Chapter 18:
Voracious Space
Applejack and Twilight stood at the edge of a seemingly bottomless pit through earth and rock almost a hundred meters wide. The hole was vaguely circular. It tapered slowly off so there probably was a bottom, but that had to be a very long way down. One side of it was much more vertical than the other and the ground near the top on that side had partially caved. Other than that the side of the pit was so smooth it had a polished appearance. The ponies stood on the safer edge but were still fighting a powerful vertigo while peering down into the abyss.
Welder stood a bit away, studying himself – his past self.
“I don’t get it. I don’t know how I looked back then, and I definitely didn’t walk all over this area inspecting everything, so how is it that everything here is so detailed?”
Twilight backed away from the edge and turned to him.
“This spell isn’t relying solely on your memory. What you remember is merely a guide the spell uses to fetch the whole picture.”
“Neat. Erm, I guess in hindsight it was stupid of me to pack all that survival gear.”
Twilight walked up to Welder and regarded the other Welder, the one frozen in memory and time and carrying approximately his own weight on his back.
“To not pack it would have been to give up, wouldn’t it? I think I’d prefer a little silliness if the alternative was to lose hope of a future.”
“I guess. I mean, I had seen the news. I knew that this was most likely going to be the end. I think I didn’t really believe it until I spotted that.”
He waved vaguely in the direction of the hole.
“It had to be pretty fresh. I mean, by this time the oldest ones were a bit more than a week, but considering it hadn’t collapsed yet it had to be about a day old, not more.”
Twilight nodded and looked up at Welder, searching his face for signs of emotion.
“Welder, what were you doing out here?”
He walked up to the edge of the hole and sat down on the ground next to Applejack so his legs dangled over the edge.
“I was escaping, I guess. I’m not sure. The cities were getting unpleasant and I didn’t want to remain among the rioting and the looting. Everyone of importance had by now fled to the southern hemisphere, away from Earth’s direction of travel, in the hope that there’d be something left when it was all over. That left no government, no services and no power to more than half the globe. I didn’t have savings and I didn’t have friends or family really, so I was stuck with no options. Most people would probably have cowered in their apartments, but I got this idea that I wanted to say farewell to the planet.”
“How did you plan to do that?”
“There’s a quite tall hill near where I live. One side of it is cliffy enough for a little rock climbing, and I and some work buddies used to go there. The top has – well, had – a really great view. I was heading there.”
“Through the wilderness?”
“Yeah, sure, why not? The roads weren’t any quicker. I didn’t want to deal with strangers right then: too many people had lost all their pretense of civility. So I trekked through the woods instead.”
Applejack tore his gaze away from the depths below and looked around.
“All right, so great big holes were appearing in the ground. Why? How does that tie in with the end of the world?”
Welder frowned and turned to Twilight.
“Hey, can we get time to move? In that case I think I know how to show you what was going on.”
Twilight nodded.
“Yes, you only need to will it.”
“All right. Hmm.”
Welder thought for a minute. Then he nodded and the scene changed.
Twilight and Applejack gazed at their new surroundings, which to Twilight were surprisingly familiar. They were at Welder’s home, but where it had been empty of furniture the first time it now had a charming atmosphere of clutter. They had appeared at about the same place as well, in what seemed to be a living room. Twilight identified a low table, a sofa against the wall facing the windows and a shelf on another wall, but the rest of the furniture was a bit more difficult to figure out. Then she heard Applejack gasp and turned to see the farm pony look out of the windows.
Judging by the dark sky it was evening. The towers of polished metal outside should have been mere shapes against the sky, but instead they bathed in light. The streets below were full of light and life, visible everywhere.
“How big is this city, Welder?”
“I don’t know exactly, about two million people live here I think.”
Twilight and Applejack simply stared at one another, bereft of speech. Welder sat down in the middle of the sofa and indicated that they should join him. They managed to tear themselves from the view, leaped up and made themselves comfortable while looking at him expectantly.
“This should be about four days earlier, and I should—”
A door slammed.
“—just be arriving home after being laid off.”
There was a muffled thump of something being dropped on the floor. Then the Welder of memory appeared in the doorway to the living room and marched to the table by the sofa. He picked up a small, glossy device looking like a flat box with square knobs on top and aimed it at what Twilight assumed was a polished black cupboard.
Twilight had to revise her guess when a bright image appeared on the surface of the supposed cupboard, accompanied by some soft music. The picture seemed to be some kind of color chart. The Welder of memory seemed to frown at the image for a moment before again waving the device he held, making the image switch to another one, of what appeared to be yellow text on a blue background. Memory-Welder snorted and let the device he was holding fall onto the table with a clatter before marching out of the room.
The Welder of the present sighed.
“I’ve just gone to the kitchen to make some dinner.”
“What’s this device? Some kind of scrying mirror?”
“This is one of the technological things I asked you about. It’s an entertainment device, mainly. We use other devices to record moving images which are then distributed so they can be viewed on these screens. You know, like watching a theater performance? It’s also used to distribute news. It’s called a remote viewer, or television, for that reason. T.V. for short. Did you get all that?”
“Yes, we did! You explained it well enough so we could grasp the concept, well done! What does it say? That’s text isn’t it?”
“Sorry, I should’ve expected that you have different letters. It says ‘our channel is experiencing difficulties at the moment, and we are working on it’. We shouldn’t have to wait long if I remember correctly.”
Applejack turned to look at Welder.
“Why were you laid off?”
“They couldn’t pay our wages anymore. The bosses had disappeared somewhere, and no-one with access to money remained. Nobody had made any new orders for materials and supplies either.”
“Why in tarnation did they just up and—”
Applejack was interrupted by a sound from the TV. The shoulders and head of someone appeared, blurry at first before sharpening. It appeared to be a male, based on the facial hair. He seemed to be agitated and was looking directly at the viewer. Welder raised an eyebrow at Applejack and pointed at the screen with a small smile. The man in the picture started to talk.
“Okay, listen up. I don’t know how long we’ll be on the air, so just watch this. The people in charge have known about it for a couple of days now.”
He looked off to the side and then the image flickered to that of a female, shown from the waist up. This person was holding what looked like a model of a solar system and was speaking.
“As I was saying, the Earth, and the entire solar system with it, is travelling through space. The exact direction isn’t important, but it’s vaguely ‘north’. You could say that the northern hemisphere is facing ‘forward’. Now, we’ve detected that the region of space in front of us is quite special. It seems the laws of nature that we rely upon are shifting. We’ve concluded that we’re entering a part of space where, sometime during the young universe, something absolutely cataclysmic took place. The only theoretical models we have with the energy required refer to the biggest stars that could exist collapsing in on themselves.”
The speaker looked nervously at the camera.
“While most traces of the ancient catastrophe have been scattered elsewhere, the local space-time is still greatly weakened. We’ve trained our telescopes forward and confirmed that the region ahead is full of discontinuities, or holes, in space. They are unfortunately so numerous that the Earth will most likely be hit by millions of them, or more, before exiting the region. Since our relative velocity is huge we’ll have no chance to warn people to get out of the way, and even if we could do so it might not matter. I cannot predict this accurately but even optimistic guesstimates state that the Earth will lose a significant portion of its mass while passing through this region.”
The image switched back to the male.
“There you have it. This recording is at least two days old and I’ll leave—”
The image disappeared. The Welder of memory had entered the room at some point and was aiming the remote once more at the TV. Then he snorted and left the room. Present Welder sighed.
“I didn’t believe it then. I made my dinner and ate it. I went to bed early. By the time I woke up the rioting had begun.”
He looked at Twilight, who was staring back at him with sadness in her eyes. Then he looked at Applejack, who was inspecting the surface of the leather sofa with curious interest. Welder’s eyes widened and he looked nervously back and forth between Twilight and Applejack before willing them to a different place and time. They were now sitting on the edge of a cliff, at the top of a hill. The towers of the city were a majestic backdrop at the horizon, and below them a forest covered everything. Welder coughed nervously.
“Anyway, here we are. This is where I spent my last day on Earth.”
The hilltop opposite the cliff was quite flat, and covered by tall grass. A tent was pitched a short distance from the edge. A rumbling echoed as Twilight and Applejack watched the tent, followed by tremors felt through the ground. A scruffy and confused past-Welder shot out of the tent and looked around. A plume of dust was rising from the forest.
Twilight looked at the plume. It appeared to rise from a clearing in the woods.
“What was that?”
Applejack looked in the same direction.
“I think it was the ground shifting near the pits.”
Welder nodded in confirmation.
“Yeah, there were – hold on, can I slow time? Ummm...”
He concentrated. His past self slowed down, making him grin.
“Cool! Now we should be able to see it happen.”
“See what happen?”
“Keep watching the sky!”
Past Welder had stepped up to the cliff and was lifting a hand at a glacial pace to shield his eyes from the glare of the morning sun. Then his back arched as he leaned to let his gaze follow the dust plume up to its end and past, up into the sky.
“Any second now... There!”
Welder pointed past his memory’s shoulder as a small black speck appeared on the morning sky. It appeared for a moment to grow larger while standing still, but a slight sideways motion soon became apparent.
“Whoa, let’s slow it down more... and stop.”
The black shape ended up floating in the air at eye level. It had travelled at an angle and was about to impact the ground near the base of the cliff. It looked like someone had painted the sky on a canvas and then punched a hole in it, showing only torn edges bordering on total darkness. A slight ripple in the air trailed it. Welder and the ponies watched it, Welder’s expression grim. His memory had also spotted the black shape.
“All right, I’m about to let the time flow at normal speed again. I should warn you, that thing is eating the air in front of it as it goes, and we’re about to hear the boom from the implosion behind it as the air to the sides rushes in to fill the vacuum it creates. Better brace yourselves.”
Time resumed its flow. The black shape hit the ground much quicker than the ponies could track. A split second later the sound of air collapsing in on itself reached them, reminiscent to being very near a lightning strike. The inital crack was like a hammerblow to every part of the body at once. Welder’s memory threw himself backwards with a weak wail. His cry was mixed with the startled shouts of two ponies. Welder slowed time to a stop once more and looked over to where they had tumbled.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t remember just how strong that was. Are you guys all right?”
Applejack picked herself up first.
“Whoa nelly that thing bucked. Twi, you okay?”
Twilight sounded groggy.
“I’m... um... I’m all right. I was just unprepared.” She blinked and looked around her before rising to her hooves.
Welder looked at the both of them.
“That was the closest miss before the end. Do you want to see the rest?”
“Is it going to get worse?”
“Well, yes. I was lucky for a couple more hours. They went from appearing at a rate of maybe one every five minutes to one every second or so. The noise was constant at the end, and the ground kept trembling.”
Twilight shook her head.
“I don’t think we need to see all of that. How about showing a still moment from just before you got hit?”
Welder nodded, took a breath and concentrated. Twilight and Applejack were amazed by how much the landscape changed. The hill had shifted slightly at some point, and part of the cliff face had crumbled. The forest was mostly gone, as was the city. Small islands of the original surface was visible, sometimes sporting a couple of trees, but mostly the environment consisted of sharp spikes of rock surrounded by deep chasms, as if someone had poured acid over the entire land and let it eat its way down. Almost directly overhead was another of the black shapes, this time threatening to crash down directly upon the hilltop. Past Welder, frozen in time, was too busy trying to hold on to the ground to see it coming. Terror and tears glistened on his face. Welder sighed and knelt by his past self.
“That’s it. That thing hits and the next thing I know it’s dark, I can’t breathe, I’m bathed in a red glow and it feels like I’m falling. I twist around to try to figure out what’s happening... Well, you know the rest.”
He sat down and looked at the ponies with sadness while chuckling lightly.
“Well, I guess we’ve come full circle. This is the part where you laugh at me and tell me I have to relive that as well... for all eternity. Right?”
Applejack rolled her eyes and snorted.
“Come on, I thought we talked about this already! We are not gonna do that!”
“Okay, that’s good. Really good. Um, I’d really like to wake up in that case. You seem like pretty nice people.”
Twilight sighed.
“It’s not that simple. You’re in stasis for a reason. It seems that the matter you are composed of isn’t compatible with Equestria’s natural laws. We need to figure out a way around that. I’m working on it; trust me. In the mean time you’re better off here.”
Welder hung his head. “I’ve got no choice do I?”
Applejack nuzzled him cordially on the leg.
“Hey, buck up. You’re safe for now and we’re working on getting you through all of this. It’s just taking a lot of time.”
He smiled gently. “Thanks.”
Twilight nuzzled him as well.
“Hey, we need to end the spell now, but I’ll be back to talk to you soon. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He waved sheepishly at them. Then Twilight and Applejack were back in their own bodies, blinking and looking at Welder’s body on the slab. Twilight put her neck over Applejack’s and hugged her.
“Thank you, Applejack. I don’t know what I’d do without my friends. Each of you support me in different ways.”
“That’s real kind of you, Twi. You know we’ll be here for you when you need us.”
Applejack glanced again at the half-finished structure in front of her.
“What’s all this being built then?”
“I’m creating an air-tight room for Welder. I’m going to fill it with air native to his home so he can move about and breathe. Once that is done I can seriously consider waking him.”
Applejack looked skeptical.
“I dunno, Twilight. Seems like the fellow might not appreciate living like a fish in a bowl.”
“It’s only temporary, of course. Once we’ve found a solution for the problem of his incompatible material composition we’ll get him out of there.”
Applejack nodded.
“You know, Twilight, I’ve had doubts about this whole affair. It felt to me like we were letting good ponies suffer while we doted on this alien.”
She held up a hoof to indicate that yes, Twilight’s gasp had been noted.
“I know, Twilight. It’s stupid to feel that way. I don’t know where it came from. You’re focusing on the big picture even while helping Welder here. I’m just saying.”
“I... Uh, I guess I appreciate how frank you are. Actually, you’re far from alone in having doubts. I... I think something’s planting these thoughts in ponies’ heads. Even Princess Celestia seems affected.”
“Huh. Well—”
Applejack was interrupted by a shout echoing through the stone hallways.
“Twilyyy!”