Chapter 4 – Event Horizon
Now I am here I can see myself,
But when I am charmed by vile delusions of happiness,
The foul magic of this engine of sorcery,
I cannot touch my essential self.
Pinkie Pie’s eyes snapped open.
Outside, the sky was dark, but there was a faint trickle of morning sunrise breaking through the clouds. Pinkie craned her head to see the clock on the wall.
4.48am
Pinkie sat up and yawned. She stretched and blinked her eyes. She lifted up her hooves and rubbed her face. Without thinking about it, she tore the wires from her body and heaved her pink body out of bed. For several seconds, she struggled to balance, like a foal taking its first steps, but eventually, she got the hang of it.
She walked to the door of her hospital room and tried the handle. It was locked. She cursed under her breath and made for the window. A set of metal bars that were screwed into the window frame prevented Pinkie from crawling through the otherwise wide gap.
She opened her mouth and bit hard on the bottom screw, holding it between her teeth, she twisted her neck. She felt the pain surging through her jaw and she worried her back molars might come loose, but she tugged with all her might and eventually, the large screw started to turn. Once it was loose, it was a simple matter of twisting it with her hoof until it fell out. Three screws later and the bars were down, but the window underneath was padlocked.
Pinkie searched the room frantically for something she could use to pick the lock, conscious of the rapidly elapsing time. At 6.00am they would bring her the first round of medication and after that she would be dead to the world.
Not today. Not anymore.
Pinkie Pie found a piece of metal wiring from one of the tubes that had been feeding her sedatives and she bent it at an angle. She slid it into the padlock opening and started to feel for the tumblers.
As the clock struck 5:45, Pinkie felt the last tumbler click into place. She released the padlock, opened up the window and pulled herself out.
Within minutes, she was on the road out of Ponyville. By the time they realised she was gone, she would already be dead.
*
“What do you mean ‘gone’”? Rainbow Dash demanded furiously.
“We believe she might have escaped through the window,” said Dr Shetland.
Rainbow glanced at the discarded bars and the open window in Pinkie’s hospital room. “Oh, you think? Somebody give Captain Obvious a medal!”
Twilight Sparkle frowned, “It worries me that your security was lax enough to let a patient escape.”
“She was supposed to be sedated,” Shetland said. “She’s been confined to that bed for weeks. She shouldn’t have been able to stand up, never mind break out.”
“There are a lot of things that Pinkie Pie shouldn’t be able to do, but can,” Twilight Sparkle said. “What surprises me is that she didn’t try this earlier.”
“She showed no signs of wanting to be outside,” Shetland informed them. “We didn’t consider her a flight risk.”
“Well you considered wrong and now my friend is out there alone!” Rainbow snarled, “I can’t believe this is what my taxes pay for!”
“Look,” Twilight said, stepping forward, “we can point hooves and cast blame or we can find Pinkie Pie and bring her home.”
“We’re not bringing her back here,” Rainbow said, rising up into the air. “She’s staying with me.”
“We’ll talk about that when we get her back,” Twilight said, “I’m going to organise a search party. You take the skies – see if she went out into the Everfree forest.”
Rainbow Dash nodded and took off out the window.
“I hope you understand that we did everything we could to prevent something like this from happening,” Dr Shetland said to Twilight as she left. “We followed every procedure. I’m sure you being a reasonable pony, will understand that?”
Twilight spun around. Normally she wouldn’t have gotten involved, but something about Shetland made her flesh crawl. “You know what, Dr Shetland? If you cared as much about your patients as you do about ticking boxes, maybe Pinkie Pie would still be here.”
Shetland let her words slap him in the face. He stared back at her.
“If I was you, I’d think very carefully about your attitude. I don’t think Princess Celestia would be very happy if she knew that all a sick pony can expect to get is a locked room and a stomach full of wires, do you?”
Shetland shook his head. “No ma’am.”
Twilight nodded at him. “Good. Oh, and by the way? I read your paper on Oedipal desires?” she snorted a laugh, “You really need to get out more.” She turned on her heel and trotted out of the room, leaving the speechless psychiatrist standing together with his knocking knees.
*
My name is Pinkie Pie
And I am here to say
By the time Pinkie had reached the mountain, it was already midday. A short climb up from where she stood was a bridge connecting two peaks. At its highest point, the bridge was nearly half a kilometre above ground level, with a straight drop onto a set of jagged cliffs at the bottom. Nopony could survive a fall like that.
Pinkie started to walk. She hadn’t stopped running since she left the hospital, but now it was time to walk. As she walked, she tried remember the chain of events that had led to her rapid descent into depression. What kicked it all off?
There wasn’t an easy answer for that.
*
6 months earlier
“There exists,” Twilight Sparkle said to her class, “a strange phenomena in physics known as a black hole.” She drew a circle on the chalkboard.
The students of Ponyville Community College watched with bored expressions. Eyes glazed over as Twilight looked on with humility and embarrassment. It was like her first day teaching all over again. She didn’t normally lecture physics, but she was standing in as a substitute for Professor Brian Colts and she had picked the only topic in physics she knew anything about.
Twilight looked nervously at her class. Then she saw Pinkie’s face. The pink pony smiled and waved at her, encouragingly. She’d agreed to come for moral support. Twilight took a deep breath and stepped forward.
“Imagine you are flying through space and you encounter this – a black hole.” She drew another diagram next to it; this one looked like a long cone with the point at the bottom. “A black hole is a massive gravitational force. You can’t see it. You can’t even feel it until it’s too late, but its presence affects everything and everypony around it. It pulls everything inside, slowly crushing it under immense, gravitational pressure.”
Ponies yawned, but Pinkie sat attentively. Something about the idea of a black hole fascinated her.
Twilight drew another line across the middle of the cone. “This line is what we call an Event Horizon. It’s the point of no return. Anybody here know the pony Rainbow Dash?”
A few students nodded their heads.
Twilight sketched out a crude drawing of the blue pegasus on the chalkboard. “Let’s say Rainbow Dash is flying through space. She flies too close to the black hole. What happens?”
Students looked at each other.
“Come on!” Twilight encouraged.
One pony raised his hoof and said “She gets sucked in.”
“That’s right,” Twilight said, nodding happily at the pony, “she gets sucked in. And what would happen if she got sucked in?”
“She would die?” a female pony suggested. There were some sniggers.
“Not right away,” Twilight responded, smiling. “Where would the black hole take her?”
“She’d get sucked towards the centre,” a unicorn offered.
“Yeah, well done,” Twilight said, pleased that the students were responding positively to her questioning. She drew a line from “Rainbow Dash” into the black hole. “Now, there’s still time for her to escape. It’s not all over for Rainbow. She can fight the pull of the black hole.” She drew over the top of the white line again, making it bolder. “Until she gets to this point. The event horizon. The point of no return. Once she crosses that line, there’s no going back. The force is too powerful to resist. Rainbow will be crushed into pieces, never to be seen again.”
The students nodded as they made their notes. Twilight checked the clock. “I think we’ll leave it there for today. Thanks all.”
*
I’m gonna make you smile and I will brighten up your day
Pinkie had crossed the event horizon long ago. She was being devoured by a crushing gravitational force that had squeezed the life out of her. Like a black hole, her depression was pulling in everyone around her. Like a black hole, it was invisible, but its presence was felt by any who came too close.
It doesn’t matter now
If you are sad or blue
Pinkie knew she had to close up the black hole – not just because she couldn’t take the pain it was causing her, but because she didn’t want it to hurt anyone else. It would be one final act of good will to her friends.
‘Cause cheering up my friends is just what Pinkie’s here to do.
She was almost at the bridge. Not long now.
*
Rainbow Dash shot through the Everfree forest. Trees seemed to part in her wake as she soared beneath the canopy.
Zecora had no idea where Pinkie Pie was. Neither had any other wandering pony she’d found. She had even subjected a group of diamond dogs to a round of brutal interrogation. She had broken four arms and a leg before she was satisfied that nobody had seen Pinkie Pie.
Then she had a breakthrough. It was getting on for midday and Rainbow was considering burning the entire forest to the ground with a lightning storm when she spotted fresh hoof tracks leading up a mountain on the far side of the forest. Had Pinkie really came all this way?
She followed the tracks up the mountain, but it was only when the sun had risen to its peak that she saw the bridge in the distance and the pink figure that was standing on it, looking down at the rocky chasm beneath that the horror finally sunk in.
Dear God, dear God, what shall I do?
All I know
Is snow
And black despair.