While she waited for the new Sandbox program to be brought online, Twilight decided to search through the data left by the researcher who had used her 'room' before Sentinel gave it to her. According to what was left, the scientist specialized in something called long-term terraforming, where the humans would alter the makeup of a barren world so that it might support life. Some of the processes that he experimented with were designed to work over the course of millennia.
If humans were capable of planning and carrying out something of that scale, then Twilight had to wonder just where they could just disappear off to. The possible answers to that question were near infinite in number. Even with all of the data that she's managed to pull together on the species, Twilight still didn't even know where to start looking.
Just as she began to delve into the cached copy of the last piece of data requested from the human networks, Sentinel arrived with a message.
Why he insisted on talking to her in 'person' instead of just sending her anything through one of his many consoles was beyond her. Whatever the case, his message this time was fairly straightforward: Sandbox was ready.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The creation of an entire universe of worlds started with a single blue and green orb. Sentinel described it as being similar to how the planet Earth, Humanity’s original home, looked a long time ago. The System took this single planet and regressed it to it's earliest form, a hazy volcano-laden sphere.
"Now for the interesting part." Sentinel declared with noticeable anticipation.
Faster than Twilight could hope to register, The first world split into two, then four. Their numbers doubling with every iteration.
"Each one has random variables applied as it splits from the host." he explained as Twilight watched in awe. "Structural compositions, Solar arrangements, the works."
After the process was complete, it looked as though every single part of the void now housed a new globe. A far cry from the vast emptiness that Twilight had began to associate the Focus' location with.
"Now time is sped up on each and every one of the simulations until the System detects life, then their speeds will be gradually reduced until normal simulation speeds are obtained. Then, true monitoring can begin in full!"
Twilight pulled a random simulation to her monitor, and watched as the surface began to subside and form into oceans and continents. Shortly after, she noticed that the acceleration had slowed.
"Why did it stop? I thought they would still be sped up until it detected life, but it still looks dead to me."
"One is not looking close enough, [Twilight]. Life does not consist solely of plants and animals."
Taking his word for it, Twilight asked what happened next.
"Now we wait." Sentinel answered with a little too much enthusiasm.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Relative eons passed. Ever vigilant, Twilight stood guard over her home, ensuring that the conditions of its salvation remained intact, itself immune to the accelerated time-frame. The other worlds had started progressing at a comparatively astonishing rate, and soon, many of them will begin to construct various bastions of civilization. First villages, then towns, then cities would begin to dot their collective surfaces. This worried Twilight, as cultures struggling for survival were rarely so civilized, and she worried that she would not be capable of holding herself to Sentinels rules regarding interference.
There was a plan, and deep down, Twilight always knew that she would someday be forced to enact it. She'd even spent countless cycles improving on her designs before she built the prototype. During her investigation into the Human Race's vanishing act, Twilight discovered how to access implements in the outside world. First, it was only the various cameras that monitored the facility, but now the unicorn had learned to access almost every digital component within range of the communication arrays.
Twilight was pleasantly surprised to find that the docking bay was not as deserted as she had first suspected when she learned of the bay’s existence. 'If there aren't any humans anymore, then why is one of their ships still here?' she pondered. The interior was one of the places she had not yet figured out how to access. The vessel was sealed and the drones that roamed the empty hallways were incapable of gaining entry.
So she built new ones. Human technology had provided her with a means to construct anything she could put her mind to. Machines that could be instructed to build other machines were fed designs that Twilight had found stored within the System. The machine that she created was in the shape of a human that, in theory, she would be able to directly control.
Her first attempt at this resulted in an embarrassing trip of a first step. 'Too bad I didn't try to create a unicorn body for myself.' she thought, altering the mental form of herself to match that of the human-shaped robot she was using seemed to help tremendously.
There would be no magic in the outside world for her to use, so she chose to forgo her own tastes in automation for something that had the ability to easily manipulate anything within reach. This place was built to be inhabited by humans after all, and the usefulness of dexterous appendages became all the more apparent when she was presented with an access panel next to the door.
Twilight started punching in numbers that she had collected from the notes she had found in the human researcher's materials. She wasn't sure which code went to which door so she was going to have to try them all.
“This is going to be a long day.” she muttered, only now painfully aware of how much slower the real world was compared to her digital home.