, while a friend saved another.

"Acts of kindness inspire kindness..."