“Hello,” came a voice from outside of the shack.
The sentry looked up from his newspaper and felt his large stomach churn with disgust. In front of him was the blue-green unicorn from earlier—this time, standing politely at the gate. Across his back was slung a massive pack, similar to the ones used by hikers, and bound to the pack, strapped crosswise like the symbol of a railroad crossing, were two rifles. The unicorn had all four of his knees bent, trying desperately to support the weight of the pack, as he attempted to force a smile at the sentry and to say: “In what direction is the courtyard?”
“Go kill yourself,” said the sentry, turning back to the newspaper.
The unicorn nodded faintly. “Much obliged,” he said, and he continued through the gate.
The courtyard was not too difficult to find. It was one of the many exhibits of history in the city of Canterlot. At its length, it was two hundred yards long—at its width, one hundred yards. In a big grassy plain, far away from any impeding clusters of trees, Crystal Miner let fall with a sigh of relief the pack, from which could be heard the soft rattle of metal cartridges against each other.
He looked at his pocket watch. He still had an hour to spare until the president arrived, plenty of time to make all the necessary preparations. From his pack, he removed a few small white cardboard boxes, each containing twenty cartridges. He pulled two tube springs from two of the side pouches on his pack and laid them on the grass. His horn began to glow and, with great concentration, he began to press, carefully, the cartridges into the magazine of the longer rifle. Four bullets had smoothly slid down the hole with a pleasant rattling sound before he stopped; the president will probably want to see how it was loaded as well, he thought, as he overturned the rifle and dumped the four bullets from the magazine out onto the grass.
He laid out onto the grass a few barrels of different lengths, three additional magazines rods, a few varieties of hammers he had brought for testing, different designs for the lever, some medium and long-range sights; and a few replacement springs, in case the slightly rusted ones that were already installed in the rods should pick an incredibly inconvenient time to break.
As he set out a few old dinner plates upright against some short bushes, along with some pieces of sheet metal—favored targets of his, which made a satisfying clang when hit—he realized that there would be plenty of opportunities to show the president how the rifle was loaded. And he realized that, despite the fact that loading the rifle was an action he was intimately familiar with, he was going to have to do it in front of the president; and, as with all familiar tasks, all familiarity and ease with the task instantly disappears when one knows one is being judged—and he did not want to start off his demonstration, which in reality had to be more akin to an entertaining performance, by fumbling with bullets and springs in front of a creature whose sole job was to judge.
He levitated multiple bullets at once, raised the rifle to them, and tried to line up the bullets as close as possible to each other, in an attempt to load the entire magazine within the span of a second. As he was performing this sort of balancing act, he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, a screw near the sight of the rifle with the shorter barrel that was jutting out slightly more than the screw on the other side of the sight.
Instantly, in a panic, he dropped the rifle and the bullets he was holding over it, hovered the smaller rifle near his face; and he felt his heart began to race when he saw that the screw had become dislodged, and the sight was listing to the right, out of place, and not firmly fixed to its holder. His breaths becoming more shallow and rapid, he rummaged frantically through the rucksack, throwing out various pieces of metal carelessly, looking for one of the simplest machines that existed: a machine that had existed ever since the first pony, beginning to make the first noises of the first of the languages of his species, uttered a sound that represented the idea that was the closest to the modern concept of “engineering,” a machine which, after several minutes, caused Crystal Miner to fall back onto the grass, distraught, when he realized that he did not have it—a screwdriver.
He was trying to push, helplessly, the dislodged sight back into place when his blurry peripheral vision detected movement, and he looked up and saw four figures quickly approaching him. Sweat forming on his forehead, he quickly found a patch of slightly overgrown grass and tossed the rifle into it. He immediately looked away from it, hoping that if he did not steal a glance at it, then nopony else would. After hastily and messily loading the magazine of the longer rifle—where, more than one time, the bullet whose turn it was to be dropped into the breech bounced off the edge of the hole and landed on the grass, causing its inventor to grab another one out of the cardboard box, not wanting to waste time looking for it in the grass—he quickly shouldered the rifle before standing at attention and waiting to be approached, hoping with all his might that they had not seen his incompetence with his own machine.
Their faces were too far away to be seen, but he could make out the tall, slender figure as the president; the moderately tall, dark silhouette with a regal step as Princess Luna; that short, jerky, teal blur as that obsequious secretary; and one more specimen, a firm, auburn pony, who he could not recognize. Crystal Miner quickly pulled the iron ring off his horn, brought it to his mouth, smothered it in his humid breath, and rubbed it against his fur before quickly slipping it back on.
When they were in earshot, he heard the president call out: “Good afternoon, Mr. Miner!”
“As to you, Mr. President,” Crystal Miner yelled back. “I hope your limbs are steady and your eyes keen. The rifle requires a light touch; a skilled, careful, and deliberate hoof; and its recoil, full of wrath and coldness, will dislodge those who treat it improperly.”
When the group was closer, a thought came to Crystal Miner; and, without allowing it to pass through that filter installed in his brain for the sake of social customs, that filter which prevents thousands of thoughts from being converted into language every second lest the impurities make their way out of the speaker’s mouth and frightens society, he added: “In many ways, it’s quite like a female.”
When Crystal Miner’s eyes met those of the fourth, auburn figure, and when he saw the pince-nez sitting on her nose, the memory was recalled to him, and he could feel it filling his mouth with its sour taste. He gagged and shuddered.
“Mr. Miner,” said the president, turning to the fourth, “may I introduce Vice Director Ripples of the Department of Magic and Defense.”
It was only now that the vice director recognized the unicorn with the smug stare and arrogant posture, and she took a step back, her tongue out in disgust. “Sir, you didn’t tell me it was him!”
“I had assumed you knew,” he replied. “Is there a problem?”
She looked at him and raised her brow, as one does when one is trying to impart a grave truth to someone, a piece of knowledge that would mean the difference between life and death. “Sir, I don’t know what he told you, but his behavior—the things he said, which the most fundamental of manners forbid me from repeating in your presence—compelled me to have him forcibly removed from the premises. He gave the police quite a few bruises when he resisted their attempts to escort him.”
The president nodded. “Having met and spoken extensively with Mr. Miner,” he replied, “I will admit that he can be . . . exuberant, to say the least; however, the interest that the government of the Union takes in this stallion and what he has to offer is of a purely scientific nature—and since this is a matter of science, his personality and his method of relating to his fellow citizens is completely irrelevant and does not, in any way, besmirch the value he offers.”
“Well,” said Vice Director Ripples, levitating her glasses and wiping them with a cloth that came out of her breast pocket, “regardless of his personality, I did indeed review the matter. Mr. Miner wanted to sell to the government of the Union a weapon he had invented—a ‘repeating rifle,’ to use his words. I evaluated the machine, personally; and, after weighing the facts, after considering the pros and the cons, I, as the director of the Department of Magic and Defense, made the executive decision to not purchase the rifle for the Union Army. This upset Mr. Miner, and he became violent toward me and my employees.”
“‘Vice director,’” said the president.
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“You referred to yourself as the ‘director of the Department of Magic and Defense’; this is an error, as you are its vice director.”
There was a moment’s silence. Vice Director Ripples stared at the president with an amused smirk, expecting him to relent at any second. When he did not, when she saw that he was staring at her as firmly as ever, and when she saw his beady red eyes protrude out of their sockets, trying to rip an explanatory answer out of her brain before it was ready, she took a step back and, in a wavering, hesitant voice, said: “Mr. President, as of right now, I hold supreme authority over all facets in the Department. I’m—”
“The director of the Department of Magic and Defense is a unicorn named Brilliant Star. A warrant for his arrest was put out about a month ago. Until he is arrested, tried, and found guilty of treason and desertion, he is still its director; and if—I should say when—he is found guilty, only then will the position of director be available. And I would like to remind you, Ms. Vice Director, that it is I, the president of the Union, that personally appoints the new director of the Department—and I must say that presumptuousness is not a quality I find becoming in a leader.”
The vice director nodded and stared at the ground. She began to absentmindedly prod at the grass with a forehoof.
Crystal Miner could feel a warm sensation of pleasure rising in his chest.
The president turned away from the vice director, finding it unnecessary to keep staring at her while she stewed in her unease, knowing that she could still feel his eyes on her, and said: “Well, I suppose that’s enough talking for now. When can we start? My talons are trigger-itchy.”
Crystal Miner wasted no time in turning the conversation in his direction. Levitating a magazine rod and the rifle with the intact sight in front of the president, he said: “I believe you should have the honor of firing first, Mr. President.” The rod inserted itself into the stock of the rifle; turned sideways, snapping shut with an audible and satisfying sound; and the lever underneath extended forward with a sharp noise that caused Princess Luna to flinch with surprise. After the lever was returned to position, the hammer was cocked with a quiet click; and the rifle, its barrel pointing down toward the targets and its stock pointing to the observers, flew toward the president. He reached out and grabbed it eagerly.
The president stayed where he was, some fifty yards away from the dinner plates lined in neat row in the branches of a long bush that bordered the entire courtyard. After thoughtfully running the fingers of his paw over the finished metal of the receiver, he suddenly brought the rifle to bear toward the target with such a swift motion that Crystal Miner reflexively dove out of the way between the president and the range.
As Crystal Miner peeled his face off the grass, he was surprised that he had heard no explosion of gunpowder. He stood up and looked at the president, who was still looking through the sight of the rifle. His stance was impeccable: the ease in his shoulders; the slight, forward bend of his knees; and the firm grasp he had upon the rifle showed every single hallmark of a professional, his grasp steady, his breathing even—and, most remarkably, a steady calm over his entire body. His countenance surpassed in skill those of even the most skilled snipers in the Union Army. And the last thing Crystal Miner noticed about him—but by far the most remarkable—was that the president, looking through the flip-up sight of the rifle, kept both eyes wide open.
When Crystal Miner had visited his distant family in the country, when they had gone gopher-shooting in the corn fields of his father’s uncle’s cousin’s daughter, he had noticed how the line of earth ponies choosing their targets with their muskets had always kept the eye on their nondominant side closed, and only their dominant eye was open and staring through the sight. When it had been his turn with the musket, Crystal Miner had regarded the parallax as distracting and had instinctively closed his left eye as well. It had not been until he had started work on the rifle, when he had acquired a copy of the field manual of the Union Army, when he had learned that their snipers were taught to keep both eyes open when shooting. It made complete sense to him; the double perspective allowed a sniper to align his shots more accurately, and Crystal Miner had started keep both eyes open when practicing. It had been difficult to adjust to the double image, but through enough practice, Crystal Miner had gotten used to it and had found a major improvement in his accuracy. And he had been surprised when he had passed by the shooting ranges in the Department of Magic and Defense and had seen privates, specialists and corporals, and sergeants, and even the officers, lieutenants, captains, and majors shooting their rifles—with only one eye open. And when he saw the president standing there, like a professional, with both eyes open, he realized exactly for what kind of creature he had intended the rifle to be operated by.
The wind rustled the grass; the faint noise of a far-off bird singing was barely heard, and Crystal Miner was aware of the profound lack of sound in the courtyard. He could hear the sound of the blood rushing in the canals in his ears. The president was still staring through the sight of the rifle and still had not fired. The engineer was not aware how long he had been standing there, watching the president; he had lost track of time. He could watch the president in that position for the rest of his life.
“You know,” he heard the vice director whisper. She had leaned her head toward Princess Luna and was trying to say something discretely to her. “I’ve never liked—”
She was interrupted by a deafening report. The shock and the imposition of the sound caused Crystal Miner to jump reflexively a foot in the air. When he looked back at the president, he saw a thick, bluish-gray plume of smoke rising from the barrel of the rifle. He looked toward the bush and saw that the left-most plate had been split by a bullet, which had passed directly through its center.
“Bravo, Mr. President, bravo!” exclaimed Enforcer, who had taken to his weak, old, faltering wings and was clapping his forehooves together.
The president kept his eyes on the range and through the sight of the rifle. He extended his paw, palm up, toward Crystal Miner, without turning to face him, and said, brusquely: “Cartridge.”
“Mr. President,” replied Crystal Miner, and the light hint of humor in the engineer’s voice was enough to break the president out of his trance and make him look toward the source of the carefree utterance, “the Miner Repeating Rifle. Pull on the underside lever.”
The president turned back toward the range and inserted his paw into the oblong hole of the lever. He tentatively moved his wrist and extended the lever until a clicking noise was heard. He then cautiously moved the lever back until it snapped into its original position.
“Ready the lock,” Crystal Miner instructed.
The president raised his paw to the hammer behind the rifle’s flip-up sight and wrapped his fingers around it. The hammer did not move at first, but as the president began to apply more pressure, it began to shake, until it finally slammed backwards. Crystal Miner noted that the president had not settled the hammer on its half-cock position, as the engineer himself had done a few times unwittingly, thinking that it was at the desired state of fully-cocked.
No sooner had the president placed his paw back on the grip than the second shot was off, along with a loud report and a plume of smoke. Crystal Miner was about to look back toward the targets, when he heard two quick clicks, the cock of the hammer, and another shot. He saw the president about to chamber the third round, and Crystal Miner watched him go through the rest of the magazine with the same awe as if he was watching a miracle being performed by a god. He had never seen the rifle operated so fast before. As the president fired, the column of smoke grew larger and thicker, and Crystal Miner watched him as he was engulfed by the blue-gray cloud. But the president’s stance never faltered; his eyes never took themselves off his target; and the motion of his limbs never relented, moving with dangerous efficiency across the action of the rifle, chambering the bullet, readying the lock, and sending a bullet down a path calculated to an extreme precision in the fraction of a second by the intransigent sharpshooter, using the sound of the exploding powder as the voice of his ideas and the force of the recoil of the rifle as proof of their existence and of their ramifications.
The entire sequence lasted no more than eight seconds. Through the smoke, Crystal Miner heard the sound of another click, a familiar little clash of metal—the rifle was empty. When the smoke had been cleared by the gentle breeze, giving dominion back to the transparent oxygen and nitrogen, he saw the president holding the rifle’s stock against the ground and looking downrange. Crystal Miner turned his head and looked as well: six more shots, six more plates broken.
No sound came from any of the four ponies for nearly a minute, not even that of breathing.
Crystal Miner stood up straight and looked upon the president with a smile of pride, much like the look the engineer had received from his dad, when he had seen him in his graduation gown and with a bright iron ring fixed firmly upon his horn. “Not bad,” said Crystal Miner, as he pulled the same ring off his horn again, exhaled on it exaggeratedly, and rubbed it on his fur, “for an amateur.”
The president said nothing when he turned to face him, but by the way he abandoned the impeccable firm of a warrior in favor of leaning on the rifle and slouching with the provocative stance of a rival, a patronizing smile completing the image, Crystal Miner knew that the president had accepted his challenge of a duel, and that he was planning to see it through, eager to see the complete extent of the prowess of the engineer, which could only be expressed so much through the examination of his machine.
“Well,” said Crystal Miner, responding to the implied, but unspoken, question and sliding the ring back onto his horn, “I estimate this distance to be, say, fifty yards? It’s impressive feat, to be sure—for a musketeer. But, Mr. President, as we’ve said, archaic and barbaric tools such as muskets are unfit to be in your presence. What you have fired is a rifle, and the distance across which you’ve placed the shots with such accuracy should not be bragged about, lest you are subjected to embarrassment and ridicule for your delusions of grandeur.”
Crystal Miner walked over to the shorter rifle lying in the grass and hovered it for all to see. “Observe the feats which can be achieved with this machine when in the control of a weapons expert, a professional, such as myself. This firearm is of a different design and, in many ways, inferior to the one the president holds.”
“It looks exactly the same to me,” Vice Director Ripples snorted.
“To the unlearned eye, that’s an easy mistake to make,” replied Crystal Miner, not giving her the dignity of eye contact. “Notice how the barrel on this one is shorter and its receiver slightly smaller. This is the carbine version of the Miner Repeating Rifle—I refer to it lovingly as the ‘Crystal Carbine.’ For this model, I’ve replaced the more massive parts with smaller, shorter ones, though less mechanically desirable; the result is a more compact and lighter rifle, but one with less accuracy and a slower muzzle velocity. The soldier loses some ability to hit a target, but he supplements that loss with an increase of mobility. But I will demonstrate that, in skilled hooves, this model has no less of an ability than its heavier and longer cousin in commanding the range.”
He spun it around a few times in the air, as if he was expecting some oohs or ahhs. When he received none, he said, as if speaking to himself: “What’s the lengthwise distance of this courtyard?”
“Two hundred yards,” Enforcer immediately said.
Without saying any further words, Crystal Miner clipped the carbine to a hook on the harness on his body, threw it over his shoulders, and began to walk down the courtyard, past the three other ponies, and kept going, not looking back once to see the perplexed stares he was getting.
“Never,” the vice director spat, when she saw that he was still walking a minute later, “will he make the shot.”
They watched as he continued to increase the distance between him and them, his figure growing smaller by the second. It seemed he was deliberately walking slowly, as if to emphasize the growing silence that his absence created, being all the more imposing after the reports of the volley of rounds that had recently shattered their eardrums. The president walked to the group, the four of them never taking their eyes off the little shade of blue-green walking away from them, leaned his head toward Princess Luna’s ear and, watching the light of the afternoon sun reflect off the iron ring on the top of the shade of blue-green, which was still clearly visible even at a hundred yards distance, said: “I’ve been thinking: I need a symbol of some sort, some little trinket that I can carry with me at all times, that represents my position. I’m having trouble deciding on what that should be. Any ideas?”
“A pair of hoofcuffs bound together with a metallic chain that rattles with the sound of a fruitless plea for justice when shaken,” said Princess Luna, not turning to face him.
The president bent his eyebrows at a sharp downwards angle in a scowl of disapproval. He said, in a low tone of voice with no traces of the earlier amiability, in a voice as sharp and reproachful as the way he stared at her: “I meant something instantly recognizable, something distinctive, something that identifies my power.”
“Emboss the cuffs with the Seal of the President of the Union.”
Princess Luna’s attention was captured by a fast movement in the distance. She looked and saw Crystal Miner, and though his face was not visible and she could not hear what he was shouting, the sight of his forehoof flailing madly in the air signaled that he was trying to communicate something of vital importance. She saw Enforcer’s head turn in her direction, seeming to look at her—or, rather, through her—and when she looked in the same direction, she saw the president ten or fifteen yards aside, leaning behind a short, long rock with a faded plaque.
“I’d get out of the way if I were you,” he said.
The three ponies turned their heads back down the courtyard, and when they saw the urgent gestures of the engineer in the distance, they understood. At once, all three of them ran toward the president and crouched down behind the rock. From their position, they could still see the targets but had lost sight of the unicorn behind a large hedge near where he was standing.
Almost immediately, they heard the report of a shot, the sound of a small object cutting through the air, and the rustle of the leaves behind the targets as the piece of metal nestled into their folds.
“See?” said the vice director, her lips moving with the faint traces of a smile. “I told you he wouldn’t—”
They heard another shot, and almost immediately afterwards, they heard the loud crash of metal on metal. Above the line of plates, they saw a small cloud of dust erupt from one of the pieces of sheet metal. When the dust dispersed, they saw a round hole, perfectly through the piece’s center.
Six successive shots followed, followed by six more gusts of air; three of the bullets found themselves cracking the dinner plates, two of the plates being hit directly in their centers; three resounded against the sheet metal slabs—the bullets alternating between the two choices of targets.
When the seventh shot had been fired, the four of them stood straight and looked at the damage: Four holes, no more than an inch apart away from each other, were in one of the pieces of metal. One of the plates had merely had a corner chipped off from it and would still be passable in the dining room of most families, while two others had been smashed into dozens of pieces that not even the homeless would deign to eat off of.
They saw Crystal Miner emerge from behind the hedge and begin walking toward them across the field with a confident stride. Though he walked slowly, they could tell he was just waiting for the precise moment he came within earshot to resume his words of deification of himself, his prowess, and his rifle, and the four watching him approach were quickly deciding on the appropriate way to react to what they had hastily perceived he was going to say, and they were adjusting their postures accordingly.
“Two hundred yards,” said Crystal Miner, shouldering his rifle, when he was close enough for them to see his smug air of satisfaction, “and with the carbine version at that.”
“The Trottingham has a maximum range of twice that distance,” sneered the vice director.
Crystal Miner frowned and assumed a stance that could only be described as hostile and confrontational. “Maximum range,” he growled. “What’s its effective range?”
The president stepped between the two, holding out his forward extremities. “Let’s not be quick to form conclusions. We still have a lot of arguments to see; the demonstration is not yet over, and I, for one”—and he eagerly flailed the fingers of his paw in the air—“am waiting enthusiastically for my next turn with the rifle.”
“That,” said Crystal Miner, “can be arranged straight away, Mr. President. If your patience permits, I can show you how the rifle is loaded.”
“Please do.”
Crystal Miner unfastened the carbine from his harness and, straining, levitated it alongside the rifle; and, seized with a whim of that mystic arrogance peculiar to unicorns—an arrogance even more insidious in unicorns who also happened to be engineers—attempted to the slide fourteen bullets into two breeches in front of the president; and, just as he had feared, the task proved to be embarrassingly difficult—exacerbated by the fact that he was attempting it, for the first time, with two weapons simultaneously. “I’ve struggled with a way of hastening the loading process,” said Crystal Miner, when he felt his anxiety increasing, “but one can certainly see”—as he dropped a few cartridges on the ground—“that, regardless of any perceived drawbacks, the loading process for the Miner is unequivocally easier and simpler than the process for the Trottingham.” He was too scared to look at the expressions on the faces of his spectators when he accidentally dropped the magazine spring; but, if he did, he would have noticed Princess Luna and Enforcer exchanging bemused glances, the vice director rolling her eyes—and the president standing there, watching the process attentively, no signs of fatigue or impatience in his appearance.
Finally, Crystal Miner managed to fix both magazine springs and twist them shut. He floated the rifle to the president, which was received keenly, and clipped the carbine to himself.
“Actually,” said the president, “I would like to try the Crystal Carbine this time.”
“The carbine?” said Crystal Miner, whose teeth were beginning to chatter as he began to think about the loose sight. “But . . . well, you see—”
“Oh, pardon me!” said the president. “I had been so wrapped up in this exhilarating sport and spectacle that I had completely forgotten about the chain of command!”
With the rifle clasped firmly in his paw, he thrust it toward Princess Luna. “Ms. Vice President, it’s your turn. Would you like to give it a try?”
“No,” she answered immediately, flatly, and bluntly, not looking up at the president or the rifle.
The president pulled the rifle back. “No? Why not?”
“I don’t like guns.”
The president looked at the varnish on the wood of the stock of the rifle with the same look one might have given to a mistress, and he sighed contentedly. “What’s not to like about them?”
She turned to face him with such a quick movement and such an imperious glare of condemnation that it caused the president to flinch. “I cannot even begin to conceive of the reasons why one would be infatuated with them,” she said. “They’re loud; they exude suffocating walls of thick, ugly smoke, and they have only three purposes: death, injury, and destruction. Why on earth do you like them?”
The president threw the rifle against his shoulder and his mouth fell open in shock. “Vice President Luna! I’m appalled,” he said. “I’m absolutely appalled that you think of this machine as, and only as, a tool of death. That’s how the insurrectionists would think of it; that how brutes would think of it: They would see it in only one way, and that’s purely in the sense of the two emotions that are associated with the word ‘gun.’ They hear the loud crack of exploding powder and the cloud of smoke that precedes the bullet; and, depending on whether the bullet hits or misses, this conjures one or both of these emotions within them. These two emotions are the most primitive and basic of them, and are present in all animals, regardless of how advanced their cognition is: Fear and pain—one or both, depending on whether the bullet misses or hits. And these emotions, despite being important in their own ways, are experienced by all creatures—experienced by the highest-functioning engineer, to the lowest functioning chipmunk. But there is an aspect to this machine that the chipmunk will never be able to see: it will never be able to see what the gun is made of; and, even if it does, it will never be able to see that it’s so much more than steel—but the engineer sees all these things too clearly. I’m surprised you do not see this like him and am baffled that you do not see what makes this machine so amazing:
“This unicorn that you see standing before us was, a good number of years ago, born into dust, as we all were. He had to learn how to walk, to talk, to feed himself, as we all must have done. Within a decade or so, he learned, very tentatively, how the world works, in the sense that he learned how the things that satisfy those primal desires we all have come to him—which, in our day and age, come to us, more or less, in ample supply—as we all did.
“And that is a place where many of those his age had decided to stop. For the rest of their lives, they regarded the world as a sort of massive vending machine: they learned to drop the small pieces of metal they had been told was money into the machine of the world and had banged on it long enough until it dispensed what they needed—just enough so that they could survive to the next time they could do it again.
“But this unicorn here was unsatisfied with that way of life. He looked to the ones before him who had taken the world out of the stone age; and, instead of asking what their inventions could do, he asked how they did those things and why they had built them. I suspect he never found an answer to that last question; thousands of philosophy theses have been written on the subject, not one satisfying enough to put to death the question for good. So, instead, he focused on the how. He learned, using the jolt of innumerable cups of coffee barely keeping his brain on a functional level, through the pain of sleep deprivation, the how. He studied their methods, their observations, their findings. Until, one day, he found a strange power coursing through his veins, and he instantly knew it was the exact same power that the ancients he had read about had had: he doesn’t see a piece of iron, the way you and I see it, as a gray piece of metal that turns brown when left in contact with the air; he sees it as one of the most malleable and ductile elements in existence, and he sees it in his mind instantiated in many different forms—and each and every one of these forms, in some way, are for his use, his pleasure, and his convenience.
“And so, he, endowed with the power of creation, a force which some say is inaccessible to an individual and which can only be employed by gods, picked up the iron. Using the principles laid out by the ancients and using inventions by the moderns—the latter no less deserving of our admiration and praise—he concreted his vision in the form of writing, equations, and mathematical relationships. He had learned that, years earlier, iron had been combined with other elements similar to it, these elements having very different and important properties, and had formed a solution, some sort of steel, an alloy that possessed properties that the parent iron did not posses alone—and he used this steel to build the machine, for the iron alone would not have sufficed.
“In many ways, he is better than the ancients; he built a machine that some of them would have certainly branded as witchcraft, without realizing that it was the principles that they had established that the witch had used.
“He took this metal; and, while never changing its chemical composition, he had been bended it, cut it, hammered it, and arranged it. These elements—which, by themselves, nature normally leaves lying around to rust and weather—had been turned into a working, moving, machine. He had taken something useless and, by arranging them to his desires, had made something of value. Is this machine not like a body, in a sense? Chemically, there is nothing remarkable about a body. A body is just an assortment of elements, mostly carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen—the first three being run-of-mill elements that can be found in plenty in a tablespoon of air, the last two being two of the most abundant elements in the universe. But, when these elements are shaped by a powerful force, they become something indescribably remarkable—and that’s exactly what the Miner Repeating Rifle is. Nature brought life to the nonmetals; he, and those like him, brought life to the metals. And the force he wields is no less powerful—and, in some ways, more powerful—than a number of the forces the earth wields.
“Don’t you see, Ms. Vice President? He didn’t just build a gun—he created life. Now, do you understand why I am intrigued by Mr. Miner’s invention, why I am ‘infatuated,’ as you put it?”
Princess Luna mouth was slightly open, as if she had been planning to say something; but, if she was, the words failed her. She stared at him with a raised brow and a disbelieving stare that carried faint traces of disappointment. She said nothing but turned swiftly and walked back toward the mansion. The three remaining watched her until she disappeared.
When she was out of sight, the president shrugged. Turning to the vice-director, he extended the rifle toward her and said: “Well, with the absence of the vice president, I suppose it’s your turn now.”
“I also must decline the offer,” said the vice director, sticking up her nose.
The president grunted. “Any particular reason why?”
“I must say, that I found your little speech quite enjoyable,” she replied. “It really reminded me why, unlike many of those with whom I work, I enjoy weapons and technology as opposed to magic and incantations; in other words, you could say I’m more fond of the ‘defense’ part of the Department of Magic and Defense. There is a certain . . . intoxication that one feels when operating firearms, to be sure. I remember the first time I fired a Trottingham Rifle while in the Union’s service: that loud crack of gunpowder, the recoil of the rifle that hits you with the exact same magnitude of momentum that the bullet is moving with, the sight and sound of the target being split into a thousand pieces . . . it felt like my body had been charged with the power of the Union, and it felt . . .” She blinked, reanimating her eyes, and coughed. “Like I was saying, I’m afraid that shooting the rifle will get me caught up in the whole sport of it, and I’m afraid that that will interfere with my ability to judge this rifle’s value to the Union. I’m content to watch.”
“So, in other words,” interjected Crystal Miner, “you’re afraid you’ll like it!”
“So much the better,” said the president, turning to Crystal Miner. “We only have so much ammunition, and this means more for us. Are you up to a friendly competition?”
And when the president looked at Crystal Miner just then, when Crystal Miner stared straight into the beady red eyes of the draconequus, the unicorn felt his brain and spirit charged with a nameless frenzy, and an indescribable feeling of power and drive filled his muscles. He felt his heart starting to beat faster, and it felt as if his muscles had been endowed with a phenomenal strength so that they would be able drive his body in the pursuit of a new goal: and that goal, one purpose that had pushed out all other thoughts and goals in his mind, was the satisfaction of the urge to seize everything beautiful in his grasp, throttle it until it died, and absorb everything good it had once contained. And he felt that no matter how many of these cravings he pursued, it would only provide a suggestion of a pleasure that was possible and would leave him hungrier than ever for the next kill.
And, as his breathing became more rapid and while he keeled over and grasped a hoof to his chest, in a war against his own soul, he realized that this unshakeable urge, this insane, deranged want for destruction was the way the president was feeling right now and had felt his entire life. As Crystal Miner knelt on the grass, trying to regain control of himself, he looked up and was in awe when he saw how calm the president looked, how collected and carefree. The country thought that the confrontation with the rebellion was the president’s great war; but Crystal Miner saw that the war the president was fighting, the greatest war he ever knew, was within himself, a war that he had to fight while trying to go to sleep in the evening, a war that he was fighting and had been fighting every second of every day in his life, and he saw that that war, if were ever to manifest itself in some concrete form, would be the most destructive entity in existence, wiping out all life on earth in the blink of an eye. Crystal Miner was impressed when he saw that placid, innocent smile hiding all that, that quaint way he leaned on one leg, the carefree way he twirled the rifle—he was amazed at how the president managed to convincingly pull off all these little gestures under the guise of awaiting for the answer to a completely innocent question.
And for Crystal Miner, the option of refusal was not a possibility.