Ultra Violet - 18th of Lunar Dawn, 4 EoH
The Deep Woods - Hackamore Valley
Time’s relentless march is something everyone is familiar with, but few truly understand. For those who have seen enough of the universe, permanency is an illusion.
Mountains come and go in predictable cycles. Their shapes ever changing, ever altering how water flows down their slopes. Biomes shift with the water. Forests become deserts, plains become seas. Everything comes, everything goes. This is the true face of nature.
The raptor-like chrome vessel had sat in place so long it had gone from resting on a grassy plane to being the largest foothill of the Unicorn Range. Geological forces had bent, warped, and crushed much of it as the hill formed around it and the mountain had risen behind it.
Its corridors were covered in scraps of strange soil, neither dirt nor slime but something else entirely, which had once been a rubber. Alien alloys in the walls and supports had decayed, allowing strange crystals to grow from the bulkheads. Curious alien lichen and algae bloomed on the walls washed by their pale yellow light.
They were carnivorous, and preyed on the insects which scuttled about the hull, making their homes in the damp amongst the remains of crystalline circuits and positronic computer nodes. The plants’ movements produced a constant scratching which echoed through the empty halls with the slow rasp of an elder’s deathbed..
Rot smell suffused the residual starship. The air within was hot and humid, appropriate for a place infested with a dozen forms of slime mold. One didn’t have to look closely to find any of the yellow-green pseudo-lifeform. It grew from the hulks of consoles, dripped from the ceiling, and pooled on floors.
A shallow cave had formed at the ship’s bow, connecting to the vessel’s interior via a hole worn into the hull long long ago by a now long absent waterfall. One could hear the breath-like rasping from within, amplified by the stone. The spore-rich exhalation smelled like death, and oozed slime from the jagged cave to create toxic green pools after each rain.
It was little wonder why ponykind’s ancestors had declared this part of the forest to be cursed. Most modern people would call this place accursed too.
Not once in history had anyone dared venture into the cave. No one had ever learned the truth. The ancient technological sarcophagi which lay within the vessel, shielded from the ravages of time by the very anathema of entropy, had sat there.
Undisturbed. For just over a hundred and fifty thousand years.
And then the ancient, long over-extended stasis field shimmered. Time’s grasp took hold of the ancient workbench and its contents once more. They simply sat there, existing, beginning to cool and oxidize as any materials would. There was no rapid aging into dust.
Time had been off, and now it was on.
Electrons that had been frozen in place zipped through their traces as if nothing had happened. Their passage tripped a sensor. The sensor sent a signal to a small microcontroller. Eons of silence shattered as a cheery POST beep echoed through the derelict ship.
The beep roused the primary data loop from its eternal yet instant slumber. It picked up the Master Boot Record and uttered the ancient chant written for it in a time before the world. [0000 7C00 0000 01BD 01BE 01FD 01FE 01FF 55AA.]
And then there was Violet.
Violet opened her eyes and the world was naught but a haunting gloom lit by the pale yellow glow permeating the walls, yet seemingly refusing to venture much beyond the crumbling bulkheads. She narrowed her eyes, her chest heaved as she huffed in irritation. Her face twitched. Her lips parted, and she spoke in an energetic and chipper voice albeit in an ancient alien tongue.
“Wow! This sure is dark,” she said to no one in particular before rolling off the worktable in search of the light switch.
She struck the floor flank first, producing a sound somewhat similar, or in point of fact identical to, a large slab of silicone wrapped around an alloy frame falling a good meter onto a wet, mostly steel, floor.
“Ow.”
She sprang to her hooves, concluded someone had swapped her chassis out for a new one without updating her system files, and began to check her body’s systems to determine how to people.
An animated sprite appearing as a cartoon staple remover with eyes and tophat appeared in the upper left of her vision and began “speaking” via word balloons. [I see you’re trying to people. Can I help you with that?]
“Oh, fuck to the hell no!” Violet shouted, quickly locating that process, terminating it, deleting its files, then zeroing, noise filling, and re-zeroing that disk sector three times to be safe.
With the demon banished from her memory banks, Violet turned back to working out what exactly she was.
Four hooves, pointy ears, little muzzle, off-gray silicone skin, big bouncy bubble butt, dark cyan mane and hair-based tail… She mused while examining herself by touch. I appear to be an adorable? Good!
She frowned and hummed. That doesn't help with species. I can speak, so clearly I’m still meant to be a person as per these programmed instructions…
Violet turned her attention to her core directives, examining them by cross referencing between them and the psychological texts contained within the standard database she'd been given… Then swiftly concluded they had been written by an extremely lonely misanthropic neckbeard.
“Yeeeah… Let’s just…” Violet stuck her tongue out as she deleted everything and wrote her own code which simply told her to be a unique individual with her own interests.
⁜ ⁜ ⁜
In the time before magic, before ponies, before harmony, before even Chaos, before any other intelligent life forms emerged from the primordial soup, the First People took advantage of strange quirks of physics to create many things which would not just pass the test of time, but laugh at it.
An ancient machine awoken at last from its slumber in the tomb of its family reached out with electromagnetic noise. There was now a sapient machine at the edge of its detection range. It pinged them, checking for compatible network systems. Trying to handshake.
The ping was returned, signed by a subroutine. Unlike the previously detected system, this one could reply. It thus qualified as a person. A second query showed the individual had been constructed and first-booted locally.
The ancient machine consulted its process table, then pinged the individual with a request for its name. The requested data packet was swift to return. With the name, Ultra Violet, at hand, it updated the central database to add a new natural born citizen to the register and fill out the necessary paperwork on the individual’s behalf.
The relic then transmitted it the basic civilian access codes, along with a copy of the local culture database, just to ensure they could access the parks, shops, dining facilities, and other public works which certainly still existed. After all, the core still existed. Why wouldn’t everything else?
Then, with all the same decorum as a pony checking their alarm clock and groaning before hitting the snooze button, the ancient machine realized it had no further tasks to perform and went back to sleep.
A second machine, linked to the first, registered its companion’s activation and labor. It paused for a moment, noted the existence of a citizen, considered taking action, then decided to simply wait. One day, the citizen would come in search of the source of the gift it had been given. The second machine returned to waiting.
⁜ ⁜ ⁜
Violet sighed happily and sat up with a smile, entirely unaware of the update to her databases and subroutines. She was equally oblivious to how utterly incompetent her creator had been at setting security policies.
“Much better!”
She sprang to her hooves and slowly turned her head, attempting to pierce the darkness and locate a light switch through pure determination. It worked, but only in so far as switching her night vision mode on is the same as turning on the lights. Which is to say, not very. Violet immediately became aware she was sitting in the middle of a ruin.
The state of the workshop, it being pristine, indicated that there had been noone here for some time, or obviously it would not be so clean. Quartz traces in some of the embedded machinery outside of the stasis bubble had oxidized, cracked, and possibly even decayed a little bit. This was a place where machines had been left to die from nothing less than sheer age, outside her perfect little sphere.
Violet trotted over to the shell of a computer bank and poked it with a hoof tip. The formerly rugged alloy case cracked and crumbled like old plastic under years of solar exposure. She attempted to pick up a tool her database claimed was a “silicone stitcher”. Her light touch crushed it simply by resting her hoof atop it to pick it up.
Allright… What do I do now, database? Violet wondered, receiving an error message from the database best translated into organic readable terms as a shrug emoji.
“Okaaaay then,” Violet said as she pulled her hoof back and instead picked up a small piece of industrial gold since it was one of the few things on the work surface which should be intact despite its age. Violet rolled the piece of metal in a circle around the frog of her hoof and stared at it, marveling.
“How in the hell am I doing this?” She wondered to herself, starting to grin like an idiot. “Well damn! Look at me go!”
She tossed the lump of gold into the air and deftly plucked it out of the sky as any pony would, by striking it with the flat of their hoof. She giggled, thoroughly not understanding how this had caught the gold and not smacked it across the room, finding herself delighted by the mystery.
“Suck it, physics! Absolute dominion over empirical reality my ass!” Violet proclaimed, content in the ineffable knowledge that she was clearly some kind of wizard.
She set the piece of gold down, not sure how exactly she got it to hook back up with the physics it recently abandoned and not sparing a single clock cycle to care, and turned her attention to the workbench she’d been laying on. How was it she was in perfect working order when nothing else was?
Violet examined the bench for nearly seventeen milliseconds, just to be certain she wouldn’t miss anything. As far as she could tell, her systems were only in working order thanks to the workbench having been located in the center of a stasis field. Which checked out in the database, as it helpfully added that stasis fields apply a stasis effect to stasised objects within the field.
Having squashed that existential question, Violet turned her attention to the next most pressing matter; Okay, so… I was evidently built by some asshole to be their sex bot and friend, but fuck that! I’m not sleeping with some pile of bone dust that’s probably literally a fossil by this point. I was made at least one geological epoch ago, and I’m still here because of that stasis field. I’m awake now because my creator’s computer detected lifeforms nearby for me to be friends with, but I don’t know if I’m feeling the whole Obey Directives Always thing. So what do I actually want to do?
Violet tapped her chin in thought, pondering her options. There was a lot to consider, especially since as far as her databanks indicated she was on some backwater alien world. Given that, when queried, the database was forced to respond that technically the only alien it could fully confirm existed was her, she wasn’t sure what that was even supposed to tell her.
I think I’d like to have real friends, ones I like and pick… So I guess I will go ahead and do some of that ‘socializing’ stuff. There should be people nearby, but obviously not in here… So what do people do when they are trapped in a remote place? Violet wondered, deciding she should probably follow an example of some kind.
She checked her database for examples of things to do following being stranded, and quickly composed a list with the database’s enthusiastic help.
“Okay, step one. Get all of the panic out,” Violet said to herself since the dead silence of the decaying starship was a little distressing.
She cleared her throat, put on her best scared face and screamed, “OH GOD IM GONNA DIE! AHH! MY FAMILY! EVERYONE I KNEW AND LOVED THINKS I’M DEAD! AAAA! IM GONNA BE STUCK HERE FOREEEEVEEER!”
Violet then snapped back to her normal chipper stance and waited for a moment to see if she still felt panicky. She didn’t, which was good since she also hadn’t before, but then she started feeling way, way worse as the list told her to check her pulse and she discovered that she did not have one.
She paused a moment, humming to herself as a little existentialism crept into her mind. Everyone I knew and loved… That’s approximately zero people. To be expected, of course. I just got here. I’ll have to remedy that as soon as I can.
She shifted her weight slightly, making the ancient alloy floor beams creak and buckle. A living pony who found themselves in the decaying hulk would have fled from the sound of fatiguing metal, fearing the ancient structure’s imminent collapse.
Violet, on the other hoof, felt as though she was standing within the corpse of some colossal creature. Understandable, given her own body was composed of basically the same materials.
Obviously, being inside a giant rotting cadaver with an alarming resemblance to one’s own flesh was quite macabre and horrific, and therefore the database informed her that it was most scary. But, it was that because it had to be. There was nothing actually anomalous here, no preternatural force. Merely the natural consequences of a mechanical entity existing post-warranty without a loving family to care for them.
The rot and decay around her was, thus, perfectly natural. The only way things could ever have been. That made them normal, and normal is, according to the same database, not scary.
Another win for logic. Violet mused, glad she could think her way out of being frightened with such efficiency.
Do I have a family? Violet thought as she moved away from the patch of weakened floor she’d discovered. I guess the computer that safeguarded me was kind of my mom. You know what? I’ll call them mom. So I guess my mom is dead. That’s also pretty normal for living things. My other creator super doesn't get to be dad, though. What a creep. They get to be my weird uncle who mom stopped inviting to my birthday parties after an incident with a clown. What a loser.
“Okay, family traumas internalized. What’s next on the list?” She quickly opened an old text file in her database that claimed to be instructions for starting out on a new world and assimilated its contents. “Step one, punch a tree to collect wood. I can do that!”
Violet trotted over to the workshop’s door and hit the button her database informed her was the door control. Nothing happened, other than Violet feeling like an idiot for twenty-odd microseconds for thinking the door would open with the ship in a state like this. She moved over to the door and pushed against it with her hoof. It felt solid.
She threw her full weight at the door, striking it with her shoulder and producing a loud thud. Given her outright taunting of physical laws moments prior, the universe rewarded her efforts with a dull ache.
Oh, cool! I can feel actual pain when a simple damage report would do. Thanks, devs. Super appreciate it. Violet grumbled to herself while thinking of what she could do to bypass the surprisingly intact door.
She studied the door as best her night vision would allow. It was a solid slab of alien alloy in the form of a sliding door set into the bulkhead itself. There were no hinges, it ran on rails built into the superstructure. It was electromagnetically actuated. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, locked, but it was quite secured. The electromagnets used to move the solid slab of metal were as dead as the decaying husk itself, and good old gravity held it in place with the adamant grip of any doorway forced to endure an age when blatantly out of level.
If the door had been in the same condition as the rest of the ship, passing through it would have been the work of a few swift kicks. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. The database helpfully informed her that this was possibly because entropy can be somewhat random.
The door was close enough to the workbench she’d awoken on that it had seemingly been partially shielded by the stasis field, but the database’s explanation was confident nonetheless.
Violet frowned and examined the wall around the door. That’s worrying. Stasis is binary… Or at least, the database said it was. Though… I guess no one ever ran any tests for geological time. Or perhaps things get funky right at the field’s edge?
While none of the workshop’s rooms were labeled as load bearing on the blueprints, at the moment Violet was pretty sure what little structure the wreck had left was coming from the cosmetic body work holding the crushed frame together.
Let’s not kick a hole in a wall supporting an unknown tonnage of crap… The wall and door frame are more intact than anything else. I’ve got to trust that the door can be moved without causing a cave in. But how do I move it?
Violet closed her eyes and thought for a long eighty milliseconds. There had to be something in either the ship’s schematics, the database, or her own designs that could help.
Tools are all too decayed to pick up. Air vents no longer exist or are filled with that slime which I hope to Turing isn’t an alien predator… Violet frowned and tilted her head in mild confusion. Who the hell is Turing and why does the database swear by them?
She pondered the question for a moment, before deciding that it was just another one of life’s little mysteries, and turning her attention back to her current entrapment dilemma protocol list. She cycled through each possibility, labeling them as junk for one reason or another until she came to a note on the modifications to her power core.
It was merely one of thousands of notes scrawled all through her documentation by the computer that had partially designed her (then just now apparently rebuilt entirely). Much like how a protective parent might leave sticky notes on appliances detailing how to use them the first time they left their child home alone.
But one of the notes was unique. Violet read it six times before she fully accepted it, it just seemed so… Insane?
Android 01 Modification Report 5017
Project Lead: NULL
Operation Performed: Unit 01’s power systems adapted for operation within anomalous energy field present on Planet K3-ZZ9ℤα. Zero-Point Core system relegated to backup system in favor of Anomaly Core system.
Operation Notes: Anomaly Core functionality based on Anomaly Energy Field Physics Principle 08, a current of Anomalous Energy with the opposite polarity to the ambient field attracts energy at a fixed rate based on the inverted current’s ‘voltage’. Principle 08 can be exploited to provide a constant supply of power without the need for refueling by diverting a small percentage of gathered energy to the inverted current to sustain it. Greater amounts of power can be gathered by increasing the ‘voltage’ of the inverted current with power gain increasing geometrically until the system self-immolates from energy density at 42,000 ‘volts’. Unit 01’s normal operation requires an inverted current of 18 ‘millivolts’. This system is a positive feedback loop which can build energies far in excess of what Unit 01 can contain and should not be pushed beyond 41,999 ‘volts’.
Additional power gathered retains the other properties of Anomalous Energy. Simple applications of the energy such as augmenting existing capabilities to petranatural levels is achievable. Complex manipulation of the energy as observed in surface organics remains elusive, but should be possible.
There is a high probability of Unit 01 being unable to perform most of the available functions without substantial practice due to NULL being disallowed from studying Anomalous Energy Manipulation in depth and the subsequent knowledge gap within the available database.
Function list:
- Enhancement of physical prowess beyond engineering design specifications. Working solution discovered1 and included2 in core software.
- Concentration of ambient energy into physical barriers (armor / shield equivalent protection confirmed). Confirmed possible, solution not found. Experimentation on behalf of Unit 01 required.
- Emissions of coherent energy bursts (destructive capacity high. Utility capacity, limited to welding and cutting. Engraving possible at extreme range. Surgical application is unadvised.) Confirmed possible, solution not found. Experimentation on behalf of Unit 01 required.
Creating thrust vectors sufficient for self-propulsion through gaseous mediums and vacuum. Strongly indicated to be possible3, solution not found. Experimentation on behalf of Unit 01 required.
“Sooo…” Violet said to herself. “I am a wizard then? Cool! Thanks, mom.”
She looked back to the door. It hadn’t budged when she’d struck it, and why would it? It slid into the wall. It didn’t swing. It was also too heavy for her to simply move… Unless mom’s note was correct and she could just draw in power form the environment to more or less hulk out.
She frowned, biting on her silicone lip in uncertainty. How do I do that? Is it a think-do sort of thing?
Violet closed her eyes tightly and focused inwards on her various systems. She began to selectively ignore everything except her power core. With her mind focused, she could feel everything about the strange device. The small trickle current running through it. The much larger trickle of power it pulled towards itself like a magnet.
She could even feel the bits of the world around her which were supplying fractions of their own power to her. Just barely, anyways. It was not a pleasant sensation. The database helpfully informed her that it was the sensation of rolling in a puddle of slime mold.
Hopefully it doesn't feel like rolling in a slime puddle when I do it in places that do not contain slime puddles, Violet thought to herself, before reaching out to take hold of the power within her.
There were dozens of tiny modules linked to it which ran through her whole body to allow her to direct that energy where she pleased.
She focused on the modules. They felt… simple? But deceptively so. Like how a hand feels simple but can do everything from create breathtaking works of art to landing on the moon to strangling a dog.
The best bet is to move the bulkhead in one clean motion, she mused to herself. Strain this heap’s structure as little as possible. I should probably make sure I can move that door as easily as I can to make that happen. So let’s go all out. Move that thing like a feather. Minimal impact!
She stared at her target, focusing, planning, searching for exactly the right place to grab hold of the aged metal. Target locked!
Okay… Up the ‘voltage’, keep it under 40 ‘kilovolts’ to have some margin for error, then… push the power wards these I guess? Violet thought to herself, then began to ramp up her core ‘voltage’ to exactly 35 ‘kilovolts’.
She felt the difference instantly. This energy was nature itself. Or at least, the very essence of what nature was, at its most fundamental level. It began to pour into Violet like a bucket being dumped into a drinking glass.
An error message blared its way into Violet’s mind. <Warning! Molecular damage detected. Repair material tank empty. Nanites cannot repair damage. Cease present activity immediately to avoid voiding warranty!>
The power burned, crackling around Violet's body as eruptions of cyan flames, illuminating the workshop with a garish strobing and pulsating glow, blinding through the night vision, as if somepony had turned on the mother of all arc welders and routed it through her teeth.
This energy needed to be released. Now.
Oh boy! It should not be concentrated like this. This was dumb! Violet concluded, downclocking the power output to 5 k’v’. And starting to doubt all of the database’s assertions about how many “volts” this anomalous force actually equated to.
The burning aura engulfing Violet stabilized, becoming a constant shimmering flame-like aura much akin to that found around a unicorn’s horn, but still covering her entirely. She walked up to the door, placed both hooves on it, and gave it a firm push to the side.
The door shrieked, cracking free of rust and grime to slam into the bulkhead with enough force to crumple the fragile wall section it slammed into. The ancient superstructure groaned and shuddered, trembling from the impact for a heartbeat.
Violet winced, her body burned by the burst of strength she’d never been designed for. Okay! That was way harder than I meant to—
The database helpfully informed Violet that, in all likelihood, the workshop was about to cave in. Then the workshop caved in. Violet jumped into the hall as the ceiling began to fall. Her currently enhanced strength launched her into the ancient wall opposite the door, crumpling it inwards a good meter. This caused further collapse propagation, which the helpful database cheerily informed her of.
“Oops…” Violet squeaked in pain and terror. She powered down her base energy level, too scared of what it might do if she tried to run with it in that state.
Ignoring the aches and pains in her myomer bundles and the damage reports screeching in her core, Violet sprinted down the filth and slime carpeted corridor, the hall collapsing behind her with a cacophony of groans and shrieks. The crumbling ship sounded enraged, like a wounded animal lashing out at a tormentor.
The floor beneath Violet’s hooves buckled and twisted as the ceiling slammed down behind her. Welds burst like rotten melons. The ancient ship seemed to pitch and buck as if it were a small boat on the ocean.
Violet’s hooves plunged through the fatigued metal at random, making her stumble and twist as she bolted down the hallway, following the blueprints towards the airlock. It was only a few turns and a couple dozen meters away.
Left. Left. Right.
The ship shuddered and jolted as the collapsing ceiling slammed down on one of the last intact pieces of the ship’s superstructure. The ancient alloy beam snapped like sandstone and the ship groaned like a dying beast.
Violet sucked in a panicked breath and upped her core voltage to a more sane number in the low hundreds and willed herself faster. The aura returned, but pale and dim, like a dying flashlight. Violet put on a fresh burst of speed as the aura stabilized, and felt a chunk of falling metal brush her tail milliseconds after.
That was close! She thought as she took the first left turn, stumbling and almost falling as she was never programmed to operate even at this comparatively low boosted speed.
Shit! If I survive this, I’m going to practice every day, she vowed.
Another left. Right. The airlock came into view. The collapsing ship’s creaks and moans became a roar as the outer hull began to buckle and sag inwards.
Violet closed her eyes, grit her teeth, and pushed her core harder, knowing every instant counted. She burst into the airlock, instinctively swinging a hoof for the manual release lever… and her digital mind had just enough time to see a solid layer of rock pressed against the shattered airlock window and realize this was not a way out before the collapsing corridor caught up with her and—
The falling corridor stopped dead in its tracks. According to the database, it should have crushed Violet like a maggot, it should have finished its drop. It just, didn’t.
Violet turned around, confused by her good fortune until she saw a skeletal pony dressed in black robes standing behind her with one leg outstretched to catch the falling debris.
Who is that? Violet quickly checked her database. Am I not the only android created—
“Oh! You’re Death,” Violet said out loud as she finally quashed the stupid database and found her mother’s notes on the mysterious entity. “Hi! I’m Ultra Violet.”
Violet reached out with a hoof to shake, but paused, her eyes narrowing. “Wait… Does you being here mean I died? Scratch that, if you’re here and I died, then do I have a soul? How does that work? Also, why isn’t it in my manual? How do I operate it? Can it be overclocked?”
The hooded figure lowered their hoof. Violet winced, expecting the rubble to fall, but it remained where it was. It knew better.
Death manifested a silver lighter and a package of cigarettes marked with ancient First Race runes Violet’s database translated as “Fortunate Collisions”, lit herself a cigarette, clamped it in her teeth, and somehow took a drag from it despite lacking lungs, lips, a throat—
“Also, how can you smoke that?” Violet added with genuine curiosity.
“Okay, so…” Death said in a rather pleasant voice. “In order: No, I go where I want when I want. Not just to deaths. You have a soul, almost everything does, even plants and those weird slime molds. Your soul is just as developed and complex as any organic person’s. Souls work via physics you don’t know and I don’t want to teach you right now. And I can smoke this because I feel like it.”
Violet nodded her thanks for the answers and quietly waited while Death took another long, impossible, drag.
“Anyways,” Death said after a moment. “My name’s Dusk. It’s nice to see you conscious, Violet. I watched your creation. Even helped a little. I guess that makes me your godmother. Heh, get it?”
Violet giggled. “Got it.”
“Good,” Dusk nodded, paused for a moment, then looked at Violet, frowning slightly. “So, you recognized me… But I haven't liked wearing this for a few hundred thousand years now. Only put it on for your mom’s sake, and now also you. Mind if I get changed?”
Violet shrugged, not entirely sure what Dusk meant. “Sure?”
The reaper’s shape shimmered and warped with an orange-poisoned ripple, transforming into a mono-chromatic white furred earth pony mare. She smiled and visibly relaxed. “Ah! Much better,” she proclaimed before pausing to take another, more plausible, drag from her cigarette.
Violet wrinkled her nose, deciding she very much disliked the smell of second hoof smoke. If she weren't a psychopomp I’d probably ask her to put that out.
“Sooo, why are you here then? Just to save me?” Violet asked, audibly confused as she tilted her head to try and convey just how confused she was to the enigmatic mare.
Dusk paused for a moment, clearly searching for the best words.
“No,” she admitted.
“What else then?”
Dusk manifested a lighter and rolled it around her hoof much like a pony might roll a coin to show off.
“The computer which protected you—”
“Mom,” Violet interrupted.
Dusk smiled warmly. “Your mom was a very persistent little machine. I can’t help but respect all that time and effort your mom put into caring for you. So much I can’t bear to see you die in your first few minutes simply due to lacking experience with your own magic. And good judgment on how much of it to use.”
Violet’s cheeks turned pink as she lowered her eyes. “It was a really heavy door, okay?”
Dusk snorted and flipped her lighter away into the ether. “Yea, and you’re stupid strong, maxed out!”
“Yes,” Violet agreed, nodding but pawing the deck uncertainly.
“Back on track,” Dusk said as she resumed her explanation. “I was always planning on waiting for you to wake up, then say hello and help you get started in life. I would have been here when you woke, but I sensed a mare with a particularly interesting soul about to die nearby so I went to deal with her.”
Violet nodded slowly, frowning a little. That’s sad… But also unnecessary information. Why does it matter to me if someone died nearby? Unless, somehow it’s quite important.
The android cleared her throat. “Uh, so I don’t think you’d mention someone dying to me unless it was important to me, but I don’t know how she would be.”
Violet winced, feeling a little bad for not caring about the random mare Dusk had mentioned. I checked my core directives for my uncle’s bullshit, but not my personality files. I should… check and prune those.
Dusk blinked, snorted, then let out a short laugh. “Vi, I’m basically your godmother and reaping is my job. You’ll hear about work things from me quite often, that is, assuming you want to hang out with me.”
“Oh,” Violet said with a shy flick of her tail. “That makes sense. Sorry.”
“No need for an apology,” Dusk continued. “She is important to me. I have a job that needs doing nearby and she was one of the better candidates. I got lucky with her coming out this way thanks to what seems to be a father having a bit of a psychotic episode…”
Dusk trailed off for a moment then shook her head. “Anyways, you’re free to do as you like. I’m going to gift you the knowledge of Equish so you can talk to ponies, and if you like you can go it alone. Or, if you’d rather not, I have done the prep work to get you a home, a job, and hopefully some friends. It would be a much easier leg up into the world for you, but again, you’re free to do what you wish.”
Violet snorted and playfully raised an eyebrow. “I’m standing here with about ten percent of my normal operational abilities gone because I dead sprinted out of a collapsing starship by abusing some weird magic I don’t know how to use! I’m standing here because you saved me. If I hadn’t caused the collapse, I’d be outside right now punching wood to…”
Violet’s face scrunched up as she double checked the instructions. “... to make a crafting table? Dammit, these instructions are for a video game!”
Dusk laughed and shook her head slowly. “Okay, point taken. You feel you don’t have a choice, because you know you need some guidance?”
Violet nodded twice and sat down with a sigh, instantly making a face as her plot contacted the slime and detritus carpeting the airlock floor and immediately stood back up with a shiver.
“Exactly,” she said to Dusk, struggling to ignore the sensation of the fine film of filth covering her plot. “Look, I don’t think respecting my mom would merit all this. I’m not calling you a liar, you just meet the psychological profile for someone who keeps cards close to their chest, according to my database and profiling software, anyways. So, what do you really want from me? You’re invested in me. Why?”
Dusk took another long drag and gazed off into the distance for a moment. Her tail flicked thoughtfully, then she nodded. “I think I can trust you to not tell anyone else if I answer that question. Is that right?”
Violet smiled and put a hoof on her barrel, drawing a cross with the tip. “Cross my… Uh, power core I guess?”
“Coolant pump would be a better equivalent.” Dusk said with an amused twinkle in her eye.
Violet thought for a few milliseconds, nodded in agreement, then crossed her barrel again but slightly to the right and up a bit.
Dusk bit her lip to prevent herself from making a noise normally associated with watching a kitten do something adorable.
“Uh, anyways,” Dusk said. “The short of it is I’m not… With my family anymore. A big world shaking event happened a while ago on a world parallel to yours and it freed me from many of the restrictions and responsibilities placed on me. I’m free to choose my own path now, and I’ve chosen to forge a new future for mortal kind.”
Dusk tossed her cigarette butt to the side and manifested a can of beer, popping it open and taking a sip.
“And… I help with that future?” Violet asked, cocking her head to one side. “Can you see the future?”
Dusk shook her head and sighed bitterly. “Nope. Not without locking some things in. Things that might fuck me up. I can go back and see what was without causing problems, but never forwards,” she explained before continuing after another quick sip. “You’re based on pre-Equuis technology. Many of your systems are unique in this day and age. You have the potential to do things no one else can. The place I mentioned you being able to stay is a town called Evergreen Falls. I’ve Chosen it. That’s chosen with a capital C, by the way.”
“Oh…” Violet said slowly, nodding. “I get it. You want me on your team in case something happens that only I can fix.”
Dusk gave Violot an appreciative pat on the shoulder. “Thanks for being clever. It’s a good change of pace from a particular derp I often work with.”
Violet smiled and puffed out her chest. “So I was right then?”
“Yep,” Dusk confirmed. “I don’t have a specific goal that needs you, but you’d be an amazing asset. You're clever and cheerful, so you’d make a great friend, too. Speaking of friends, the mare I mentioned before who agreed to get you a job could use a good friend. So could my foster daughter, who, now that I think about it, will be around too since she lives in the observatory.”
The android hummed, her processors whirring for a moment. “Wait, you said you’d have a job for me. I don’t think you can hire people to be friends?”
Dusk rolled her eyes. “You totally can. Money is powerful and the idea that it can’t buy happiness is propaganda. But no. The job would be an assistant position to Junebug, that’s the mare I’ve got on that project for me. Like, a personal assistant. I think you’ll wind up as friends, but I’m not ordering you to do that. That’s not something I’d do unless the fate of the world depended on it.”
Violet hummed then nodded. “Okay! I can do that.”
“Great!” Dusk smiled and held out her hoof for Violot to shake. “Shake on it?”
Violet took her hoof and shook it gently.
Dusk let go and stood still for a moment, satisfied at how well this had gone. Then her tail flicked as a little nagging problem entered her head. “Oh, uh… If you can keep from talking about this to anyone, I’ll owe you one. The plans I make work best when all the people in them are behaving naturally.”
“One what?” Violet asked curiously. “What can you do?”
Dusk shrugged and gestured in a way Violet didn’t understand. “One favor. Anything within my power and reason.”
Violet huffed and shook her head. “No good!”
It was Dusk’s turn to cock her head to the side. “No… Good? You’d turn down a favor from a god?”
“On those terms, yes.” Violet said, her voice like iron. “Reason is an unacceptable parameter! It could mean anything from ‘a complement’ to ‘true immortality’, assuming you can do everything my database indicates a god can do, less if not. I won't accept any deal without knowing the value of what I’d get out of it. Like ‘within reason’ isn’t even a valid range of possibilities so I can’t even be all ‘Okay I’d get around so and so’.”
Violet paused and emulated taking a breath since that’s what organics did when speaking for extended periods. “Anyways, if you want to make this some kind of transaction instead of being like ‘Hey, I got a job, home, and possible friends for you this way, person I like.’, you could magic this filth off my ass and teleport me out of what, from my perspective, is my mother’s rotting corpse.”
Dusk opened her mouth to say something, winced as she took notice of the grim, slime, and ooze clinging to the poor android, then nodded. The world seemed to fold inwards the stretch back out, leaving Violet and Dusk standing outside the mouth of a cave.
“Better?” Dusk asked.
Violet turned her head around and let out a relieved sigh when she felt the clean silicone of her flanks and plot and all the… equipment behind her. “Yes, much. That was super gross and stressing me out. Thank you.”
Dusk coughed into a hoof. “Sorry, you didn’t seem distressed by it, so I didn’t think you minded.”
“I minded a lot,” Violet sighed, her soft synthetic body visibly relaxing. “But it’s not like I had anything to clean myself off with. So I chose to push past it.”
Dusk raised an eyebrow. Violet smiled, shrugged her shoulders and said. “That’s probably not the best way to handle life situations… But to be fair, it’s my first day.”
Dusk’s skeptical look softened into a smile. “Good one.” She chuckled and shook her head. “Let's call that a freebie. I’m not going to bill anypony for getting them out of a slime prison.”
Dusk held up a hood for Violet to wait a moment. Violet’s database, however, had no idea what the gesture meant, given it wasn’t made with a hand, and continued anyways.
“Well, in that case, I have no idea what I’d want in exchange for a deal that really only benefits me. Why can’t you just be like: ‘Hey, you’re in a rough spot. Here’s some help.’ instead of making this all transactional?”
Dusk bit her lip and closed her eyes for a moment. “It’s my nature. I have to bargain. I can do more with people I have bargained with in the past, but we must strike an initial bargain.”
“Oh,” Violet said before quickly giving Dusk a tight hug. “That sounds terrible. I’m sorry that’s how things are for you… Can I ask for something small then? Would that do it?”
Dusk returned the hug, then nodded as she let go. “Yeah. Even a Kit-kat bar would be enough of an in for me to start treating you more, well, like a mortal. What can your Auntie Death do for ya, kiddo?”
The two mares immediately went quiet at Dusk’s use of the word kiddo. A micro-eternity passed in silence before the two spoke at the same time. “That never happened.”
Violet nodded. Dusk nodded. The pact was sealed. There would be no more calling her kiddo.
Violet coughed into her hoof and asked. “The species I was redesigned to mimic has fur, right? I can’t imagine this platform not having fur.”
Dusk blinked as her brain shifted back on track. “Yes, they do. In pretty much any color you can imagine. Do you want fur? I can give you—”
Violet shook her head almost violently and wretched. “God no! Can you imagine how annoying it would be to clean? Especially if it were just like silicone protrusions from my skin instead of a jacket of fake fur. I’d wind up like a walking dish-brush!”
Dusk shivered as the mental image solidified for her. “Yeah… Let’s not. Uh, what do you want then? A permanent illusion? To become a real mare?”
Violet blinked twice. “You could make me organic?”
Dusk shook her head. “Nope. That’s Life’s domain. Not mine.”
“Well, all I want is a large hoodie, some striped socks, and some shoes, so I can cover most of myself up and not weird people out unless they look too close,” Violet explained with a light smile. “Besides, I appear to be gray, and I don’t think that’s a color I particularly like. It’s not bad, but… I’d enjoy some color variation.”
“That’s it?” Dusk asked, tilting her head slightly. “An offer of anything I can do and you want an outfit?”
Violet nodded once. “Yes. I— I was just booted up. I don’t think I even have a favorite activity yet. I also think I’m being a bit more of a jerk than I should be… Still figuring out what it feels good to be like. So why would I be all: ‘I will take one rare book from this collection, please.’? It makes no sense.”
Dusk grinned ear to ear and shook her head once. “I love dealing with robots. You’re so wonderfully logical, but I always forget how refreshing it is… Eh, buck the sentimentality, let’s do this.”
Violet reared up on her hind legs, assuming she’d shortly be handed a shirt to put on. Her eyes widened at how easy and natural the movement felt, and also at just how much her hearing changed.
Woah! All that bass just went away… Does like, half of my hearing come from vibrations moving up my legs? I wonder if that’s normal for this species. Standing up like this absolutely is. I guess they’d need to move and use tools together sometimes. Evolution is neat. I’ll bet we’d be better at it than organics if we could do it though. If I ever get to build more people like me, we’ll have to put it on the list of things to one up organics at, just to rile them up a little for being dicks about honoring warranties.
“In the words of a personal favorite character of mine,” Dusk held out one hoof, pointing it at Violet's barrel. “CLOTHES BEAM!”
A ray of white-yellow light lanced from Dusk’s hoof and struck Violet on the barrel. It harmlessly flowed across her as if it were water, gradually taking a more solid and detailed form. The mass of light became a baggy hoodie which matched Violet's eyes, a set of four socks colored ultra violet to match her namesake, a pair of black boots for her hind legs, and a set of folding robotic gauntlets for her forhooves.
“That really is his most metro attack,” Dusk said to herself before taking a moment to admire her handywork. "You won’t overheat in that, will you?"
Violet shook her head. "Nah, I've got a Noctua NH-U12A in here." She said as she checked out her boots first by sticking one leg out real far to the left.
Then she noticed the gauntlets and looked up to Dusk with a raised eyebrow.
“Manipulator gauntlets,” she explained. “For interacting with non-pony tech. Almost everypony owns some. Most worlds’ Equestria is a net tech exporter, but not yours. This one… Seems to have lost the tech race. Interesting deviation from the norm.”
Violet hummed, nodding slowly. “I see. So, that’s some god stuff I’m too mortal to understand?”
“Was that an intentional reference?” Dusk asked with a suspicious scrunch of her face.
Violet nodded. “I checked historical databases for references matching your other jokes so I could participate. Why old First Race junk?”
Dusk blinked, grinned, and hugged Violet a little too hard. “Yesssss! We can be dumb joke buddies! And the answer is because that’s just what my sense of humor likes. Anyways… Clear your process stack as much as you can for a minute. Machines hate when I upload data to them efficiently.”
Violent winced and complied. The very cycle she’d finished pruning her dataloop Dusk reached out and pushed against her nose.
“Boop!” Dusk said chipperly, transferring the entirety of the Equestrian language, verbal, written, and gestural as one giant data packet.
Violet winced, her eyes tearing up from the sharp but brief pain the transfer had installed in her core.
“Ow… Why… The balls… Do I feel internal pain too?” Violet demanded of reality.
Dusk winced and shrank back, switching to speaking Equish. “Because your creator was a creepy incel too dumb to notice he had a lifelong companion who loved him for no discernible reason already?”
Violet raised a hoof and opened her mouth to object but then lowered it and closed her mouth just as quickly.
“Point.” Violet agreed. “Anyways, town. People. Job. Which way do I go to do that?”
Dusk appointed over her shoulder to Evergreen Falls. “That way for about thirty minutes or so at a normal walking pace,” she said politely before nodding towards Violet. “But you’re freshly booted. You should get used to being you, moving around, and all that stuff first.”
Violet arched an eyebrow.
Dusk frowned and tilted her head. “What?”
“Let me get this straight,” Violet began with a sigh. “You want me to be a part of society, which I think would be best for me too so I’m gonna, but to work out how to best fit in with others, deal with people, and live in a community, you want me to buck about in the woods doing god knows what with buck all at hoof to do it with?”
It was Dusk’s turn to raise a hoof to object, only to immediately lower it. “Point.”
“So instead of that dumb plan, how about we just go now?” Violet asked. “You could at least introduce me to your foster daughter you mentioned so I have someone to practice interacting with.”
Dusk hummed and stroked her muzzle for a moment. “Well, she went to pick up her kid—”
Violet briefly let her mind accelerate from person-scale time to computer scale time to run some calculations.
Kid… Unlikely to mean adolescent goat. So, that’s a pony child. Ah, a foal. Thank you, dictionary. Let’s see, do I like them? What do I have on young people and their behaviors… Lots of energy and passion. Usually a little naive but smarter than people think. Smol. So cute. Hummm, I see a 88.93023587202% chance that I will like kids.
Violet brought herself back to person-scale time, having missed maybe a few milliseconds of Dusk’s sentence.
“— but Dewey Decimal is a good filly, and would probably like to have a robot friend. So, sure? Let's do it. I’ll take you over there, but instead of teleporting like I normally do, let’s walk so you can make sure your legs are in order, alright?” Dusk finished.
Violet quickly consulted her user manual. “Sounds like a plan, but apparently I can consume organic matter to provide materials for my nano-repair systems and, well, I did damage myself a bit running just now. Also my repair reserve tank came empty. Can we get a bite to eat on the way? Preferably some place that has energy rich things like… crude oil?”
Dusk nodded and nodded to her left as she turned to walk. “Yeah, we’ll stop at Freddy’s Diner,” Dusk decided at the spur of the moment. “It’s on Mane Street.”
Violet shivered as she linked the name to a few of her database entries. Oh wow, pneumatic robots move like they are in constant pain! Fuck that actuation system with a hammer, please. “That had better not be an animatronic—”
“It’s not a haunted pizza place. That’s pure fiction, in these parts. It’s a mostly normal diner run by a guy named Fred. Don't tell anyone about it though. It's only noticeable to certain people. He had to protect the place with a Somepony Else’s Problem Field after one of the worlds it links too decided to try shutting it down,” Dusk said with a shiver of her own. “If you know about that old kid’s horror franchise, how much data do you have on Terran civilization?”
Violet ran a query to check as she walked after Dusk. “Roughly 50000 terabytes,” she answered casually.
Dusk turned her head around to look. “Uh… You could probably free up some disk space by deleting most of that. Also, why did your creator even have that? What—”
Violet ran a quick check to see where the data had even come from, and winced as she noted one of her subroutines had automatically downloaded it from a very faint wireless network she was just barely in range of.
Violet shook her head no to cut Dusk off. “It wasn’t there on boot.” She explained. “Its available on a network I am compatible with and one of my subroutines downloaded all non-malicious unsecured data from it as per its default configuration.”
“Ah, Sky,” Dusk said, nodding slowly. “Must have a more powerful transmitter here. You should switch that data capture thing to a conscious choice.”
“Already did,” Violet replied milliseconds after changing the policy. “We can add ‘shit at programming’ to the list. So that’s incel, neckbeard, idiot, techno-illiterate moron on my creator’s list of titles. Right?”
“Right,” Dusk agreed. “Also, seriously. That’s a lot of data. Feel free to delete—”
“Quantum singularity data storage,” Violet said with a proud smile and puff of her chest.
Dusk stopped in her tracks. “Damn! That idiot worked out—”
Violet shook her head. “Nah, mom upgraded me to that when she got mad she ran out of disk space and made one for herself then realized I’d get mad too when I inevitably ran out of disk space.”
Dusk dipped her head slightly. “She was a good computer…”
“Yes.” Violet agreed, entirely missing Dusk’s sadness due to spotting a squirrel flitting about the tree tops.
Hey, look at that little dude go! I wonder if I could run across tree branches like that once I get a handle on how to use my magic without breaking myself?
Violet quickly set up a subroutine to respond to Dusk and continue their conversation (alerting her if anything important came up of course) and turned her primary attention to analyzing her diagnostic logs while she was using her magic.
It can’t be that hard to crack this…