September 28, 2008
Sweet Apple Acres
Sunday
Quantum bolted upright in bed. Her scream died in her throat the minute she gained consciousness. Staring straight ahead, she felt under her body to make sure she hadn’t lost the remainder of her mind.
Definitely a bed.
A bed, a quaint little room, and an open window with a fresh autumn breeze. Every surface was made from rustic wooden planks, and these were adorned with all manner of homey decorations. A vanity with a mirror stood against one wall opposite a solid dresser. Fresh linens, smelling of lavender, were neatly folded at the end of the bed. A cozy looking quilt, embroidered with images of flowers and fruit, lay draped across Quantum’s knees.
Moments ago the mint-coated mare had been quite certain ghosts of ponies she’d probably killed in a conflagration at Equestria’s capital city were about to exact their revenge on her. Now, a view from a nearby window showed a pleasant morning, a bright red barn, and trees full of ripe, juicy looking apples. Quantum’s stomach rumbled just looking at them. It had been some time since she’d seen fruit that wasn’t mashed into a brown, processed paste.
Quantum was shocked back to reality by a sudden clopping at the room’s only door. A high-pitched, immature voice muffled through the wood.
“Sis? You a’raight in there?”
Quantum scanned the room to make certain she was indeed the only pony present. The voice persisted.
“Ima come in, kay? Sorry if yer asleep or sumthin’…”
The door began to creak open. Eyes wide, Quantum immediately dove under the quilt, pulling it up over her head until there was room for nothing but an eye slit. This she peered through, half expecting a colorless shadow monster to bound into the room, cackling and tearing at her.
Instead, a sweet looking filly with no cutie mark trotted into the room. Far from frightening, the child had a lovely shade of amber to her lively eyes, a pale yellow coat, and a large pink bow tied in her reddish mane. Quantum relaxed a bit at the unassuming sight and closed her eye, faking sleep.
“Still sleepin’ huh?” The filly said, her eyelashes turned up with concern. “Ya poor thing. Flu ain’t no fun’t all. Granny Smith made up some’a her ‘get better’ soup. You ‘member that stuff? Smells a’fright, but sure makes ya feel all fuzzy inside.” The filly grinned, “Ah’ll bring ya up some later.”
Quantum said nothing, but she made the mistake of crackling her eyelid to see if the filly was still standing there. Yelping at the muzzle mere inches away from her own, she sat up in bed, letting the quilt fall away.
The filly’s smile never broke. She simply nodded approvingly. “Well, yer reflexes are lookin’ good anyway. Bet yer temp’s still up though. How ya feelin’?”
Quantum stared stupidly at the child until she made a face.
“You a’ight sis?”
“M-me…?” Quantum pointed at herself. The filly giggled.
“A’course you! I ain’t related to the wall, ya know!” The filly nabbed the quilt, and before Quantum could grab hold, yanked it clear off the bed. “Dunno what you were thinkin’, but wrappin’ yerself up in this ain’t good. ‘sides,” She giggled again, “There’s so many oranges on it we might just loose ya!”
Quantum looked down at her foreleg. Still a minty shade of blue green. She watched as the filly took to unfolding the linens and remaking the bed, with Quantum still in it.
“There now,” the filly said, “yer all wrapped up just enough. Ah should prolly get back downstairs. Big day ya know. But don’tcha worry – ah’ll come in and check on ya whenever I can!” She looked up at Quantum with big, innocent eyes. “Anythin’ ya need? Hungry?”
Quantum shook her head. Her empty stomach called her a liar.
The filly just nodded. “Ah’ll get ya somethin’. Back in two shakes!” With that, the child trotted out of the room at a ginger pace. Quantum was left alone in bed, too dumbfounded to move until the little one returned, balancing a bowl and saucer in her teeth and a folding tray on her back. In an instant, the tray was lying across quantum’s knees, and the steaming bowl was releasing its payload into her nostrils.
It smelled like a gallon of milk that had been sitting for a week. In the sun. In July. With cough medicine mixed into it. Quantum tried, and failed, to suppress a gacking noise.
The filly giggled again, as was apparently her habit. “Aw, don’tcha fret. You know’s well as ah do, it tastes better’n it smells! Here,” she picked up a spoon with her teeth, filled it with the curious brew, and offered it to Quantum, talking out of the side of her mouth (which only made her thick drawl that much more difficult to comprehend). “Yeeaw neef sum helf?”
Quantum looked at the spoon. Then the filly. Then the spoon again. Finally finding enough composure to speak, she opened her mouth – and instantly found it filled with the foulest smelling…tastiest soup/stew-like concoction she’d ever had the pleasure to sample. Abandoning decorum in favor of satisfying her hunger, she buried her muzzle shamelessly in the bowl and fed. She heard the filly’s laughter, but didn’t care enough to watch her mosey out of the room.
“You eat hearty!” She young one called. “Ah’ll come back later. Biggest days of the year comin’ up ‘round these parts!”
Eight minutes later Quantum came up for air. She was actually surprised to see nothing had changed – more than half of her was expecting to see cold cell walls, as had greeted her after every meal for the last three weeks. It took biting herself and then finally slipping out of bed to wander around the room before she was convinced the scene wasn’t either an illusion or delusion. The floors were solid. The walls were straight. The mirror was…
…wrong.
Quantum stopped cold. She batted her eyelids, smiled six different ways, and played peek-a-boo with herself. The image in the mirror matched her move for move. It was her reflection…but it also wasn’t. The mare in the mirror was orange, with emerald eyes to contrast Quantum’s sapphire ones. The image’s mane was longer and far better kept than Quantum’s sea green tones; blonde and free from frizz, split ends, or the general wildness borne of prison neglect. It took hiding throughout the room and then trying to jump out on the image several times before Quantum believed it wasn’t some sort of trick. She looked down at herself. Still minty fresh.
Bewildered, Quantum took to inspecting her surroundings in greater detail. The hallway was just as rustic as the bedroom – clearly this place was not downtown Fillydelphia. Photos on the walls ranged in age from sepia prints that looked a century old, to images containing the filly who had served her lunch…and the orange mare from the mirror. Quantum rubbed a bit of dust from a low-hanging frame containing a panoramic view of scores of ponies standing outside a barn, and read the inscription.
Apple Family Reunion – 2007
“Apple…?” She asked the air. The word was what she was missing. The identity of the orange mare with the cowfilly hat and the apple-based cutie mark hit her like a bale of hay to the back of the neck.
“Applejack?” She mused aloud. “One of the Keepers of the Elements of Harmony.” She tapped Applejack’s image with the tip of her hoof. “Princess Twilight introduced me to you at a festival in Canterlot. Is this your house? But…” she glanced around at the rest of the images on the wall, her analytical mind drawing immediate attention to a curious fact. “…but why no recent pictures? I barely recognized you at such a young age. If this is Applejack’s house—”
“What’sa matter sis?” A familiar voice rang out, “Fergit which cousin ya were on the way to the bathroom?”
Quantum blinked, slowly turning to find the same pale yellow filly standing at the top of a landing with stairs leading down. Quantum removed her hoof from the image of Applejack. “Uh…no? I mean no! I mean…” she looked around and then grinned sheepishly, “…where’s the bathroom again?”
The frustratingly-nameless filly made a face. Walking straight up to Quantum, she reached out and placed her hoof on the older mare’s forehead. Quantum flinched.
“Sis, you sound funny. Ah’ll help ye wash up.”
“No!” Quantum insisted. “I’m…just fine, thanks. I already, uh…went.”
The filly grinned and patted Quantum’s withers, “And ye didn’t even fall in! Great job sis! Now you need t’git back t’bed, kay?”
“I’m fine, really…”
The filly shook her head, “No ya ain’t, and big sis or not, you ain’t arguin’ with me. Y’nearly fergot where the bathroom was and yer talkin’ like yer fresh off the cart from Manehatten or some such place. Ah bet y’don’t even remember mah name right now.”
Quantum stared. The filly rolled her eyes.
“Applebloom!” She squealed impudently. “Yer sister! Geez, you really are sick…”
Quantum allowed herself to be led back into the bedroom. It was just as she had left it…with the addition of a burnt-orange pegasus stallion wearing a pocket protector and a horribly gaudy turtleneck, standing in the center of the room.
“Hal!” Quantum brightened, “Am I glad to see you!” Eyes widening, the pegasus made a feverish series of cut-throat gestures.
“Whut?” Applebloom glanced about the room, bewildered. “Sis, ah’m sorry I ain’t cleaned yer room up yet today, but there’s no need t’be rude ‘bout it. This ain’t Hell.”
“Hal!” Quantum repeated, brushing Applebloom off and approaching the pegasus, who was now waving his hooves in the air frantically. “You’ve got to help me! I jumped in the Accelerator…and well, I know I shouldn’t have, but…i-it’s a long story, and there was this white pony and he was really scary, but then there were shadows yelling at me, and I couldn’t get away, and my mom…is my mom okay? And now I’m here, and I’m Applejack, but I’m not Applejack, and…and what’s going on??”
The elaborately-dressed pegasus slapped himself in the forehead and sighed deeply. Applebloom spoke up.
“Sis, yer scarin’ me now. Lay down, or so help me ah’ll get Big McIntosh to hog tie ya into that bed.”
“Huh?” Quantum stood aside to give the little filly a good view of the new arrival. “No really, you don’t understand. This is Hal…he’s a friend of mine. I’m not your sister. Well,” she glanced in the mirror, a vexed Applejack glancing back, “I guess I somehow look like your sister to you, but I’m not orange, see?” Quantum held up her foreleg. Applebloom wore a somewhat less than bemused expression and pointed sharply at the bed.
“Bed. Raight now. Ah’m callin’ th’doctor, and y’all are goin’ into town to see him this afternoon.”
“B-but—”
“B-E-D.”
Meekly, the elder mare obeyed the little filly and slid into bed. When Applebloom finally left, Quantum rolled over and fixed the toasty-colored pegasus with a fiery gaze.
“What, you couldn’t say hello? Are you invisible or something?”
Hal sniffed and rubbed his muzzle with a hoof. “As a matter of fact, yes I am. Good job, now she thinks you’re coltcrap crazy. And what’s that smell? It’s making me want to sneeze.”
Quantum indicated the remnants of lunch on the nightstand. “Granny’s ‘get better’ soup. Tastes better than it smells. And I call BS. I can see you just fine.”
Hal sat his ample rump down on a hope chest and whipped a device that somewhat resembled a calculator out from his pocket protector, examining it in lieu of eye contact. “Yes, but you’re the only one. I’m not actually here. I’m a projection from the Accelerator’s holo-matrix.” He made a show out of reaching directly through the wall, “Remember the failsafe routines? If something goes wrong, we have a way of seeing firsthoof what sort of trouble a dimensional traveling pony is in without having to risk anypony else.”
Quantum bapped herself. “Right, right…I remember now. The system scans the traveler’s molecular structure and projects an image attuned to that structure, so only the traveler can perceive the hologram.”
“There ya go.”
Quantum rolled over in bed. “So something went wrong, huh?”
“Are you kidding?” Hal replied, bapping at his device with the tip of a hoof, “it would take far less time telling you what went right. What in Equestria were you thinking? We hadn’t even tested the Accelerator yet. It could just as easily have torn your atoms apart and scattered them across half the continent. Do you have a deathwish?”
Wordlessly, Quantum nodded. For a time, the sound in the room was reduced to only the soprano tinkling of a tiny windchime by the windowsill. Hal spoke first.
“You still have friends, you know. Me and Tissy.”
“Then you’re both crazy,” Quantum accused. “All you have to do is rig the pattern enhancers to dissipate and hit the recall control. Then the world will be rid of one less criminal psychopath.”
“Do you like hurting ponies?”
Quantum sat up in bed and fixed Hal with a withering glare. “What in Starswirl’s beard is that supposed to mean? Of course not!”
“Then you’re not a criminal psychopath,” Hal returned. “As a matter of fact, I’m willing to bet you didn’t even set that bomb.”
“I’ll take that bet, since I was kinda there when it happened.”
Hal treated lightly. “Cutie…why?”
“Because I love my mother,” Quantum replied. “I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t expect anypony to understand. I interpret the magic of friendship in my own way and I’m not going to justify it to you. Now are you going to tell me how it’s possible for the Accelerator to make me appear to everypony as though I’m somepony else?”
Hal let the subject drop. As he tapped keys on his device, it lit up in myriad bright colors, and beep-booping noises could be heard. “Still working on that one. But I can tell you one thing. While you’re here, you can make the best of it.”
Quantum raised her brow. Hal kept tapping.
“Tissy says you not only broke the dimensional barrier, you broke the time barrier. Congrats. It’s 2008 right now, and you’re on a farm in Ponyville called Sweet Apple Acres.”
“Great. I love cider.”
“Not what I meant.” Hal examined his device closely, “Tissy managed to triangulate this location in spacetime with a series of temporal causality strings. Basically she can garner a decent idea of what could happen here in the future, based on the actions you take now.”
Exasperation was clear on Quantum’s face. “She did what? That’s impossible.”
“She’s Tissy.”
“Hal,” Quantum shook her head, “Tissy once tried to fuel the Accelerator with a mixture of Uranium-234 and a rutabaga. It blew up.”
Hal shrugged. “We rebuilt it. And it was two rutabagas. You’re forgetting, it actually worked for 6.58 seconds. Cutie, you and I are smart. Tissy’s a savant. To be that brilliant, it’s practically a requirement to be six or seven quarks short of a quasar. Now do you actually want to know how you can make the best out of being here?”
Quantum nodded, “Why not I guess?”
Hal hesitated, his expression softening. “Applejack has the flu. The next three days are harvest time on this farm, and Sweet Apple Acres is a critical supplier to all the major cities of Equestria. Right now, other than you, there’s a filly, an aged nag, and a single draft pony living here. Without Applejack, there’s a—” he checked his screen, “…a sixty-seven percent chance that the harvest will fail. That sets off the apple famine of 2009, which not only leads to starvation and mass hysteria, but causes Twilight Sparkle to be called away to other duties the following year. She never comes to Ponyville. No Elements of Harmony. See where I’m going with this? Oh, and Tissy says there’s another twelve percent chance on top of that the earth ponies will try to cover it up by blaming the pegasi for bad weather conditions, who in turn will blame the unicorns for not finding a way to magic the harvest into completion, and that,” Hal paused to take a breath, “will pretty much rip apart society as we know it and plunge us back into the dark ages. Charming, isn’t it?”
Quantum looked unconvinced. “Come on…all of that because one pony got sick?”
“Ever heard of Chaos theory?” Hal retorted.
“Well, I feel fine. So I guess I could go buck some apples or something.”
Hal chuckled dryly. “Yeah, like you know a thing about apple-bucking that’s going to put you on par with the one pony in Equestria that’s the most famous for the skill. Besides, we have no idea how long you’ll remain at this point in spacetime. If you go out there and start working the fields, you might vault away. Tissy says there’s an eighty-nine percent chance that Applejack will stick it out if placed in a position like that…and then she’ll die from overexertion.”
Quantum’s cocky grin faded. “So...where is Applejack now?”
“No idea. Tissy has a theory about you that might help answer both questions though. The most likely scenario is that the Accelerator malfunctioned by accelerating your molecules too much. You reached the point where you could break the spacetime barrier, but then you went beyond it. Your entire body basically became a tuning rod for the flow of dimensions. We can’t know what effect that will have, but it does mean that there’s a good chance that you’ll just poof away from here and end up at some other random point in a different time, or a different reality altogether. We can’t even be certain the events happening in the here and now are even a part of our own timestream, or would have any effect on it. That molecular attunement means that, at least while you’re vaulting, you travel through spacetime until your form latches onto an anchor in the form of stable molecules similar to you own – in other words, another pony. You then phase into that pony’s life, and assume control of it until the tide goes out and you’re pulled away again. The host consciousness probably just gets repressed. Like being possessed by a ghost or something. And before you ask, with your molecules in such an unstable condition, just bopping the recall control is almost guaranteed to kill you.”
Quantum could feel her eyeballs spinning. “Tissy has been busy.”
Hal nodded. “We have no idea if this reality is or own, or can affect our own. My suggestion? Do something about it anyway. If you find a way to change the events Tissy’s matrix is predicting and it turns out they made no difference either way, we lose nothing. If you don’t do anything and this is our reality, a whole mess of ponies are going to suffer. The same if it’s somepony else’s reality.”
“Ponies have already suffered because of me,” Quantum mumbled.
“If that’s really true,” Hal shot back, “then here’s your chance to atone for it.”
Quantum shrank. The white pony. The shadows. Is this what they meant? If she failed here…what would happen?
“So are you in?”
The minty mare paused for a long time. Finally, she nodded. “Let’s do this.”
Hal grinned. “Sit tight. I’ll see what else I can find out. Meanwhile, play along. Be the best hayseed you can be, look sick, keep your eyes and ears peeled for a solution, claim you were delirious with fever a few minutes ago, and for Celestia’s sake, learn bumpkin-talk. You sound ridiculous. Slur your vowels, say ‘y’all’ a lot, and make up half a dozen emergency farm metaphors.”
Hal pressed a button on his control, and a rectangle full of white light opened behind him. Quantum stopped him before he stepped through it.
“…how are you even allowed to help me? No matter what you think of me, the law still says I’m an enemy of the state. Princess Celestia would never allow aiding and abetting a—”
“Princess Celestia doesn’t know. Princess Twilight does.”
Quantum watched her friend step through the pane of rectangular light. It swung closed like a door, erasing itself from existence. She was alone again.
The breeze felt a little chilly.