“You can’t keep me here forever.”
The man—Meg still didn’t know his name—slammed the door behind him. “And you’ll have to do better than your last attempt.”
“I got out of this room, didn’t I?”
Without bothering to open the door, never mind unlocking it. There was no need to limit herself to three dimensions. She had invoked her own version of a “return spell,” a spell that returned her to hyperspace.
She had deliberately let herself get caught, of course, and get caught inside the building no less. “Next time, I’ll get out of this building.”
Conflicting emotions fought for control. He settled on a sneer. “Despite your best efforts, we accessed the advanced spells kept on your computer.”
Her efforts to prevent that had only been enough to look convincing. The past was immutable, after all. But she had little trouble looking crushed. “You should not meddle in matters beyond your comprehension.” Even as she said it, she cringed at how clichéd it sounded.
“Fortunately, you ‘know a thing or two about magic.’” He literally finger quoted that. His eyes turned stone cold. “You have a niece, do you not?”
Steve had not returned home when Meg woke up the next morning in her bed. She hadn’t stuck around in Tracy; there wasn’t anything she could do there. Twilight did suggest before Meg departed that a software model for the anomaly would be helpful. A model certainly wouldn’t hurt, but not one created while sleep deprived. Not that she got a good night’s sleep. Her upcoming appearance before the Senate made sure of that.
But that was two days away, and this crisis was now, so where to start?
Best to start with breakfast.
Meg got out of bed and made her way to the kitchen. She stopped before she got there. There was a folded note card on the table with her name on it. It bore a royal seal.
After picking it up and unfolding it, she read it. It was a request that she attend a working breakfast with the princesses. Guess I don’t have to make myself breakfast, was her first thought. Her second thought was to wonder which princesses would be present. Celestia, certainly. Luna, probably, though it wouldn’t be breakfast, technically speaking, for her.
Twilight, that was the question. But since Steve hadn’t returned, presumably neither had Twilight. And those two would have the most up-to-date information.
The card had not stated what would be “worked.” Maybe she shouldn’t make assumptions. Just make herself presentable and go. She’d find out soon enough.
Dawn had broken. The sun was only minutes away from rising unassisted. This was a state of affairs that didn’t exist in Equestria, where the transition from night to day was far, far shorter. It was the first time Twilight would experience the human realm’s version.
The wind at the perimeter had strengthened in the last few hours. Presumably the anomaly had grown in size to match, but that was surprisingly challenging to determine—and not just because it had been until recently night. It wasn’t opaque. It didn’t glow. There was no obvious boundary. Whatever was on the other side of it was plainly visible, if somewhat distorted. Maybe slightly dimmer too, with the hint of a tint. The interior was there for them to see, but all that could be seen was… nothing.
“Can you get a lidar unit here?” Steve asked, a mug of coffee floating before him. He was talking to MacAuley, who also had a mug. It was the only way they were staying awake. “We need to measure how big it is—on the inside—and more importantly, how fast it’s growing. Also determine the geometry in there; light can map out the geodesics.”
Lidar? Whatever that was. She still found it amazing how many inventions humans had with which to do what ponies did with magic. Like measuring the size of this anomaly. She had already ruled out using the spell for measuring a realm’s size. Not that it wouldn’t have worked, but because it would require exposing the anomaly to another magic generator. It was growing fast enough on its own.
“Sure,” MacAuley said. “We can get whatever we need. But we can see the dent in the ground it’s making. Isn’t that a good enough approximation?”
Steve shook his head. “It’s a lot bigger on the inside than the outside; that’s where all the air is going. A laser is the only thing we’ve got that can pass through it in one piece.”
“How can you be so sure of that?” MacAuley shrugged. “Not that I can see any harm in trying.”
“Because we can see through it.”
MacAuley did just that, gazing at the far side. “Yeah.” He turned to a subordinate. “Go requisition one.”
The subordinate nodded and left them, careful not to spill any coffee from his mug.
“So where is all the air going? I mean, can we get it back? Has it left our universe or something?”
“No, it’s still very much a part of our universe. Think of our universe as a rubber sheet, ignoring the fact that this sheet is two dimensions instead of three. Now think of this anomaly as a bubble in a rubber sheet. If we can shrink it, make the sheet flat again, we get all the air back.”
“And if the bubble… pops? Does everything bleed out of our universe into… whatever contains our universe?”
Steve shook his head. “I wouldn’t worry about that. The rubber sheet analogy is flawed, but I don’t have anything better. It can’t pop. It’s not even a bubble, really, in that it doesn’t ‘extrude’ outside the universe; that’s not how space-time curvature works. It’s not how the expansion of the universe itself works. There is no ‘outside the universe’ as far as the laws of physics are concerned.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
No outside the universe… But there was, of course. Even if this realm’s physics was oblivious to it. “Perhaps we should go out there and take a look,” she told Steve. “A different perspective could help.”
He thought about it. “No idea what we would see, but I guess that’s the point. If we can locate this spot. And if you-know-who cooperated.”
MacAuley raised an eyebrow. “You-know-who? Any reason I should remain ignorant?”
Twilight sighed. “Discord, if you must know.”
“I thought he couldn’t come to our world.”
“He can’t. That’s not what I’m suggesting.”
“Then what are you suggesting?”
Twilight hesitated. She looked to Steve. He shrugged. “You might as well tell him,” he said.
The FBI agent was waiting.
“Fine. We can go outside your realm, into the hyperspatial void between our realms, and take a look at this anomaly from the outside. No idea what we’d see, but, as Steve said, that’s the point.”
“I thought he just said there was no ‘outside.’”
“No, I said our laws of physics don’t acknowledge an outside. There’s very definitely an outside. Both Twilight and I have been there.”
“Can our scientists accompany you?”
Twilight frowned. “Unfortunately not. Discord claims that he can only keep magical creatures alive in that place.” And yet Future Meg, apparently in human form, was able to handle it all on her own. Must have been due to future technology. Regardless, it was of no help to them in the present.
MacAuley locked his gaze onto a certain unicorn. “May I assume that you are now a magical creature?”
Steve was unfazed. “If by that you are asking whether your scientists can be turned into magical ponies so they can accompany us, the answer is yes. Would they be willing to do that? It is not a decision to make lightly.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” Twilight declared. There were enough things on her to-do list without adding the training of additional humans-turned-ponies.
“I’ll pass that along,” MacAuley said, evidently content not to discuss that topic further. “Do you think you can fix this from—hyperspace, was it?”
Twilight and Steve exchanged glances. “I wouldn’t depend on it,” Steve said.
The phone in Twilight’s saddlebag started playing the My Little Pony theme, which meant Meg was calling her. Custom ring tones were an fortuitous discovery; she could now ignore any unknown caller. The rare such call she’d actually care about usually left a message. She retrieved her phone from the saddlebag and accepted the call, putting it on speakerphone. “Hi, Meg.”
“Do you have a few minutes? I’m in a meeting with the other princesses. They’d like an update.”
“And little old me!”
Discord’s there too? Twilight couldn’t imagine what… well, they could use his help anyway. “Sure, we can give an update.” She waved Steve over. “Why don’t you summarize what we’ve come up with so far.”
Steve did so. While he was doing so, MacAuley had come over uninvited. Twilight didn’t think it productive to point that fact out. “Are you willing to escort us there?” Steve concluded with a question directed at Discord.
“I wouldn’t miss it for anything. I can almost taste the chaos it must be causing, all the way here in Canterlot.”
MacAuley fumed. “That ‘chaos’ you’re tasting may end up destroying our world, if we can’t put a stop to it.”
“And my help you shall have. A dead world is a dull, boring, chaos-free world.”
“Don’t argue with him,” Steve softly said.
MacAuley glared at the unicorn, but then thought better of it.
“Who are we addressing?” asked Princess Celestia.
“Special Agent MacAuley. I’m in charge here. And to whom am I speaking?”
Twilight face-hoofed.
“Princess Celestia. I can assure you, Special Agent MacAuley, that we shall provide whatever assistance we can to end this magic-based threat. It is deeply troubling that there is one, in the first place, in your realm.”
“Your Highness. Perhaps it was inevitable there’d be a first,” he conceded. “Fortunately, there is reason to believe ponies were not behind this.”
“As much as I wish that were true, I am not so sure. I am familiar with Star Swirl’s space expansion spell. There are few ponies I would trust to cast it. I have always myself cast it on the few vaults in my palace that would benefit from it. It is difficult to imagine how humans could have learned of this spell, much less cast it.”
MacAuley gazed into the anomaly. “Unfortunately, forensics is impossible when the spell has destroyed evidence of its own casting.”
“A not uncommon occurrence when that spell is cast incorrectly.”
He drank some coffee. “So how do you recover from that? Can we not do that too?”
“I think I should answer that.”
“Of course, Twilight.”
“There are spells to deal with this,” Twilight began. “I am of course familiar with them. The problem is, they won’t work in this realm. They don’t conserve energy, can’t conserve energy, which this realm won’t tolerate, and it isn’t obvious how to fix that.”
MacAuley sighed. “It is obvious that it cannot be fixed?”
“No?”
“I guess that’ll have to do for now.” Sudden realization struck, and he pointed a finger at the phone. “You received a phone call from… Canterlot, was it?”
“I’ve got my phone with me,” Meg said.
“And you’re there, in the same room as Princess Celestia and Discord.”
“I am here as well,” declared Princess Luna.
“Us too,” Cadance said. “We happen to be in town.”
“And you’re doing a great job, Twily.”
Did he even recognize all those voices? He hadn’t recognize Celestia’s. “Uh, in order, that was Princess Luna, Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, and Prince Shining Armor.”
He waved that away. “Your phone is getting a signal in Equestria?”
Over the phone, Meg simply said, “Magic.”
“Magic.”
Twilight smiled. “That’s right. Magic.” The full explanation would no doubt go over his head.
Steve changed the subject. “Look, I’m running on fumes here and coffee can only do so much. Until we can get that lidar there’s not much more I can do here, so I think I’ll return and try to get some shuteye, then maybe help Meg with modeling the anomaly in software.”
“Quite honestly, I think I’ll need Twilight’s help with that, because of the magic component. Unless, Twilight, you think Sunset Shimmer knows that spell.”
“She does,” Celestia said, preempting Twilight.
Steve was pointing off into the distance. “Are we on camera?”
MacAuley turned around. “Not good.”
Twilight looked for herself. A human with a shoulder-mounted camera was standing next to a parked van, using it to obscure their presence—attempting to use it, anyway. Another human, behind the first, was pointing some sort of… was that a large funnel of some sort? Whatever it was, it was pointed in their direction too. Reubens was already purposefully striding in their direction.
“Is that a directional mike?” Steve asked.
“Looks like it,” MacAuley said.
Agent Reubens reached the pair. Neither had tried to escape him. The funnel was no longer pointed at them. Was that the “directional mike?” What did it do?
“How long do you think they were listening to us?” Steve asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” MacAuley replied.
Twilight’s eyes widened in alarm. “They were listening to us?” She remembered the camera. “Wait, was what we were saying being recorded?!” It had never occurred to her that there could be technological equivalents to eavesdropping spells here.
“Yep,” Steve said with a sigh. “And if we’re really unlucky, they were transmitting, not recording.”
The phone. It was still in her magical grasp. She looked down at it. “Did you hear that, Celestia?”
“Yes, Twilight. You are best suited to determine the prudent course of action.”
“Damage control,” MacAuley dryly noted.
That was obvious, but how? She didn’t even know how long they’d been there! Her only consolation was that the others were just as caught off guard—and they were familiar with the technological possibilities.
They watched in silence as Reubens questioned the two men. It wasn’t much longer before the interrogation ended and he started back. The other two made haste and headed back to the media pool.
“So?” MacAuley asked once Reubens returned.
“They got everything starting about the time the subject of lidar came up. They were transmitting, so that’s that. It’ll be all over the news soon enough.”
“Great. Time to get started on that damage control. So if you’ll excuse me…”
“Sure,” Twilight said. She turned to the Secret Service agents. “You too?”
Reubens and Fowler shared a glance. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “I’ll go make the call.” And he departed.
“I’m going back now. Let me know when the lidar arrives.” Steve vanished.
“Just us two left,” Fowler said. “You should probably go back too. Doesn’t look like there’s anything else you can do at the moment.”
There didn’t seem to be. Maybe her time would be better spent working with Meg on that simulation software. She looked down at her phone. It was still communicating with Meg’s phone. “Any ideas over there on what I can do?”
Several seconds of silence. “There does not appear to be,” Celestia said.
What? Not even a… creative one from Discord? “Okay. I’m returning. Talk to you later.”
Meg followed Sunset Shimmer through the old mining tunnels, the latter’s horn lighting the way. It was a refreshing change from the helmet light she usually relied upon. When they reached the locked door, the unicorn was able to unlock and open it with her magic—another refreshing change. Normally, Meg had to knock and wait.
A royal guard came to investigate immediately, of course, but relaxed upon seeing them, content to close and magically re-lock the door. Meg quickly noticed all her co-workers were present and gathered around a whiteboard.
There was also someone else present, seated in a chair out of the way, who was far more interested in the new arrivals than in the whiteboard: Lauren Faust.
“Could someone fill me in?” Meg asked.
Diana paused her scribbling on the whiteboard. “About the situation in Tracy, or our unexpected guest?”
“I’ve been to Tracy, seen the anomaly for myself. Twilight was there too. Are all of you being dragged into this?”
“Top priority. We’re to do whatever we can to get a handle on it. If Twilight was there, could she confirm magic was involved?”
“She sure did. Has a good idea which spell it was too: one of Star Swirl’s, though incorrectly cast. That’s why Sunset is here, to help me model it in software.”
Faust joined the conversation. “Star Swirl, as in ‘the Bearded.’”
“The one and only,” Meg replied. “I don’t want to be rude or anything, but this is the last place I’d expect to find you.”
“Faust’s getting the VIP treatment,” Jake, their manager, said. “Word came down from on high.”
Their guest shrugged. “I don’t know what you did after I last saw you, but all the sudden my calls were being returned and… here I am. Or should I be thanking Twilight?”
“It could have been either of us,” Meg said. Though it was probably my mentioning you to Serrell that did it. She walked towards her workstation. “If this is top priority, I’m assuming we’ll have all the computing resources we could want to run my model of the anomaly once I get it running?”
“Money is no object,” Jake declared.
As opposed to when I ran the simulation that came up with the necklace for my Pinkie Pie doll. She arrived at her workstation. Whatever happened to that necklace? She had gotten the Pinkie Pie doll back from the FBI, but it was missing its collar. No one seemed able to explain what happened to it.
“When do you think you can have something to run?” he asked.
“I don’t know how to model it yet. I guess I can start with a black hole simulator, because something is definitely being done to space-time. The big unknown is how that space expansion spell is interacting with the field equations, never mind what the hell is powering it.”
Faust asked, “How are you going to use a keyboard with hooves?”
Meg’s hoof stopped short of her pendant. “I wasn’t. I was about to go human. Easier to sit in this chair, too.”
“Right. You can do that here. But before you do that… could you fly a bit? I’d like to see a pegasus flying up close—if you’re not exhausted from flight training again.”
“She’s never flown for any of us,” Martin pointed out.
“You never asked,” Meg shot back. The cavern was big enough, so long as she kept it slow and easy. She decided that humoring her wouldn’t hurt. “Sure, I can afford a minute or two.”
So she stepped away from the computer, extended her wings, began flapping, and lifted a few feet off the floor. Next she carefully flew over to Faust. “So what do you think?”
“I’m thinking…” Her eyes were tracking the slow flapping of Meg’s wings. “I’m thinking that you’re barely exerting yourself—which ought to be impossible.” She threw up her hands. “I know, I know. Magic.”
“You’re right on both counts. I’m not exerting myself; I can keep this up indefinitely. And magic.”
Diana approached her. “But pegasi can fly in our universe, right? You must be violating conservation of momentum; you’re not moving enough air, to put it mildly.”
“It doesn’t feel any different flying in the other universe. I don’t know how it knows, but flight magic compensates. Over there, momentum is conserved; the equal and opposite momentum is carried away by gravitational waves. But only over there; here, it isn’t conserved.”
“How do you know that?” Jerry asked.
Meg was beginning to wish she had simply claimed ignorance. “My husband figured it out shortly after becoming a unicorn. Telekinesis works the same way.”
“Okay… Regardless, how does magic ‘know’ how to deal with the limitations of our universe?”
“I, uh…” Meg turned her head to the unicorn in the room. “Do you have a clue?”
Sunset looked up in thought. “Can’t say I do. There is much we don’t understand about so-called instinctive magic, even as to how it works in our own realm.”
Meg returned to the floor and squeezed her pendant, eliciting a shocked squeal from Faust.
“You get used to it,” Diana said.
“I sure have,” Meg commented as she walked on two legs back to her workstation. She sat down and logged on to her computer.
“I-I can’t even begin to imagine what it must… must be like to experience a transformation like that!”
Meg spun around in her chair and threw Faust a smile. “That makes two of us. I don’t experience anything. Really. And I’ve tried. It’s always something that has happened, never something that is happening.” She returned to her computer. “Probably better that way.”
Martin rubbed his chin in thought. “Stream of consciousness is unaffected by the transformation. So when your brain is transformed between human and pegasus, its state is perfectly and instantaneously mapped from one to the other. That sounds like one hell of a computation that’s being performed damned fast.”
“It’s magic,” Meg said with a sigh. “What do you want?”
“To understand it, of course. If we could harness it… just imagine what else it could ‘compute.’”
“Who says it can ‘compute’ anything?” Jerry said. “It’s magic, not a computer.”
“Still looks like it’s computing to me.”
“On what? No conceivable computer can begin to compute that!”
“Maybe this proves we’re living in a simulation. That’s what we should find out!”
“We can worry about that later,” Jake said. “After we save the world.”
“Not even then,” Sunset said. “That particular spell is beyond my ability to cast. Beyond any unicorn’s ability to cast.”
“She means it’s alicorns only,” Meg said. “Or Discord. So don’t get your hopes up.” She started typing, creating a new branch in the repository holding the black hole simulator. Then her hands went slack. “That was the easy part. Still have no idea how to model the spell.”
Sunset scrunched her face. “A spell cast incorrectly. Which makes it worse. We don’t yet know how it was incorrectly cast.”
“Maybe the simulator can help figure that out?” Diana suggested. “Vary the parameters until it matches observations.”
“That could work,” Meg said. “Especially since we have an unlimited computing budget. One small problem though: we don’t have observations to match against—not yet.”
“And what are the parameters to vary?” Sunset added.
“Well,” Martin began. “There’s an obvious one to start with. It’s a spatial expansion spell, right? The field equation has a term tailor-made for that, the so-called cosmological constant. What if the spell manipulated that?”
“It’s as good a place to start as any,” Meg said. “There’s still a problem though. Star Swirl didn’t have a clue about Relativity. His spell would only manipulate space, ignoring that it was connected with time.”
“Which is why,” Sunset continued, “that spell must be cast with precision, otherwise things can go horribly wrong. And that includes problems with time.”
“And Steve reported that time dilation is happening inside the anomaly. Plugging in a non-zero value for the cosmological constant won’t cause that.”
Martin shrugged. “Doesn’t mean that’s not a part of it. Maybe if the spell was written with knowledge of General Relativity, that’s what it’d do, directly. Because it wasn’t, maybe it’s doing it indirectly, via some Rube Goldberg contraption. It’s only his genius that got it to work at all.”
Sunset gave him a studied look. “You know what? I can’t say you’re wrong. But it does make me wonder how he managed to avoid destroying our realm before he got it working.”
Twilight’s head sank onto the open book. Her head jerked back up again. “Maybe I could use some coffee,” she groaned. She was still running on Greek time. That had become as unhelpful here in her library as it had been helpful the previous night in Tracy.
“Latest set of books from Celestia.” Spike walked in, yawning, with three books in his hands. “She thinks these are the last she’ll find.”
All were quite thick. “Put them over there, Spike.”
He did so, adding them to the existing pile. And yawned again. “Maybe you should catch some shuteye?”
“There’s no time for that. That anomaly had doubled in size, at least, while I was there, maybe more.”
“Then at least use that… what did you call it? That ‘jet lag’ spell?”
She yawned. “Won’t help. It only lets me fall asleep when I otherwise couldn’t; it won’t keep me awake.”
“Tea? Coffee?”
She’d prefer tea, but she needed something stronger. “Coffee.”
“Whoa. You really are struggling. Be right back!”
As the baby dragon hurried out, a disguised pegasus entered. “Save the world yet?”
Twilight eyed the too-energetic Yearling. “How are you managing to stay awake? And no, not yet.”
“It’s not that late. You’re working yourself too hard. You should take a break.”
Her head slumped back onto the book. “Maybe you’re right. I can hardly think straight.” She looked up at Yearling. “How would Daring Do solve this one?”
“She wouldn’t. This isn’t her kind of story.”
Twilight sighed. “I suppose not. So what did I miss in Athens?”
“Well, in addition to the Parthenon, which you saw, briefly, we also visited the Old Temple of Athena, the Sanctuary of Zeus Polieus, the Theater of Dionysus Eleuthereus—”
“I get the idea.”
“Also an impressive museum,” she hurriedly finished. “Seeing so many ancient ruins belonging to an alien civilization… they’re like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
Maybe it was just as well I had to depart early. Visiting ruins for the sake of visiting them didn’t do much for her. “They are human, after all. So when do you leave for Knossos?”
“Tomorrow.”
Spike returned with a mug in claw. “Hey, A.K. Would you also like a mug of coffee?”
She shook her head. “No thanks. I plan on going to bed soon.”
He set the mug down in front of Twilight. “Probably a good idea.”
Twilight stared at the mug, not disturbing it.
“You might still want to go there,” Yearling said. “There’s still the question of that minotaur myth.”
That was her motivation for tagging along. It hadn’t become less important just because of the anomaly. Maybe she could find an hour or two. But if she didn’t go back now, how would she get to that palace?
Seemingly reading her mind, Yearling added, “I can take you there when you have the time.”
Of course she could; that’s how the plaid pills worked. It would be better to do so while Andy was still there, when they had official permission to poke around, but that wasn’t absolutely necessary.
“I’ll let you know.”