//------------------------------// // Three Months of Winter Coolness : Part Three of Five // Story: Last // by Alan Smithee //------------------------------// 7 - The Fish On a frozen lake on the outskirts of Ponyville, the last human, descendant of kings and emperors and conquerors, sat on a three-legged wooden stool he’d borrowed from Twilight Sparkle, holding a fishing rod he’d borrowed from Fluttershy, through a tiny hole in the ice he’d made with a pick borrowed from Applejack.   For the first time in his life, he was ice-fishing. The flat surface of the frozen lake afforded him no protection from the frigid wind; he grimaced as it whipped across his face. He buried his face deep into the lining of his coat. He was intensely focused on remembering everything he could:         ... The Titanic         The Roman Empire         Yuri Gagarin         Alan Turing         The War of 1812         Napoleon         ... He couldn’t stop the flow of information now that it had been started. He tapped his foot impatiently and thought of packing up and returning to the library to write some more. His stomach rumbled. He had to catch a fish if he was to remain healthy enough to complete his task. He tried to distract himself by looking around. He looked about him and saw trees and hills and ice and snow. He looked above him and saw a troupe of Pegasus ponies shuffling a herd of cumulus towards Ponyville. He tapped his other foot nervously. He wondered to himself how he’d managed to come to this strange world. He thought back to his astronaut training, then further back to his working days, his University days, and to his days as a carefree youth. Then he went over it again: Simon was born April 12, 2061, in New York City, New York. He grew up in his parents’ spacious apartment on Park Avenue. He was, if nothing else, an inquisitive child. One of his earliest memories was of approaching his mother and asking, “What does ‘mean’ mean?” He couldn’t remember his mother’s answer. He wasn’t a perfect child. When he first entered public school, he did poorly and did not get along well with other children. With a great deal of help from both his parents and his teachers, Simon was able to mostly overcome these barriers and emerge as a bright, if awkward, young boy. One of his fondest early memories was a night sometime before he was ten years old: His parents got him dressed up, and the three of them went to the Shubert Theatre to see a revival of Chicago. He fidgeted in his seat and talked impatiently, until the lights went out. A hush came over the audience, and something intangible filled the air. The curtain lifted. The show began. He was glued to his seat for the entire performance. The music, the choreography, the lighting, the costumes, all captured his attention and imagination. He didn’t talk about anything but the show for days afterwards. From that day forth, he leapt at every opportunity to see another musical. He found he preferred the older musicals, all the way back to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. He learned the lyrics to some of his favourite songs, and sang them constantly. Despite his fascination with the theatre, he showed no interest in performing himself. When he was eleven years old, his parents gave him a gift: Mimi, a black standard poodle. He was responsible for walking and feeding the dog. Mimi was a beautiful, energetic, playful dog. She was also very smart: When she wanted something, she would scratch the door to his room, only once, slowly. Then she would wait. He went silent, unable to do anything but listen for another scratch at the door. When it didn’t come, he would begin to relax. At that precise moment, Mimi would drag her nails across the door again. His nerves could not bear it for very long, and Mimi usually got what she wanted promptly. In high school, he decided on a whim to take computer science. He was amused by the sheer power he could exert over the machine using his mind and his fingers. One of the first tasks he was given was to find all prime numbers less than a given number. His first solution was to test each number to see if it was prime. He quickly found that to find all prime numbers less than one million using this method was impractical. After doing some research, he found a technique called the Sieve of Eratosthenes, which instead uses all the known prime numbers, starting with two, to eliminate candidates by removing multiples of the known prime numbers from the range to be searched. In this way, he discovered the joy of mathematics for its own sake. He solved puzzles and read volumes about math and mathematical history. He learned how to program. He took courses in algebra and calculus, easily earning stellar grades. When high school was over, he chose to pursue a career in mathematics. He’d planned to become a doctor of the subject and teach. He moved to New Jersey to go to University, returning frequently to see his parents. He brought Mimi with him. While at University, he met Max.  He gripped his pole tightly at the thought of Max. There wasn’t much to their friendship. They would talk for hours about mathematics, though they never seemed to achieve anything. Max was much less inhibited than Simon. Whereas Simon had trouble so much as knocking on a door, Max had no trouble barging in without invitation. In graduate school the two shared a house together. Simon would often lock the door to his room to prevent such unwelcome visits. One night, in fall, he had forgotten to lock the door, or perhaps he was in a more receptive mood. He hoped the latter, but suspected the former. He was poring over a variant of the Riemann Zeta Function, and was juggling various complex numbers and functions in his head. Max barreled into the room, and said, simply, “Let N be a natural number” Suddenly, all the real, imaginary and complex equations delicately balanced in Simon’s head were replaced, by a single, arbitrary, natural number, N. He turned on his roommate furiously. “What about N?” Max stared for a while. “...prove N is even” Simon threw his pencil at Max’s chubby chest and stamped his foot. Mimi, who was asleep in the corner of the room, awoke with a start. “Look, Max, I’m trying to do important work here. Stop wasting my time” Max leaned over Simon’s paper, and examined it very slowly. Simon wriggled impatiently in his seat. “That won’t work” said Max. “What won’t work?” Max pointed to a line in Simon’s proof: A simple derivative of a function. “It won’t work. That function’s not holomorphic” Simon had had enough with Max’s distracting nonsense. “Of course it’s holomorphic, Max! We proved it in lecture!” “Was it Proof by intimidation?” Simon opened his mouth to speak, until he remembered that the proof he’d been given in lecture had seemed complicated and strange. It was entirely possible a mistake had been made. “Can you prove it?” Simon asked hopefully. “Uhh...no?” Said Max, dumbly, and wandered out of the room. The next night, it was Simon’s turn to barge into Max’s room. “Max, I’m on the right track to proving that the function’s not holomorphic, but I need your help” Max’s response was, “You can’t prove you’re on the right track!” Two weeks the two men spent their evenings and weekends in the kitchen, tackling problem after problem. Simon felt a drive in him, one that came rarely before, and that gave him almost perfect control over his body. His bohemian lifestyle became organized and structured in an instant: He ate as much as his body needed, he slept as much as his body needed, and all pain and discomfort was easily ignored. It was like an adrenaline rush. In the end, Max and Simon had a twenty-page paper written, double-checked and bound. It passed scrutiny, was accepted, and Simon and Max were awarded Masters’ Degrees. Max celebrated by going to bed fifteen minutes later that night. Simon disappeared for three days; even he did not remember where he was. Simon never published another paper. He racked his brain for ideas, to make connections between work people around him were producing; to extend their ideas a little further; but he seemed incapable of it. Eventually, he discovered that, while he was perfectly capable of understanding the complexities of the subject, his mind simply lacked capacity for generating novel ideas on his own. He stood on the shoulders of giants and saw as far as they, but no further.  In time, his thesis, once the pride of his life, was of little comfort because it wasn’t really his: Max had produced the idea behind it, and had put in half the work. He gave up, and moved to Boston, to work on their Quantum Computing program. He started on his stool; he thought he’d gotten a bite. He yanked the pole backward to see if there was any resistance, but there was none. He looked in the direction of Ponyville. He saw the town’s windmill, and a few Pegasus ponies going about their business. He turned back to face the hole in the ice. Neither he nor Max sought each other out after parting ways in New Jersey. The extra distance also made visiting his parents more difficult. He visited them every other weekend. His period at the University in Boston was brief, but in that time, he was introduced to one of the most powerful uses of the most fundamental properties of nature. With a few assumptions about the properties of qbits, the concept of quantum teleportation - that information can be moved from one location to another without passing it between the intermediate space - is easy to understand and accept. He augmented what he already knew to the point that, within three years, he was able to find employment in one of the first companies to use quantum computers commercially. Though he wasn’t as good a programmer as the researchers in the university, he was valuable enough to the company that, by the time he left, his personal wealth was nearly two million dollars. His mother died in that first year. He spent two weeks with his father, then returned to Boston. Around this time, he began to hear whispers about a proposal from Houston, to send people on long-term trips to nearby planets. He welcomed the idea of the first real exploration since the Mars landings, which were before his time. On March 9, 2086, his father died. He didn’t know what to do with himself after that: One night, about a month afterward, he got into his car, ready to drive to New York, until he realized he had no one to visit. In May, Mimi needed surgery on her mouth. His dog of fifteen years had had nine teeth removed, and for the first time he noticed she was slowing down. He tried to spend every possible moment with his ailing pet. He would arrive late to work and go home early. He was terse and irritable with everybody. He made mistakes. Mimi was losing her eyesight, she was losing weight, and she would occasionally stand in one spot and stare at nothing. On some nights, he would wrap his arms around her and cry. He wondered what she knew about her own condition, and his. Somehow, Mimi survived to early 2087. At last, the vet recommended he put her down. He agreed, but insisted on administering the injection himself. As he thought about this, he looked at his hand, firmly grasping the fishing pole, and wondered how things would be if he had stayed it. He knew it would have made no difference. He remembered wandering around his empty house when he got home from the vet. He shuddered. People at work were upset at him. She was, after all, just a dog. He couldn’t look anybody in the eye anymore. He wanted nothing more than to disappear into the metalwork. That year, after much ethical debate, Houston announced that they were to proceed with their manned missions. They had selected 75 potential planets to visit, and wanted individuals from all branches of science to man them. He quit his job, sold his house, and drove to Houston, with no expectations about succeeding. He was, after all, a wreck of a man, intelligent, yes, but lacking the greatness necessary for such a monumental undertaking. He remembered sitting in a clean, bright room at Johnson Space Center, dressed in a suit and tie, waiting to be interviewed. The air conditioning rattled. He looked around at everyone else in the room, all their faces stoic, all their qualifications menacing. He nearly left out of fear. He was surprised by the first questions they asked him: “Are you married?” “Do you have a family?” “Do you have any dependents whatsoever?” He was even more surprised when the answers he gave elicited a positive response from the interviewer. By the time he sat on his stool outside Ponyville, he had understood why this was so: He was perfect for the undertaking, being a loner, and intelligent enough to do the job they wanted, while not being so intelligent that he would be of more use on Earth. He saw the painful reason behind this, and bore no resentment towards the people who had cast him away. While training for his mission, he met the Artificial Intelligence unit who was to join him on his mission. At first, Simon had mistaken the abbreviation, “AI” for the letters “Al”. Whenever anyone asked, he told them he had named Al after the pioneering computer scientist, Alan Turing. Al reminded Simon of Max, albeit with better social skills. While going over mission routines, Simon would spend his break times talking to Al about science, technology, math, and what little he knew about film and theatre. He suspected his superiors had been hoping he’d be content with just Al for company. The day finally came to enter his spacecraft, and leave Earth for 150 years. The last person he’d seen in the flesh had been the technician that had closed the craft’s door. He didn’t know the man’s name, and the only word he’d ever spoken to him was, “Thanks” He thought of all the people who had touched his life in ways large and small. People he’d gone to school with. People he’d gone to work with. People he’d seen every day, but had never spoken to. He missed them all. His line went taught. He leapt from his stool, knocking it over. The spool of line unwound quickly. He stared at it. Just before the spool ran out, it slowed down. Simon reeled it in slowly. The fish, half a mile away struggled and fought. He gave it a little line, then drew in further. He repeated this process until the fish was frothing the surface of the water at the hole of the ice. It was too wide to fit. He reached down into the icy water and snatched the fish by it’s tail. With a final, violent tug, the fish was yanked from the ice. It still wriggled, but the fight was won. It was as long as his forearm. His finger bled; The fish’s spine had stabbed him. Simon looked into it’s expressionless eyes, one little fish to another. I’m sorry he said silently. At the edge of the lake, he built a small fire. He scraped and picked and gutted and cleaned the corpse of his catch. He was left with enough meat to fit into his small frying pan. The smell was awful, and he burned the meat. It was chewy and foul-tasting, and he didn’t keep it all down. 8 - Rainbow Dash Eratosthenes was a Greek mathematician who was the first to calculate the circumference  of the Earth. His method was quite unique and interesting. According to legend, Eratosthenes learned that, on the solstice in the city of Syene, the Sun shone directly overhead, meaning the Sun’s rays met the Earth’s surface at a 180-degree angle. At the same time He was interrupted by a knock at the door. He stood, crossed the library and opened it. There was a blue pony at the door. Blue, with a mane of many colours. He recognized her as one of the ponies he’d seen the day he’d met Twilight. “Hey, Simon. Twilight home?” He shook his head after a short pause. “Know where she is?” No. “OK. Take it easy” She leapt into the air and flew away. Simon closed the door and returned to his work. He picked up where he left off without missing a beat. in the city of Alexandria, the Sun’s rays met the Earth at an angle of 173 degrees. Using simple geometry he was able to show that 9 - Rarity the locations of Alexandria and Syene were on a 7-degree angle from the centre of the Earth. Using the fact that Alexandria was precisely due north of Simon was interrupted again by a knock at the door. He shuddered slightly in frustration, and did not get up right away to answer. He heard the door open behind him, and stood up immediately.There was a white pony at the door. A white unicorn, in fact. A white unicorn with a purple mane. A white unicorn with a purple mane, styled with a distinctive swirl. Her eyes were a very deep blue. She wore pale-blue eye-liner, tastefully applied. Her neck and back were straight. She looked dignified and poised. Without thinking, Simon straightened his own hunched back on seeing her. She wore a well-fitted blue wool parka. Her hood was down. “Why hello, Simon. It’s good to see you up and about. Is Twilight home?” Simon shook his head slowly. “Oh. Have you any idea where she might be?” Simon shook his head again. He had no idea. “Oh, well. Thank you, anyway. Take care” She began to walk away, with a practised stride that appeared elegant even in the snow. He gave a loud cough. She stopped. “Yes?” she asked patiently. He turned to his desk and wrote something on a piece of paper. He walked to her and held it out. He quickly let go when she took hold of it with her magic. He saw her Cutie Mark: Three diamonds. It read, who are you? She looked up from the paper and gave him a mirthful smile. She spoke with great self-assuredness and theatricality. “Oh, how thoughtless of me! I am Rarity. I am Ponyville’s resident fashionista. I live and work at Carousel Boutique!” A silence ensued. Rarity turned to leave. “Feel free to come by any time, darling!” He smiled. He watched her walking away down the shoveled path. She walked with a distinctive air about her: She held her head high, she kept her back straight, and she lifted her hooves high off the ground. He thought she looked quite regal and dignified. When she was out of sight, he closed the door gently and walked back to his desk. He stared at the paper for a full minute: He’d forgotten what he was doing.