//------------------------------//
// Chapter 3 
// Story: (Old) Obsolescence 
// by Chaotic Dreams 
//------------------------------//


Obsolescence




Chapter 3: 
‘Old Soldier?’ There was that term again, the name of the file that Daisy had wanted me to hack—
A warm liquid dribbled onto my chest, and I looked down to see the blood still dripping from my mouth. Right, deal with the current situation now, worry about whatever the Tartarus ‘Old Soldiers’ were later...especially why I was considered to be one. 
Looking up fearfully at the Enforcer pegasus, who still had her twin side-mounted rifles trained on me, I racked my brain for some way to get past her without having explosive shells burrow into my torso and make shrapnel out of my rib cage. Maybe if I started talking and got her talking, I could distract her long enough to... I don’t know what. I certainly couldn’t slip away from this many Enforcers even if I escaped this transport vehicle—there was a whole Goddesses-damned fleet of their aerial vehicles out there—but I had to do something...
“Don’t you have to read me my rights or something?” I asked, wiping the blood off my split lip with a foreleg. The crimson liquid stained my white coat, but again, there were more pressing things to worry about right now. 
“Shut the buck up,” the Enforcer ordered, and I could hear the intimidating click of her rifles readying themselves. 
I winced, not at her words but at the stupidity of what I was about to do. Doing nothing would have been more stupid, but this was still really stupid, even if I didn’t see what other choice I had. 
“I have rights!” I shouted, struggling to rise despite my shaky limbs. “You can’t just arrest me without telling me—”
The mare lashed out with a foreleg and struck me across the nose, her iron horseshoes sending blood flying from my nostrils. 
“I said shut up!” she demanded, her voice carrying the barest hints of a tremor. 
Wait, what...? She was afraid of me? But I was just a hacker! Whatever an ‘Old Soldier’ was, they must be a force to be reckoned with if an Enforcer, nay, an entire squadron, was frightened by just one of them. I imagined I’d never know why they mistook me for whatever such things were. 
“Are you afraid?” I said, trying my best to even out the tremor in my own voice, as well as add a bit of a creepy, threatening undertone. I sounded about as confident as the fleet of Enforcers looked intimidating, but it had the desired effect all the same, much to my surprise. 
She took a step backwards, her rear hooves on the lip of the floor. The city zoomed by beneath her, the acidic chocolate milk rain sizzling off of the back of her armor. 
Hesitantly, but growing bolder, I took a step forward. 
“Don’t come any closer!” she warned, her voice now wavering just as much as mine had. “I’ll fire! I swear I’ll—”
“I don’t think you will,” I said, taking a huge risk but still not seeing what other options I had. “I think your superiors want me alive, and that means you’re not going to kill me. Not that you could anyway, of course, me being an Old Soldier and all. Speaking of which, here comes the rest of my squadron.”
I looked over the Enforcer’s shoulder, forcing a smile as I did so. 
She took the bait, quickly turning to see what I was looking at. Ducking down, I leapt forward, wrapping my forelegs around her and holding on tight as we both plummeted off the the transport vehicle. The enforcer's rifles barked, the bullets harmlessly ruffling my mane. The noise, however, pounded through my skull like an ice-pick, the price of my batlike hearing, I guess, but it was a small price to pay for the opportunity it provided. 
With the Enforcer disoriented, I pushed off of her with my hind legs with a force that, on a larger pony, would’ve qualified as an applebuck. The wind knocked out of the pegasus, she plummeted as I spread my wings and darted downwards, away from the pegasus but also away from the Enforcer fleet. 
This was perhaps my biggest gamble. I had no way of knowing for certain if the fleet wouldn’t simply blast me into oblivion. 
My gamble looked like it was about to pay off—they weren’t shooting at me! For whatever reason, they must have wanted me alive, and that actually frightened me more than if they wanted me dead. After all, you can’t brain-rape a corpse...unless necromancy is involved, but the Council didn’t have access to quite that level of technology, or so I hoped. 
The spires of the Rim rose up to meet me, though I noticed with a wince of dread that they were buildings a bit further into Canterlot Proper than I would’ve liked. They must have been taking me to the heart of the District. 
“Buck that,” I whispered to myself with a gleeful smirk. 
I couldn’t believe this! I might actually be able to get away! The Enforcer pegasi made use of enchanted jet engines, so I knew that any moment the fleet above would be sending a full squadron down to try and catch me. Nevertheless, I also knew that no Enforcer knew the streets of the Rim like I did. If I could just make it into one of the back alleys, I could lose them in the crowd. 
“CITIZEN!” boomed a crackly voice over a loudspeaker as the translucent pillar of a searchlight shone on me, quickly joined by dozens more. The Enforcer’s aerial vehicles were giving chase, trying to keep me in sight. There was no way I could outfly one of those, let alone a fleet, but I was closer to the skyscraper-spanning bridges and civilian vehicular traffic and such of the lower Rim than I was to my pursuers. Just a little further... “YOU ARE ORDERED TO HALT IMMEDIATELY! YOU ARE UNDER ARREST FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE COUNCIL!”
“Freeze!” shouted an Enforcer pegasus as he zoomed down alongside me, having finally caught up after his late start. Others were quick to join him. 
Glancing out of the corner of my eyes, I could see them raising bulky rifle-like weapons, the likes of which I’d never seen. I could read Stunner on the side, which was even worse than if it had been named Killer. 
Mere yards away from the civilian traffic, I flared my wings and flapped furiously upwards, sending the Enforcers zooming downwards, too late to correct their flight pattern. By the time they realized where they were headed, an aerial transport vehicle had blindsided them. I heard the sickening crunch of metal crashing against thinner bits of metal, and the even more sickening wet sounds of what was inside. 
“Buck yeah!” I shouted. “Take that, motherbuckers!” 
I knew I’d regret that later. Essentially, I’d just sent half a dozen ponies to their deaths, but it had been them or me, and for the moment that was all I could care about. 
Spotting an opening in the civilian traffic, I darted through it and landed—hard—on the crimson roof of a more luxurious model. The vehicle swerved slightly before resuming its course, and I grabbed onto the front of the roof with my wing-claws. 
The chill wind and rain blasted my mane and tail back, and I could see that both weren’t as spiky as they had once been. My natural genetic structure was fighting back against the transmutation magic. Soon I’d look just like I normally did. I only hoped I’d still been genetically altered enough to prevent the Enforcers from identifying me. 
The vehicle zoomed towards one of the many skyscrapers, already much taller than those of the outer Rim, the wide mouth of a traffic tunnel growing larger all the time. I couldn’t believe my luck; as soon as the vehicle was in the tunnel, all I had to do was leap off, fly into one of the many side tunnels, and disappear in the crowds of the inner building. 
I would be a whisper amidst a billion voices. They’d never find me. 
If I had been the more religious type, I might even have felt like heading to the first Harmonist temple I saw and kissing the hooves of each statue of the Goddesses. Tartarus, maybe I would do so anyway. 
That’s when I realized the wind blowing through my mane and tail was becoming less and less forceful. Looking down, I saw that the vehicles flying by beneath the sports model I was on were slowing, and so too was my own ride. 
No, no, no.... I thought frantically. That’s not possible!
The traffic seemed to disagree. The air was suddenly alive with the blare of sirens and horns, more so than usual, as each aerial vehicle in sight slowed to a stop, each hovering motionlessly. 
“Fly!” I demanded, pounding my hooves against the roof. “Move! Go! Do something!” 
I glanced back to see more Enforcer pegasi weaving their way through the stalled traffic, their own vehicles fanning out across the top of the frozen civilian rush hour and shining their searchlights between the myriad vehicles. 
I furiously slammed a hoof to my touchscreen amulet and began rapidly typing as the holographic interface projected itself before me. Hacking into the vehicle I was riding, I ordered the machine to move, but a large, angry red error message filled the screen when I hit ‘enter.’ 
“A Council-mandated cessation of vehicular transportation is in effect,” I read. “Please remain calm and in your vehicles while the Enforcers search for a dangerous terrorist. Your cooperation is non-negotiable and appreciated. All violators will be shot.”
“There she is!” I heard somepony shout behind me. I glanced over my shoulder to see an Enforcer speeding towards me, others farther off changing course to follow suite. 
I swore, turning back to my amulet and typing away faster than I ever had. There was no way I could outfly them now. Even if I made it to one of the bridges now, there would be too few ponies to hide behind; the Enforcers would probably just land on either side of the bridge and close in on me anyway. I certainly couldn’t make it to the skyscraper traffic tunnel in time. 
I only had one chance. 
I opened the Enforcer’s online network and sicced my customized viruses on it, praying that they could eat their way past the firewalls in time. 
PROGRESS AT 0.01%, I read. 49.73 hours remaining. 
What?! They must have beefed up security since last night. That also meant that I was royally bucked. 
My breaths came in ragged heaves, my eyes bulging. They were going to catch me. There was nothing I could do to stop it. They were going to pluck me from society, erase any evidence I’d ever existed, and shove the wriggling tentacles of dark magic into my brain to rip my psyche apart. 
I felt like I was about to vomit, and I could already taste bile in the back of my throat. 
Ping. 
FILE UPLOADED, I read. 
Huh?
I glanced at the bottom of the screen, seeing that my viruses were still over two days away from eating their way into the nearest Enforcer maneframe. Then what had just loaded?
A chuckle rose in my throat, which turned into a maniacal laugh. My project! The one I’d been waiting for this morning, it had finally loaded!
I minimized the window concerning the project itself—something to do with redistributing funds to local poorhouses and cutting funding to weapon shipments, but that wasn’t important right now—and logged right onto the main field management files. Selecting every local Enforcer, I activated the emergency failsafe protocol, and the searchlights died, as did the sound of Enforcer jet engines and the mechanical whining of their aerial vehicles. 
I looked back to see the Enforcer pegasi, just a few civilian vehicles away, slow down and drop onto the flying machines immediately below them. They moved slowly, the pistons and gears that would have normally enabled their powered armor to function having deadlocked. 
I cackled as I looked up to see the vehicles slowing to a halt as well, their external lights dying as they hovered as motionlessly as every other machine in the sky. 
Every Enforcer database had an emergency failsafe protocol, a massive killswitch to shut off any particular bit of their technology should it ever be stolen or used against them. I grinned smugly, thinking of how poetically just it seemed that their own fear of being turned against was what had kept them from catching me. 
“It’s been fun!” I laughed at them, closing the amulet’s interface, taking wing, and flying towards the nearest skyscraper’s traffic tunnel. “But let’s not do it again anytime soon.”
My adrenaline rush was wearing off by now, and my wings felt heavy as I flapped towards safety. Even so, I had just enough juice left in me for a few more hours, which would be more than enough to disappear. I’d really have to be more careful from now on, and that definitely meant never trusting any two-bit crime lords like Daisy ever again. I’d relocate, just like I’d planned earlier, far from this side of Canterlot Proper. The opposite side of the Rim was sounding all the more enticing now. 
I gasped as a chrome figure landed in front of me, nearly crumpling the vehicle on which it had landed. I nearly crashed into it, instead slowing to a hover a few feet from the metallic...thing.
I say ‘thing’ because it completely lacked any defining sexual characteristics, or biological markers, for that matter. It was the most basic of equine forms, with a visor-like screen for eyes and segmented metal plating for skin. Neon lights ran between where its plating intersected, and side-mounted rockets took the place of what, on a real pony, would’ve been wings. 
I was looking at what could only be a robot. Others began rocketing down from the sky, weaving through the stalled vehicles and landing on them, crumpling the roofs, sending shards of shattered window glass tumbling down to the earth far below. I could hear the screams of the ponies trapped inside as they were all-but-crushed crushed by the heavy equine machines. What frightened me most was that there weren’t as many screams as I had anticipated. 
The robot immediately in front of me possessed two speaker-like protrusions on either side of its lower face, which crackled to life before announcing in the most overly peppy voice I’d ever heard “Jolly good show! You really unwound their sticky-wickets and shoved it to them backwards! I congratulate you on your exceptionalism!”
I darted to the side and dropped downwards. 
The robot leapt down in front of me, nearly flattening the vehicle beneath it and blocking my path as the other machines closed in. 
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” the robot chuckled in a surprisingly fluid equine voice. “Hold your metaphorical equine figures of speech! We’re the silver linings to your poisoned cotton-candy clouds. Don’t believe us, like you’re some sort of robot atheist? Then we’ll put the ‘p’ in front of ‘r-o-v-e’ it to you!”
The robot turned its head, apparently looking up beyond me. I turned to see what it was looking at, cursing myself for realizing too late that I’d just fallen for the same trick I’d pulled on the Enforcer. However, it seemed that this wasn’t a trick. 
My jaw dropped in utter horror as I saw other robots closing around the Enforcers, whose armor was too heavy to allow them to fly without power. Other robots still were flying down from the sky, landing on the Enforcer vehicles. 
I wasn’t horrified at the fact that the robots were surrounding my enemies, mind you. I was horrified that what appeared to be weapons were extending from opened panels in their fronts. Electrodes crackled with a sort of magic I’d never seen, which pulsed with an intensity that made it hard to look at, sending shimmers of distortion throughout the air. 
“Lights! Camera!” the robot nearest me announced. “The opposite of inaction!”
The other robots fired their weapons at the the trapped Enforcers and their vehicles, and a shrieking, horrific wrongness blinded me for a moment, as if somepony had just poked a hoof into reality and swirled it around. 
When the spots stopped swimming before my eyes, the Enforcers and their vehicles were gone. The ponies who had once worn Enforcer armor were...no longer ponies. The robots were now surrounding an odd assortment of seemingly random objects, ranging from a potted plant to a goldfish bowl (complete with goldfish) to a clothing rack covered in lingerie. 
I heard a impossibly deep, melancholic wail as a huge gray shape plunged down from above, right where the nearest Enforcer vehicle had just been. I saw something I’d only ever seen in history files crashing through the civilian flying machines, knocking them out of the way or simply flattening them with its massive fins and even more massive tail and huge, bulky body. 
The screams of ponies streamed through the creature’s blowhole, telling me that though the ship had been transmogrified, those inside had not, and were plummeting to their death inside the poor creature. 
The robots had just turned a fleet on Enforcers into a bunch of random objects and a whale and who knew what else. 
I could feel the bile rising back up. 
“What do you neurally process about that?” the nearest robot inquired, sounding proud of itself. “Are you experiencing an emotion akin to euphoria, like the kind you might feel if you had been blessed with the power of crying chocolate frosting?”
“Why did you do that?” I snarled. Sure, I had killed some Enforcers of my own, and though I had been elated to have done so at the time, I wasn’t particularly proud of it and never truly would be. It had simply been me or them in the heat of a moment, and I had come out on top. They had known the stakes when they chased after what they apparently assumed was a deadly fugitive. 
But these robots...sure, I was no friend to the Enforcers, but those ponies had been sitting there defenseless. They hadn’t been a threat to me or anypony else, even if they’d wanted to be. 
“Does our gift not bring pleasure to the pleasurably pleasure-producing centers of your squishy gray matter?” the robot asked, sounding confused. “Our calculations had indicated that this course of action only possessed a failure probability of ninety-nine point eight percent, which is more favorable than the figures we usually calculate.”
“But they were defenseless!” I shouted. “They couldn’t hurt anypony! You’re more of a danger than they are. You’re crushing whoever’s under that roof you’re standing on right now!” 
“I fail to optically observe how this circumstance bears any significance,” the robot said apologetically. “The mushy red jelly-filled flesh-bags of this District are irrelevant to our intrepid enterprises, save for your own biomass. Does this data compute with your gray matter?”
“What are you talking about?!” I demanded. “Who are you?!”
“You mean you don’t know?” the robot asked. “Accessing identification records. Translating binary linguistics. Answering the damn question. Pleased to meet you, Miss Biomass! We are the Binary Operating Technology Systems, or BOTS, of Unreality, Inc., also known as the Entropy Empire in the District adjacent to Canterlot Proper. We have travelled long and far to present you with a business proposition. Our lord, master, and CEO, that devilishly good-looking pony Mr. L, wishes to speak with you on a matter of utmost urgency. Do you accept our humble invitational, um... invitation?”
“No!” I shouted. 
“Processing response,” said the robot...roBOT...Bot? “Response has been processed. Mr. L was ‘a’ to the ‘f-r-a-i-d’ you would say that. Thus, he programmed us with his magical jazzy hooves to encourage compliance with our request. I shall ask you four minus three more times: will you hear out Mr. L’s businesslike business propositional proposal?”
The other Bots had surrounded me by this time, having left the former Enforcers to either sit unattended on top of the civilian vehicles or fall off to the seemingly endless stories below. I vaguely wondered if that would kill them, if they still possessed some form of consciousness after their transmogrification, or if death came the moment they ceased possessing brains. 
I wasn’t surprised by what was coming next, but it still wasn’t pleasant. The Bots, the spokesbot included, re-released their odd electrode-like weapons. The air shimmered, twisting into impossible non-euclidian twists and warps. 
“You possess approximately seven-hundred-and-seventy seven minus seven-hundred-and-seventy-four seconds before we unleash a can of entropic whup-flank upon your mortal soul,” the spokesbot warned, still using its overly peppy tone. “One Maresissippi...two Maresissippi...”
“What do you want from me?” I asked with a sigh, defeated. There was no way I could outfly these metal monstrosities with their rockets, much less beat them if it came to blows. I’d try hacking them, but I had been lucky enough to get into the Enforcer’s local maneframe in time. Besides, even if I could get into whatever crazy systems these Bots were using, they’d be transmogrifying me into another potted plant before I could activate my amulet. 
“Mr. L requires your attendance at his swankily high-resolution office,” the spokesbot answered, if such a weird response could even qualify as an answer. “We, his glorious vanguard of metal heartthrobs, are to escort you to the promised land beyond the walls of Canterlot Proper.”
“...Fine,” I finally said. 
The Bots’ weapons began to lose their charge, sliding back into their compartments. 
“We are eternally grateful for your cooperation,” the spokesbot thanked me cheerily. “We depart for the Entropy Empire immediately. All aboard the chaos train!” 
There was a bright flash of white, and an aerial ship several times larger than the Enforcers’ vehicles—all of the fleet I had seen combined, in fact—appeared in the air above the stalled civilian traffic. I assumed it had been there the whole time, simply invisible. Why the Bots hadn’t used it to take out the Enforcers earlier was anypony’s guess, though given what I had seen of their tenuous grasp of reality as well as their total disregard for its natural laws, I also supposed it was in keeping with their actions so far. 
By any rational definition of the terms ‘ship,’ ‘aircraft,’ or even ‘vehicle,’ the mechanical monstrosity floating above me should have in no way been capable of flight. It essentially looked like what might happen if somepony took a bunch of different ships, blew them up, and then randomly welded the pieces back together in a completely hodge-podge way. 
Streamlined white armor panels covered in blue neon strips clung to massive exposed engines that looked like they were obsolete centuries ago. Smokestacks that looked like they belonged an a preindustrial steamboat belched multicolored smoke and sparks into the air, while electricity danced along unprotected wiring and clearly damaged circuitry. Some of the coils and armor plating even looked organic, possessing fur or feathers or scales, and I could’ve sworn an eye popped open and winked at me before disappearing again. The thing barely stayed aloft on a mixture of rockets spouting blue flame, wide jet engines that looked like they’d been stolen from an Enforcer cruiser, and even a cluster of party balloons. 
“What does your carbon-based processing unit compute about the flagship of Unreality Inc.’s proud fleet of Improbability Vehicles?” asked the spokesbot as we flew through a circular panel that opened in the side of the craft. “Is she not beautiful? Gorgeous? Sexy?”
“She’s very...unique?” I said lamely, looking around nervously at the interior. I had no suspicion that these Bots would harm me—yet—if they had put so much effort into getting me to come with them. I assumed I would be safe until I met this ‘Mr. L.’ Nevertheless, I had what I felt to be a reasonable degree of fear about whether or not this ramshackle ship could stay airborne for a few more minutes. I didn’t want to even think about it whether or not it could survive a journey all the way to the next District, and one I knew absolutely nothing about at that. 
Everyone in Canterlot Proper knew plenty about most of the other Districts, even with the Council attempting to sensor most of the information. The megacorporations of New Everfree and even the Dreamscape all did business with the Council on a regular basis, even if it wasn’t always by choice. The Shrine of Harmony, a neutral zone among the Districts, was a religious center of the Harmonist faith and, as far as I could tell, literally nothing more. 
However, there was one District which remained an enigma to everypony in Canterlot Proper, except perhaps for the Council and their inner circle. I knew that the Council made certain never to mention it in any telecasts, and most websites that made mention of ‘the Last District’ were entirely deleted by the government’s artificially intelligent censor programs. 
It was the domain of Unreality, Inc., a power company and one of the many megacorporations which had fought in the Corporate War against the government, which had led to the Crash. It still provided power to Canterlot Proper and, I assumed, the other Districts—though I didn’t know at what price—save those uninhabited by anypony. Nevertheless, it had kept to itself since the Crash, and the rest of Canterlot had left it alone. 
It seemed I would soon find out why.