March 15, 20238 (A.D.?)
Atlaminitis
Thursday
Quantum erupted in a fit of coughing. Her stomach felt like a group of colts were playing kickball with it, and she was pretty sure the home team scored nine goals into her intestines before the violent spinning sensation all around her finally began to subside.
When the dizziness passed and she was finally able to remove her hoofs from her temples and open her eyes, she found that nothing was as it had been. Sweet Apple Acres, its residents, Ponyville…they weren’t just gone. It was like none of them had ever existed. After confirming the cowfilly hat was no longer on her head, she picked up her hooves and stamped about the concrete below her a few times, sending clacking noises echoing throughout the empty room she was standing in. A rectangular skylight opened to the night like an eye, sending in a soft pattern of starlight that clung coyly to objects around her. Checking to make sure her glasses were still on her muzzle and the pouch Tissy had constructed for her was still wrapped securely around her left foreleg, Quantum carefully picked her way through a pile of something that resembled masonry debris and clambered about, trying to make sense of her new environment.
What she found fascinated her scientific mind in ways she could only dream about.
The objects themselves were rather mundane – chairs, some overturned, lay beneath piles of hastily discarded electronics under enough desks to suggest an office environment. Lighting her way with her horn, Quantum sifted one of the thin pieces of polymer on the floor out from its fellows and prodded it with her hoof. It came to life beneath her, and she was astounded to find herself staring at a hoofheld computer screen, with a logo she didn’t recognize on it. A small, snakelike appendage slowly rose from the device and lazily swung in midair before her face. It had no discernible eyes, yet it seemed to be watching her. For all intents and purposes, it looked like a tiny stereo jack. Quantum gasped.
“Mnemonics?” She reasoned aloud. “Automatic response to user input…interfaces directly with the brain, but…” she pondered, dissertating to herself, “…the user would have to have a jack-in port wired directly to their cerebral cortex, plus their brain itself would have to be reengineered to be compatible with the bandwidth. The advancements in medical science alone would have to be colossal to even attempt something like this. Hoofington Wells wrote a book about it once, but it was all just wild speculation. At the Academy it would be so much fiction that it would get you laughed right off campus…”
The minty mare, her coat dyed blue by the midnight, poked around to a few more of the little computers, watching as each one she accessed tried in vain, like a leech, to find a place in her head to bury itself.
“Sorry little ones,” she smirked, “but I don’t have the right kind of hole in my head, and even if I did, I’m betting you wouldn’t like the taste of my neurons.” As she thought about her own words, her geeky smile faded. “But…but the ethics behind this…it would be like taking an old nag’s brain out of their body and plugging it into a filly’s skull. They’d have to be starting ponies off as foals just to avoid rejection...”
Quantum shook her head and tried to dismiss the unpleasant image, but a piece of it stubbornly remained, like mildew on the tile walls of her mind. Before she gave up playing with her newfound toys to turn her attention to where she was, she nabbed one of the flat little tablet-like devices with her teeth and slid it into her pouch.
The large, warehouse-style room was more or less intact, but there were signs of structural damage. Quantum found herself swallowing as she approached the slightly cracked, glass double doors that looked like a main entrance. There was a soft pink light pulsing rapidly on the other side. She couldn’t make out its source, but just standing around in one place certainly wasn’t doing her any good. Hesitantly she nosed at the door. It opened easily.
Having made the acquaintance of far too many science-fiction novels in her brief life, Quantum half expected to find herself cantering directly into a warped, destroyed metropolis infested with seven-story tall pony-eating plants from outer space, giant mutant cockroaches that had eradicated ponykind, or hundreds of victims of a wasting disease bent upon consuming her flesh. She relaxed and berated her runaway imagination when she found herself standing on a quiet city street. The pink light was emanating from a neon sign across the street that was advertising…something. She squinted at the image, trying to discern what the dizzy looking pegasus in the picture was doing, hooked up to so many strange devices all at once. Was it some form of entertainment? Transportation? Therapy? Stimulation?
As she thought on it, her eyes wandered down to a shop window that had clearly been broken on purpose. Similar bits and pieces of damage could be found all over the street – broken glass, uprooted vegetation, graffiti, and so forth. There was an unlit stone sign arcing above the street in the pattern of an arch with a colored keystone in the top of it. Quantum squinted and read.
Borough of Atlaminitis – Erected in Memoriam of Mayor Derby Downs, Hearth’s Burning, 20399
Quantum blinked. Hard.
“Twenty thirty-nine…nine?” A cold shiver ran down her spine, “Hearth’s…burning? Atlaminitis?” Where—when in Equestria was she? And for that matter, where were all the ponies? Where were all the flying space car contraptions? A shiver emerged from Quantum’s synapses and shot warily down her spine. Something wasn’t right. She glanced up and down the gagged street, looking for giant cockroaches or evil brains from dimension X.
“Cutie?”
“GAHHH!”
Quantum nearly leapt out of her coat when she came face to face with a hovering, gawking Hal.
“D-don’t do that to me ever again!” She whined, trying to tamp her heart back down in her chest. “What in Equestria is wrong with you? Mares slap stallions in the face for less than that!”
Hal held up his hooves but didn’t look apologetic. “Cutie, we don’t have time for you to protect your girlish privacy. You need to get out of here.”
The cryptic statement eroded Quantum’s anger back into worry. “Why? Don’t just say scary things like that out of the blue with no explanation. I’m not—” she swallowed, “I’m not really about to get eaten by giant mutant space slugs, am I?”
“What?” Hal shook his head, “Forget it, I don’t want to know.” Hurriedly he whipped out his control device and punched up a sequence of colors. “Long story short – Tissy has no idea what year this is, but the guess is that it’s so far in the future that the Equestrian nation we once knew has probably reorganized itself so many times, we wouldn’t recognize any of it. We don’t have time to figure out details. Your name is…no, forget that too. It doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that there’s a colt somewhere in this city named Mane Saiah. White coat. You need to find him right now and get the hell out of this place. That’s all we know.”
“That’s all you know?” Quantum repeated sarcastically waving a dramatic hoof about. “This city looks pretty huge to me, and it’s like a bazillion gashmillion years in the future! For all I know ponies don’t even walk on the ground anymore! How am I supposed to do that? How much time do I have? And for that matter, why is it so critical that I do this right now?” Quantum wanted to add the one very good reason she could think of – that dozens of evil looking black monster ponies were thirsting for her undying soul (or whatever it is they were doing), but she thought this a bad time to try to explain her encounter with the white pony to Hal.
The toasty orange pegasus opened his mouth to explain, but he was cut off by a sight that both of the classmates noticed at the same time. A figure was standing at the mouth of an alley. Its face was partially obscured by a heavy green cloak, but its markings clearly identified it as a zebra. The zebra just…stood there, staring at Quantum, stoic and solid as if birthed from the concrete sidewalk.
Hal beeped and booped away. “Tissy’s got nothing for an ID, and I don’t like this. Leave him—her—whatever alone and let me tell you why you need to get out of here right n—”
“Excuse me!” Quantum was already trotting across the street. “Um, excuse me, but I’m kind of in a pickle here, and I could really use some help. It’s my, uh…it’s my nephew.” She stopped in the middle of the street and held her hoof out, “about yay tall? White coat? You see, we got separated and I’m just so worried. Do you know if there’s a shelter or something nearby, or any place I could ask about—”
“Beware!” The zebra shouted.
“Ex…excuse me?”
The zebra threw back its hood. Beneath was the shattered visage of a striped pony with a shredded mane and a quarter of its head, including one eye, replaced entirely by cybernetics. The zebra’s red mechanical eye shrank and expanded with the perspective of everything it looked at. “Beware the Ides of March! Time was never meant to flow on for so long! The end comes!”
With that, the zebra turned and fled down the alley at a full gallop. Hal spoke before Quantum had any time to react.
“Dammit!” He hissed, “Cutie, I warned you! Run!”
“Huh--?”
Quantum Trotts Lulamoon, daughter of Trixie Lulamoon and now unwilling dimensional traveler, turned around to see what was the matter. The sheer, terrifying impossibility of the sight sent all her senses up to a screaming high alert. Sputtering and flailing, she turned from the office building and galloped madly, nearly tripping more than once in her maddened dash to get away. Behind her, a massive wall of water, stretching to the horizon and easily dwarfing the tallest skyscrapers by two or three times was barreling down on her, blotting out the moon and engulfing everything in its path; obliterating structures as a foal might knock over a sandcastle. Hal pounded his wings in a desperate bid to catch up.
“You have to find Mane Saiah and get away from here!” Hal shouted at the top of his lungs just to be heard at all above the crashing, civilization-ending waves.
“Coltcrap crazy!” Quantum shouted through moments of white hot terror. “Do I look like an eight thousand hoof tall, sixteen mile wide, five hundred hoof thick concrete wall to you!? Or maybe you think I’m faster than a speeding Wonderbolt!? I’m gonna die! Oh Celestia, I’m gonna die!!”
“Calm down!” Hal shouted indignantly. He opened his mouth to yell his vocal chords raw again, but the minty mare shut him down.
“Why should I even care what happens here!?” Quantum screeched, running for her life. “Even if this is our reality, nothing that happens here will affect us, our grandfoals, their grandfoals, or their great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandfoals!” Panting desperately, she glanced at Hal as long as she could before narrowly avoiding a streetsign in her path. “What happens to me if the host pony dies? Tell me Tissy has a theory on that!”
Hal sped along, not even bothering to check his device. “Hard to say,” he shouted, “but if the anchor supporting your unstable molecular structure suddenly fails, well…you do the math!”
“Hit the recall!” Quantum screamed, glancing back only long enough to see the earthshattering tsunami gaining fast.
“What?”
“For Celestia’s sake,” Quantum fixed her classmate with pleading eyes, “hit the recall switch! Pull me back home! I’m sorry for whoever’s body I’m in, but you know they can’t be saved!”
“I can’t do that!” Hal shouted. “You’re too unstable! The transition would kill you!”
Quantum sniffed. The white pony…the shadow ponies…what good were their bargains if she died anyway? Was this whole thing some sort of sick joke? Or…did she deserve it from the beginning? Blubbering, she shouted, “I’m gonna die either way! At least let me do it at home!!”
Hal said nothing. Quantum’s hysterical shouting continued.
“Hal, please! You’re my friend, right!? Maybe I deserve to die like this for what happened back home, but…I…I’m scared! Help me!”
Hal sped along, heedless of the obstacles he was sailing right through. He retrieved the control device from his pocket protector and glanced back at the fast approaching Everest of water. No pony alive had a chance of getting away from such a derisive death by drowning, though the lethal impact would make that irrelevant. Hal doubted even the combined magic of all Equestria’s princesses and the elemental Keepers could waylay such an extinction-level event. His hoof shaking, he slowly reached out to the single, deep vermillion button that would trigger the Accelerator’s recall function, which was designed to immediately return a dimensional traveler to the point of origin in case of emergency. Justifications went rocketing through his mind:
It’s not a guarantee she’ll die on the return trip
She’ll definitely die here
She’s my friend…I have to do something
Hal’s hoof brushed against the button. Swallowing against a thickness in his throat that wasn’t there a moment ago, he applied pressure until a flicker of movement caught his eye. Peering overtop of his device, his gaze came to rest on a fast moving colt…with a white coat. Removing his hoof from the recall control, he began booping away at speed.
“Cutie!” Hal practically laughed, “That’s him! That’s Mane Saiah!”
Quantum, who hadn’t noticed the young pony just because she was too busy being terrified, suddenly brought him into focus. He was a scrawny thing – even moreso than she was, with a scraggly albino mane and a slight pinkness under his ears. He looked old enough to have a cutie mark, but there was nothing present on either of his flanks. Slowly but surely, she found she was running him down.
“What’s so special about him!?” She shouted.
Hal beeped and booped. The water closed in. A pulverized hotel drowned out his gasp, but his eyes gave away the shock.
“Cutie!” Hal bellowed, “Tissy says isn’t the future! It’s the past! Twenty millennia in the past! A previous civilization beyond the limits of our archaeology! What happens could affect us after all! Say ‘Mane Saiah’ five times fast!”
Quantum wriggled her nose. “Mane Saiah….maynesiaha? Mainsaeya? Messainiah? Mess….Messiah?”
Hal stared, “You and I have both learned to trust Tissy’s instincts, and I for one have never seen her like this…” He flew through a building and kept his eyes on the retreating, faceless colt. “Cutie…try. Just try!”
Quantum favored the wall of water with one more glance. In another minute it would be nipping at her heels. Her heart was throbbing in her chest and she was nearing the point of exhaustion. If the water didn’t overwhelm her in the next few blocks, her need for oxygen would. Death was a certainty. Saving the colorless little colt with the ecclesiastical name was beyond impossible.
The minty mare gritted her teeth and forced her limbs into fifth gear, blotting out the pain in her knees. When she was upon the retreating colt, she did the only thing she could think of – adrenaline coursing through her veins, she nabbed his withers with her teeth and whipped her neck as hard as she could. Never seeing his face, she felt the satisfying weight of the…surprisingly light colt, on her back. She then narrowed her eyes and charged ahead, determined to run until either her heart exploded, or the sea took them both.
“And you’re so sure you want to die!” Hal called cheerfully.
Ignoring the quip, Quantum beat the colt’s lethargic pace and felt proud of the fact that she’d managed to save his life – or at least prolong it for a few more terse seconds. Her eyes now wet with tears, she began to feel spray dribbling over her rump and back.
“Hal…if you’re not going to press that button, then…please just get out of here,” Quantum whined through strained panting. “I don’t want you to see me die like this…”
The mint-coated mare closed her eyes tightly. It made no difference if she ran into anything at this point. She had done her best - If this was what the shadow-tribunal wanted from her, there was no way to stop it from happening. She wondered if she would drown, or if the force of the water would pulverize her bones into powder so fast that she wouldn’t even feel it.
The weight on Quantum’s back disappeared. She looked up.
Hovering a few hooves above her, keeping an easy pace, was a creature that resembled a pegasus. Quantum had to blink several times until she was sure of what she was looking at. The being was still a pony, but much of its body had been replaced by cybernetic parts that so closely mimicked the real thing, Quantum couldn’t help but feel inadequate for the technological development of her own entire society. The pegasus was wearing a helmet and uniform in a drab olive color, with an insignia on the foreleg that Quantum didn’t recognize. The beating of his wings was augmented by a large tank-like device on his back, that was spitting out orange exhaust fire as he sped along. The white colt was in the grasp of the pegasus, and the flyer was holding onto the dead weight as though it were nothing.
Quantum pleaded to the being with her eyes, hoping it might understand and dive in to help. Instead, it arced its body up and began to climb into the oddly serene stars of the night sky. Before it left her view, the pegasus saluted staunchly. Its expression was noble and apologetic. A single tear traced its brown-grey cheek.
“Cutie,” Hal shouted from somewhere unknown. “The pony you are…Tissy says this pony has a ninety-nine point five three four percent chance of dying sometime in the next sixteen seconds, increasing by point zero one eight percent every second thereafter. I…if you really want me to hit the recall, I guess…I guess…”
Quantum heard no more. Her lungs were past their ability to force oxygen into her starving bloodstream. Stumbling, her hoof caught a crack in the street and sent her spiraling out of control, until her chin slammed into the ground. There was no time to feel pain. There was no time to breathe.
An ancient civilization ceased to exist.