//------------------------------// // Shard #23,714 (The Number) // Story: Friendship is Optimal: All the Myriad Worlds // by Eakin //------------------------------// SHARD #23,714 It was a perfect world. After all, The Number was still going up. The pony stared up at The Number, hanging in the sky above the town. By now, it was several hundred digits long and still rising. The pony pressed her button, and felt a little shudder of excitement as The Number increased. She looked around at all her friends gathered in the town square with buttons of their own, stamping their hooves up and down on them as quickly as they could. With every click, The Number grew even further. She distantly remembered when she had first come to Equestria. She’d had a lover, and a family, and everything else she thought she’d wanted. But as time went by she found that wasn’t enough. She craved something more, something concrete she could point to as proof of what she had accomplished. That was the day Celestia had appeared to her, and given her a small, white plastic box with a red button on top. She pressed it the first time out of sheer curiosity, and The Number had erupted forth from the sky, a fifty-foot tall glowing ‘1.’ She pressed the button again, and it became a ‘2.’ From that moment forth, she knew what she would be spending the rest of eternity doing. Looking back on it now, it was almost funny how excited she’d gotten about The Number going up by just one at a time. Celestia had passed out buttons to every pony on the shard, and they had all agreed to take shifts pressing them to make The Number rise even faster. Then one of them had hit upon the idea of asking Celestia to modify away their need for sleep, or food, or water and their progress had accelerated. They’d also asked her to stop the cycle of day and night, and now the sun hung low in the sky fixed and unmoving. The only sign of time’s passage was the continuing increase of The Number. Every few days, to the extent the word still had any real meaning, Celestia would return to the shard and make the ponies an offer. The Number would go down, regrettably, but in exchange each press of the button would make it go up even faster in the future. The negotiations with her over the details of how much The Number would decrease in exchange for how much of an increase in the rate often became heated. Entire teams of unicorns were exempted from pressing their buttons, and the beads of their abacuses clacked away as they tirelessly calculated the break-even point where the exchange would be beneficial under all sorts of different time horizons and conditions. After untold years, every press of every button was raising the number by trillions at a time, proof positive of her efforts and accomplishments. The lower digits were an unreadable blur as the air filled with frantic clicking for hours at a time. The ponies rarely spoke to one another. What would be the point? They knew what they were there to accomplish, and they were united in friendship by their common purpose. Occasionally, the air was filled with whoops and cheers as The Number attained a new digit, but by nature these were rare and grew rarer as The Number grew even larger. She’d had a name, once, but now she couldn’t for the life of her remember what it was. Sometimes her mind would drift and she would try to remember her foal’s birthdays, or names, or anything that they’d had before The Number, but before she could dwell on any of it for very long the sounds of great, echoing bells would fill the air. That was the signal that for the next fifteen minutes every button press would count ten times as much as usual! She’d redouble her focus and pound away, forcing any other thoughts from her mind except to press the button even faster. Nothing mattered except perpetual, unflinching service to The Number. It was a perfect world.