//------------------------------// // 14. Don Quixote's Misfortune // Story: I.D. - That Indestructible Something // by Chatoyance //------------------------------// I.D. INJECTOR DOE That Indestructible Something By Chatoyance ═════════════════════ 14. Don Quixote's Misfortune “Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza." - Franz Kafka Mr. Crown assured them that it was no burden to him, and indeed was entirely to his benefit. Put simply, it was a very lonely thing to be a refugee from a world that never existed. His wealth was unfathomable to Gregoria and Rachel. Crown's riches were such that the total upkeep and support of every human and Equestrian within his compound was not something he ever thought about. It had been a minor faux pas even to momentarily worry about the issue. "Once a certain threshold has been reached, there is no longer any consideration given to the necessities of life, they are a given, expected, an absolute. We could support hundreds here, even thousands, for the entirety of their lives, and it would barely cause my accountant to blink. Actually, if it were thousands, he would certainly question my sanity, but he would not be worried. Imagine, then, how very little the act of offering you all you need to live represents to me. Don't bother either of us with such matters again." Crown had frowned slightly, and moved on. It was as if the concern of taking care of another pony's needs forever was as annoying to him as rambling on about pocket lint. It was worse than irrelevant - it was an imposition to mention it. Over the last two and a half weeks, Gregoria and Rachel had nearly become established fixtures of Mr. Crown's 'menagerie', as Gregoria had described it. They were not the only ponies within his compound, nor were ponies the only Equestrian creatures under his protection. The diamond dog that kept the stables had been a hardware testing engineer for Apple. Mr. Crown had recruited the troll-like creature just after he had transformed during an all-nighter in the lab. His name was Michel, and he still had never watched a single episode of My Little Pony. "I've heard a little about what... this thing is that I'm supposed to be, and ...I'd rather just be my own dog, with no outside influences, right?" He kept the big red barn in order, and had such tremendous strength that he could toss entire bales of hay around as if they were pillows. Michel could dig through the ground as if it were air, literally swimming through packed earth, his claws melting through stone. He was careful not to let the humans working for Mr. Crown see his abilities - Crown became cross when he was forced to erase memories to keep order, and to keep secrets. Mr. Crown did not trust his humans with the reality of transformation. "Humans are a naturally xenophobic species. Humans can't even be expected to naturally deal well with other humans who have slight physical differences from them. It's hardwired, it is an evolutionary matter. It's a shame, really. They can work to get past it, yes, and often do - but are you willing to bet your life, and the life of your friend there, that every last human working here won't freak out and run to some authority?" Even Rachel could not argue with that and shook her head. It was asking too much to expect every human to just accept Randal - the disturbingly large dragon who slept in a modified quonset hut an acre away from the main house - blithely and without panic. All it would take would be one single frightened human running to the authorities, and dark forces would descend to secure, contain and protect the public from the threat of monsters in their midst. Rachel and Gregoria felt the greatest kinship with Damon and Joanna, two other ponies. Crown had found Damon when he had taken the trip to Europe to dig up Kafka's grave. Damon, a unicorn, had been trotting down a sidewalk as carefree as could be when Crown noticed him while being driven about. Damon had instantly signed aboard at the promise of free food and shelter for life. Joanna had been indirectly detected by others, and deliberately tracked down by Crown's team. She was a pegasus, and enjoyed flying over Lake Charlotte, Nova Scotia. She had been reported as a UFO, the closest thing the curious perceptual blindness allowed the humans who saw her to define her as. "The program of reality works to maintain the status quo... more or less. I think what you call 'perceptual blindness' - good name for it by the way - is competing subroutines failing to interact in normal ways." Mr. Crown had put a great deal of study into every aspect of the code injection effect. It was the focus of his life, now. Gregoria, a little miffed at ending up as an earthpony, had no end of questions for Joanna the pegasus. "Clouds! Can you walk on them?" Joanna had pawed the ground and shook her head. "Clouds aren't like in the show. They're just fog." She looked up at the sky as they stood in the wide fields of Crown's farm. "They look like solid things from here, but... you get close to them? They just get fuzzier. By the time you are there, it just looks like a fog bank. All the details are gone. There's nothing there to walk on. It's real gradual... it just gets thicker and thicker, there's no boundary or surface." Joanna sighed. "I was really disappointed by that. I was going to build a sky house." She grinned. "Or even a castle!" But of all the members of the menagerie, it was Chelsea that had the greatest impact on Gregoria and Rachel, especially Rachel. Chelsea, it seemed, had been error corrected. It was something every member of the menagerie worried about. Especially Randal the dragon, who was too large to do anything but hide out in his hut. Humans reacted badly to him on sight. It seemed that the convenient miracle of perceptual blindness was not without hard limits. If something was too anomalous, if something went beyond some hidden and ill-defined limit, the blindness was not enough. This was the very thing Gregoria had used to force Rachel to finally perceive her. And according to Crown, in some specific cases - such as humans transformed into classic gray aliens, or into sasquatches - the blindness towards transformation utterly failed to occur at all. Randal was partially such a case. He was gigantic and unearthly, and while from a distance humans thought him an elephant, close up the perceptual blindness rapidly failed, and humans would panic. If humans became too disturbed by the disruption of the perceptual blindness, if too many humans noticed a discrepancy in reality, then apparently, the running code of the world had an error checking routine. An error correction routine. Chelsea had been a pegasus, just like Joanna. Like Joanna, she had enjoyed flying, but unlike Joanna, Chelsea had possessed no concept of trying to be discreet about her condition and status. Chelsea was young, only nineteen, and completely immersed within pony fandom. She had believed that her random transformation was the beginning of a rescue mission by the real Celestia, who was coming to save humanity from itself by turning them all into ponies. She had been thrilled at this fan fiction notion, and had decided to be loud and proud about being a pegasus representative for her princess. Chelsea had named herself 'Cloud Cover' and began flying everywhere she went, living the life of a pegasus openly and blatantly. She had dined on the lawns of her neighbors while they watched, and helped with roof repairs by flying tiles up in saddlebags she had bought online. She went around without clothing, and insisted she was fully dressed in a proper pegasus pony coat of hair and feathers. She was adamant that others should recognize her as a living, breathing ambassador of Equestria on earth. And it had worked. For a very short while. The entire town, in an overwhelming moment of shock and wonder, finally saw her as what she truly was. For half a day, the people around her marveled or ran in terror as their sense of reality was utterly shattered. And that was when the error correction routine had activated. The people of her town, her family, her friends, her neighbors - everyone aware of her in that moment - simply forgot her. She had never existed, and all proof of her life had vanished. Her attempt to break into her own, conspicuously empty room had been a disaster. All of her possessions had been erased from reality along with her identity, and her struggle to buck down the door to get into her house had resulted in her nearly being tranquilized and taken away as rogue livestock. She had barely escaped. All humans now consistently saw her not as a My Little Pony Equestrian pegasus, but as a very ordinary Shetland pony. The reason all humans saw her this way was because in an instant, that is exactly what the ontological error correction routine had corrected her into. She could still think, and she could still talk, if with some difficulty. She could still breath through her throat as well as her nose. She possessed vocal chords. Her insides were not one-hundred-percent earth equine, thankfully. But from the outside, except for a slightly oversized skull with a high forehead, Chelsea was a perfectly ordinary looking Shetland pony. She had lost her wings. She had lost the magic to fly. She had lost the color red, having become a dichromat like a real horse. Also like an earthly equine, her vision had lost most of the capacity for binocular sight, and what little remained needed to be quite a distance from the front of her head. She now saw the world in three hundred and fifty degrees of monocular vision, flat, without depth of field. For all intents, she was a talking horse, ordinary in every way save for the capacity for human thought and limited human speech. Worse, Mr. Crown strongly suspected that her Equestrian three-hundred year lifespan gain had been reduced to less than three decades. He'd had samples of her cells studied, and they were more like earth equines than the cells of Joanna and Damon. Her situation was a tragedy - and a warning to the others. Chelsea lived in the big red barn. The barn had been reconstructed with a show-accurate Equestrian house appended to it, on the far side, away from the view of the ranch house where Crown's humans worked with him. Michel the diamond dog looked after her needs, and kept her company when the other, still anomalous Equestrians were in the human house. Chelsea wasn't allowed in the ranch house, because any humans there would see her clearly - as the Shetland pony she had become. She was careful not to speak when any human was around. Rachel was gravely disturbed and upset at what had happened to Chelsea. The poor creature had genuinely wanted to be an Equestrian pony, just like Rachel, and her innocent exuberance had cost her her wings, her lifespan, and every last bit of magic. Up until meeting Chelsea, Rachel had felt terribly sorry for herself. Now she realized that by comparison, being a big immortal alicorn was nothing to complain about. It made her feel ashamed for having complained at all. "Ith's okay... ith's not that thad. Ein sthill a thony, and I can run in the thields, and thlay all day. I hath thriends, Thichel and Randal and Joanna and Thanon - and nowh you, thoo, Rathel and Gregoria! I thith thy things, oth courth, I thith thlying aroundth. Thision is kinda thrange, thut... ethen thith all that - I an thill throudh to thee a thony!" Rachel put on her best princess Celestia gentle smile, and held back tears. Even after such dire 'correction', Chelsea was still glad just to be a pony. She could have spent her days crying, and rightfully so, but instead she had found a way to take as much happiness as she could from what remained of what had been - for her - a divine gift of pure joy, her dearest wish come true. Chelsea's plight nagged at Rachel as the days turned to weeks, as Mr. Crown the Changeling took personal interest in discovering just what powers the alicorn might actually possess. Rachel wanted to somehow make things better for Chelsea, but it was difficult just to interact with her. Chelsea couldn't help from bowing every time Rachel visited her, and it was clear that the little Shetland mare desperately wanted Rachel to actually, really be Celestia somehow. Rachel, for her part, found herself unable to entirely avoid trying to act Celestia-like for the poor mare, just out of compassion. Every day, Rachel would visit with Chelsea, in the barn, or in her little Tudor cottage appended to it, and sip tea and talk pony with her. Chelsea would bow in reverence in greeting and parting, and Rachel would wince but try to accept it gracefully. It seemed to make Chelsea happy, and it was such a tiny thing to bear. Meanwhile, Damon and Joanna worked with Gregoria every day to help her to find her earthpony powers. "Yes, you have powers - you really haven't read any of the good fanfiction, have you?" Damon was annoyed with Gregoria today, and Gregoria, for her part, couldn't imagine the point of learning to use earthpony magic. "No, and I don't intend to. Being a fanfiction writer is the only thing that isn't as low as being a furry, and face it, if you read that crap, you might as well just put on a fake tail and burn your 'coolness' card on the spot." Gregoria got a perverse satisfaction out of saying that - the training hadn't been going well. Perhaps more accurately, being able to feel the ground, and all the living things in it through her hooves severely depressed her, every time she looked at Damon's horn or Joanna's wings. Every time Gregoria learned how to do a new earthpony magic power, she just felt more lame, and more envious than before. "You want I should buck you right in the chops? I could do it, you keep that up." "Damon! Alright, take five. Damon... go take a walk or something." Joanna's wings flapped with frustration and upset. "Fine!" Damon stomped off, heavy hoofed and angry. Gregoria glared at the unicorn stallion as he ambled off across the fields in the direction of Randal's quonset. She stuck her tongue out at him. "Okay, listen up miss grouchy-pants. We're trying to help you! You do understand that, right?" Joanna's ears were not exactly back, but they were not upright. Gregoria scraped a furrow in the dirt with a forehoof for awhile, before answering. "Yeahhh... yeah... I know. I know." "Then what's the problem? Why so hostile? It's not very pony, you know." Joanna kicked at a clod on the ground, which shattered at the impact of her hoof. Gregoria glared. "That's exactly the problem!" She stomped a hoof. "I never wanted to be a pony, I don't like pony stuff, but here I am, bam, one day that's exactly what I am - a pony! And I didn't even get to be a cool pony, I'm the lame one..." Joanna shook her mane and slapped her own flank with her tail. "So THAT'S it. You're upset that you ended up an earth pony. Sweet sugar cubes!" The pegasus looked out at the small shape of Damon, still walking away. "If you weren't so high-and-mighty, and actually read some of that fanfiction you think is so dreadful, or really paid attention to the show, you'd know that being an earthpony is cool. You never get tired, you could make things grow, if you bothered..." "Yeah, some super-power. I'm ready for the X-Men. I'm Plant-Grow-Girl, only I'm not even a girl, I'm a mare. I'm the mascot." Gregoria looked at her furrow bitterly. "So you think that if you had some buck-tail super power, like in comic books, that would make up for not being human anymore, that it?" Joanna's wings fluttered. "Well I've got news for you. You're not human, you're a pony now. And there is no way to change that. This is permanent, as far as Crown can tell. You want to be a superhero? How about starting with the Hulk? Earthponies are basically the Hulk, only they don't have to get angry to buck trees over! That good enough for you? Or how about Poison Ivy, from Batman? Growing things sound a little more 'cool' yet? If you would get your head on straight, you're basically the Hulk with all of Poison Ivy's powers, and then some. I need a break too." And with that, Joanna spread her wings and flew off after Damon, leaving Gregoria feeling like an idiot, standing over a furrow in the ground. Rachel was having tea with Chelsea in her little Equestrian cottage. Although she was loathe to admit it now, when the error correction had happened to her it had broken her heart. Malus Crown had rescued her before she had become property - or worse, likely worse, because she lacked the sense to stop talking and act her part - but she had taken a year to come to terms with the full extent of her loss. Crown had arranged for a show-accurate pseudo-Tudor cottage to be appended to the barn, just for her. He needed her to have a reason to stay alive and to remain functional. As the first clear example of an error correction, she was invaluable to his effort to understand the nature of the bug in reality that allowed the transformations to occur, and he was highly motivated to secure her loyalty and stability. The cottage had worked. Inside her little Equestrian home, Chelsea could live in a private fantasy where she was a proper magical pony. Rachel had soon realized that Chelsea coped by playing a game with herself, where she pretended that the real Equestria existed outside her cottage door. Having 'Celestia' over for tea played into that fantasy, and gave the poor mare enormous comfort, if only for a short time. "Do you like the tea, thrinthess?" Chelsea had trouble carrying things, because her authentic equine jaw was not as versatile as an Equestrian one, yet she still managed to carry both cups and pot to the low table using flat trays. Chelsea had lost the perfect balance of a magical pony, so sometimes she dropped everything, but she succeeded more often than not. Crown had obtained unbreakable cups and a Japanese metal teapot, so accidents were wet, but not overly destructive. "Yeah... it's... it's very pleasant tea, my little pony." It was such a little thing, to put on the air of Celestia now and then. It made Chelsea beam. If the little Shetland had been a dog, Rachel was certain that she would have squirmed and wagged her tail while making squeaking puppy noises every time she dropped a Celestia-ism. Limited vision, less than thirty years of life, no compensating magic - Chelsea had been struck down hard by the implacable code of the simulation that apparently was the world. "Thrinthess?" Chelsea folded her foreknees and lay down near Rachel. "I neen Rachel. I know you arnth really Celestia, thut you thust hath thome oth her thagic thowers! I thas a thegusus, unce. I could thly, right uth into the thlouds! And Thanon ith a unicorn! He can do thagic! You thake things thloat hith your horn, and you are an alicorn!" Chelsea lowered her head reverently. "Thlease, Rachel, try. Justh try, thlease! Thix ne, thake ne thack into a thegusus, or an earth thony, anything, I thont care! Just... thlease, Rachel, thlease... just thry. That's all I ask. Thust thry, thlease!" Rachel had expected this moment. It was inevitable, really. Chelsea was in a hopeless, desperate place, and it was only natural that she would cling to even the smallest hope. Rachel sighed. Mr. Crown had spent many days trying to encourage Rachel to make use of the Celestia body she had ended up with. It had been a hard sell. Rachel had found herself becoming surprisingly skeptical since her transformation, and the concept of doing magic - real magic - which might have once appealed to her imagination, just seemed impossible now. Rachel felt bitter, she knew she was bitter, she hadn't wanted to be stuck as a poor replica of Celestia. She had so wanted to be her own original pony, or if she had to be a replica, Fluttershy. "What humankind refers to when they speak of magic is really just the iterative process of trying to establish repeatable conditions for bugs in the simulation we exist within. Magic, human magic, is debugging." Crown had smiled at that, he was proud of that insight. "Humans can't do magic. Magic is just another dumb myth." Rachel had been feeling particularly cranky, the effort to do Celestia-like things had been going nowhere. Crown laughed. "That... is what a hard-core materialist would say, and they would be wrong, because the world is not made of material at all. It's made of ones and zeroes... or more likely something far more exotic. Probability states in a quantum matrix, or maybe some technology we literally can't imagine at all. Materialism is a dead end, when reality isn't material! "The fact is, Rachel, that humans can do 'magic', of a sort anyway, by making use of all the little bugs and errors in the running code of the world. The simulation we are in seems to be a bit on the shoddy side, frankly, which is to our benefit in the end." Rachel glared at Mr. Crown. "If there were magic, I would have seen it before I became a pony." "You have, probably many times. Everypony has. And you already know many of the rules, also like almost everypony." Rachel used her horn to get herself a bottle of juice. She offered one to Mr. Crown, but he refused with a wave of a perforated leg. "What rules? Magic doesn't have any rules. That's what makes it dumb." She was in a very sour mood indeed. "Voodoo. Take a little doll, stick pins in it or hurt it, and the human it looks like becomes ill or even dies. The effect is documented and real, but it's devalued as being nothing more than an example of the placebo effect. Thing is, it has been documented to work even when the victim has no idea that it's being done. That... just gets dismissed outright. The fact is that it's a bug, and it is repeatable. There are rules to earthly 'magic' - voodun, or voodoo uses what is known as the 'Law Of Similarity'." "The law of similarity?" Rachel sipped her juice. Strawberry and coconut. It was a smoothy, one she particularly liked. "Back a few decades, there was a human who got a degree in magic. Seriously. And he was serious about it. He was named 'Bonewits', and he wrote his thesis about the universal laws of magic that were common to every human culture and civilization, regardless of how isolated they were." Crown curled up in his big ball chair. "Bonewits? That's sounds like a pony name!" Rachel giggled. Crown was being silly today. "Phillip Emmons Issac Bonewits. Fancied himself a Druid, he was also quite scholarly. Only human to ever get a degree in magic, and he did it because his research was impeccable. Turns out that all humans, everywhere, throughout time, always agree on a set of rules by which 'magic' - real magic, not stage magic - is supposed to operate." Crown used a swiss-cheese leg to slowly spin the ball chair. "Funny thing that. If there wasn't something real going on, how do all people, everywhere, in every age, somehow come up with the same rules about magic? Apply that to physics, and any physicist would be quick to say - because that's how the world works. Everyone agrees on the rules of physics because they are repeatable, because they are factual. "Magic is real, and the rules are real, because all they are is discovering repeatable ways to abuse the bugs in reality. That's the first step in trying to debug a program - see if the fault can be induced, see if it is repeatable. I bet you know other rules of magic already, Rachel. The Law Of Names - names are supposed to have power. Every religion - religion is just magic, theurgic magic to be precise - makes use of that one. Call on a deity, and the name is supposed to make something happen. Know the true name of a magical being, and you can control them - I'm sure you've encountered that in a story or a show before. The Law Of Similarity - wear the skin or the trappings or the image of a fierce predator in order to gain their power and strength. Every human culture used these laws, and humans still use these laws even without knowing them. They are truly universal, as universal as the laws of physics." "Doesn't that say more about the human mind, than reality?" Rachel was having none of this. "Magic is just humans being irrational." "Says the physical incarnation of princess Celestia holding a bottle in her telekinetic grip." Crown's Changeling grin was disturbing to see, every time. It was those two sharp fangs. He couldn't help it, but it always made Rachel feel creeped out. "Um... yeah." Rachel studied the bottle of fruit juices hovering in front of her, encapsulated in a mass of glowing, golden light. "I guess I'm being a little bratty today, aren't I? Sorry, Mr. Crown." "Listen, Rachel - I can do magical things. You know that. You saw me make Thibault forget about running into poor Randal the dragon the other night. If I lacked the power to alter minds, Thibault would likely have ended up in an asylum, or worse, in their clutches. Then we'd all be sunk. That's magic, Rachel. Joanna flying - that is impossible, you know. There is no way a pegasus could ever actually fly according to the accepted laws of physics. Not enough lift, not enough energy for those tiny, tiny wings and that big heavy body. Magic. Reality isn't real. It's a simulation, and we changed are all really just living exploits and cheat codes, if you think about it. Your code describes you as princess Celestia. You almost certainly have some very impressive powers." Rachel levitated the last mouthful of smoothie out of the bottle and made the sphere of pink liquid hang in front of her like a pink planet with a golden atmosphere. Then she leaned forward and gobbled it, while releasing her telekinetic grasp. Crown stopped his slow spinning in the ball chair and smiled at the trick. "What did your Richard think Celestia could do?" Rachel had looked concerned, almost worried at that. "Almost anything. In his eyes, she could create and maintain a universe." "Thease?" Chelsea was looking up with her terrestrial Shetland face, the face of an animal, not an enchanted sapient from a magical cosmos, the face of a creature on death row, her three centuries stolen from her, relegated to less than three decades of flightless life as a barnyard animal. Rachel set her tea cup down on the low table, her golden, glowing, telekinetic field vanishing as she released it. She thought a moment, seeing her reflection in those small, brown, earthly eyes. "Yeah, Okay. Crown's been teaching me, or trying to. Let me get a few things first. I don't know if they'll help, but we might as well go all out on this. I really want to help, but you have got to understand - I'm not really Celestia, you know that, right? It may not work." Rachel studied the reaction by the little Shetland mare. "I know. I know you're not really Thrinthess Celestia, thut you're the only Celestia I'th got!" Chelsea was limited in the facial expressions she could make, she couldn't properly smile or grin like an Equestrian could, but she did bare her large equine teeth, and Rachel understood. Rachel trotted back to the main house, and tried to find Mr. Crown. Damon was in the 'mission control' room, surfing the internet at one of the work station desks. "Crown and all the humans are gone. They got a lead that there might be another one of us out there that isn't completely messed up, and they're checking it out. Why?" "I just want my stuff. My jewelry. I'm going to try to help Chelsea." Rachel tapped her hoof anxiously. Mr. Crown had explained that his team had found her golden and bejeweled Equestrian regalia and taken it away. Rachel - if not Gregoria - had been okay with this, she understood that such a treasure would only cause trouble, and Crown had made a point of showing her where it was kept safe, and giving her the means of access. It was hers, he had no intention of stealing it, but it was too precious an artifact to be lost or melted down. "Huh... what, you're going to try to turn Chelsea back?" Damon looked stunned. "I... she's pretty bad off, I know. If you can do it, that would just be... I didn't know your studies with Crown had gone that far, wow!" "Actually, I haven't learned a muffin thing... but I promised Chelsea I would at least try. I'm not expecting anything to happen at all. But, I kinda have to at least try, you know? If he comes back before I'm done, don't let him get freaked out because my stuff isn't in the vault, okay?" Rachel trotted away, trying to keep moving. If she didn't keep going, she was sure she'd lose her nerve, and Crown had been clear that confidence was a big part of all forms of real magic - of trying to force the world to glitch and allow an exploit. "Hey, good luck - I hope it works. She got a really rough deal." Damon turned back to the internet. Rachel went past the room she shared with Gregoria. Gregoria was trying to play Skylanders Giants on the Xbox 360 with Joanna. It was a little violent, but it was very cartoonish, and so it was within pony sensitivities. Rachel had been surprised to see a Microsoft box allowed in the house, but Crown had explained that he bore no animosity towards his old rival. "We're frenemies. Bill even helped us out, once." Gregoria was not doing well, because she was still clumsy with her hooves. Joanna was remarkable. With the controller on the floor, she used one hoof on the left stick, the analogue switch tucked into the rolls of her frog. She used the hard edge of her other hoof to press the buttons with an uncanny accuracy. Games with trigger functions were a problem, of course, but by curling up, she had a way around that, too. Gregoria was trying to learn how to do the same thing. "What's up?" Gregoria's controller skidded away as she moved the left stick. She grumbled and slid it back. "I'm going to get my Celestia stuff and try to magic Chelsea." Joanna was so engrossed in defeating some weird green thing that she hadn't even noticed Rachel. "You can do that?" Gregoria had managed to finally get her character - a crystaline dragon Skylander with glass wings - to move correctly, and she was overjoyed. Rachel shook her head. "No, probably not. But I promised I'd try." "Uh...huh..." Gregoria was trying to move and hit the buttons now, but her hoof kept impacting too hard and making the controller bounce and skid. Rachel turned away, and went on. She had to do this before she lost the last of her confidence. "Um... Good luck!" Gregoria called out after she had left. Rachel went down the stairs into the basement, an area generally off limits to the humans. She used her telekinesis to enter the code into the electronic lock. A lot of fan fictions had made much of magic destroying technology on contact, it was an interesting but beneficial anomaly that this trivia was not true for the changed. Then again, she thought, Rick never agreed with that notion. She had come to accept that he was the most likely Doe to be the source of the pony code injection, and she took some slight comfort in seeing patterns to it that reflected things he held true. It was like having some part of his spirit woven into reality itself, always near, always around her. The great vault door unlatched. Inside, along with gold bars, stacks of money, some very strange antiques and objects - and not a few old computers and bits of electronics - was the case that held her regalia. For the first time since the night she and Gregoria had left for the bridge, Rachel put on her golden shoes, and her jeweled peytral - the collar like artifact was called a peytral, she had discovered - and, of course, her crown. It was odd - the things were heavy, very heavy, being made of gold, but when they were actually on her, they felt weightless, and completely comfortable. Perhaps they were magic, in some way. Rachel closed the vault door with her telekinesis, and made her way upstairs and out of the ranch house, determined to put on her very best impersonation of the solar princess of Equestria. That was a big part of tricking the computer that ran the world, Mr. Crown had insisted. The Laws Of Similarity, Invocation and another one - Rachel couldn't remember all the stuff he went on about. The bottom line was that pretending to be something sometimes made it almost so. The rest was hacking the system by acting out in ways that seemed to work at all. She would do her best to 'be' Celestia, and do what the 'real' Celestia might do, and hope something good came of it. At least it was a way to show she cared, and it meant so very much to Chelsea. Rachel trotted across the fields to the big red barn. Rounding it, she approached the outside door of Chelsea's Equestrian cottage. Although it opened into the barn, Rachel was trying to put on the best show she could. Celestia, the 'real' Celestia would knock at the front door, not sneak in the back. She would come to call like a proper princess, and be regal and refined and ever so gentle too. Ritual, Crown had told her, was showponyship, putting on a strong performance that the sometimes dumb code of the universe might confuse with a real reality, and process as such. Chelsea opened her door, moving her head from one side to the other so that each eye, in turn, could see. "Your thajesty!" she almost squealed the words, before she bowed low and reverently to her beloved and true princess.