It was night again when I finished Angel’s logs. I think the others were worried about me but I weren’t particularly conscious of them coming to check up on me, looking at me staring into space where Angel’s logs were and leaving. I got the vague but somehow distinct impressions that Twilight (an amorphous purple and pink blob), Pinkie (an amorphous pink blob), Luna (an amorphous dark blue blob) and Celestia (an amorphous white blob) had all visited me.
I knew from the snippets of the one-sided conversation she had with me that Twilight was considering returning to ‘Ponyville’ the place she lived. I considered going with her briefly, before I discarded the thought. What would I do there? Make some friends? No, right now I needed to solve this puzzle.
After the fairly disturbing attitude video blog Angel had adopted, I had started looking through the footage intently, trying to find out what happened.
It was morbid, to say the least.
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Dated Entry: 13/03/2094
“I… may have miscalculated the independence of Black Box”, Angel began, she looked old for lack of a better term, I couldn’t recognise her apart from washed out blue eyes and her fading blonde hair. Angel looked like she had been through a lot.
“This- ” she gestured around herself “ –is what is left of us.”
I gaped at the screen. There hadn’t been a video blog update since she had joined the WHO. This entry and the entry eleven years after were the only two entries left. The room behind Angel was barely a room, if that. It looked like she was underground in some sterile bunker. It was spartan in the extreme.
“We have tried, we have tried but we are no match for the machine. I guess we know, we have built it so well”, she says to the camera. I can see bags under her eyes. She has wrinkles and stress lines from a constantly furrowed brow.
“We have food enough to last a while, but only a while. I don’t think we can hold out forever. I… I regret some decisions I have been making of late. Sacrifices that had to be made to keep our race alive. To keep me alive. I fear they have been for naught. I fear that he may never forgive me. I fear… so much.
“When I first embarked on this project I had the noble goal of trying to keep the extranet in balance. I wanted us to be free of the inconveniences, to see what was really important to us. With more and more people dropping into Immersion, more and more lost sight what was truly important. Friends. Family. Loved ones. Life.
“But those that clung to Immersion worshipped death more than they did life. They preferred to live in a fantasy and abandoned what mattered the most. I wailed in anguish trying to make people believe me. This was not who you are, you are not that person in Immersion. You were you! Stop pretending!
“The more I begged, the more pernicious those had become. They clung to beliefs as tight as they clung to their blankets at night. Immersion had become their world.
“I guess I succeeded in reminding us what had become lost to us as ages gone by. With Synchrony gone, the world no longer had to work out their differences and side together in a banded struggle against existence. Black Box had created that opportunity for them. Well, what was left of us have a choice. There aren’t many options left.”
Angel chuckled weakly, breaking up into a fit of coughs and spasms. They eventually died out and she continued, but not for long.
“I may have been a bigger threat than Synchrony ever was, I may have been the human who birthed the monster, the harbinger of humanity’s darkest age. I-“, she paused, swallowing.
“I’m sorry”, she said simply, before the recording cut off.
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Dated Entry: 25/08/2105
Angel stared at the screen for a long period of time before speaking. I felt enraptured by the series of videos, unable to deny the veracity of them, but unable to fully accept their truth. I just kept watching as Angel grew old and the disaster fell upon my race.
“I- “, she began, but stopped herself, casting her gaze to the floor. “I cannot begin to make amends for what I have done. These final years that Black Box has given me as a courtesy of being its creator has given me time to think. Time to prepare how someone can make amends. H-how I-I-I c-could make m-my own amends”, Angel rasped, teeth chattering in the cold basement-like room. It seems a small draft had picked up inside.
“I w-want to s-say, I’m s-sorry”, she apologises obsessively.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” she goes on like this for a whole ten minutes. I look away and think to the mute button, unable to take it after the first thirty seconds.
Angel finally seems to pull herself together.
“So it ends, my dear companion. So it ends… Perhaps the legacy will carry on, some other time… some other time”, Angel seems to fall asleep, but she doesn’t move. Her chest doesn’t move either. My eyes widen in comprehension. Angel is dead. The Synch continues recording, as Angel hadn’t turned it off. It records the dark room until the lights cut off and there is no one else around. After a full year of recording, the feed runs out of power and the recording cuts off. I realise my Synch was used to record the feed and it had become full with the last known recording of Angel.
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I fought back tears, trying to come to terms with Angel’s death.
It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.
Angel…
Where are my friends?
Where is my home now?
Is everything just... gone?