“Any sufficiently advanced illusion is indistinguishable from reality.”
Cobalt finished his countdown and recorded the experiment's start time as exactly five o’clock. Everypony watched Twilight and the helmet closely, expecting anything except what happened.
Before the fifth tone of the clock’s bell, Twilight lifted the helmet off of her head. Nothing had happened. The assistants slouched in defeat and Blue Moon grinned.
“Ha, just as I thought,” he said. “I knew your crazy plan had no—”
Twilight interrupted him, “What time is it? What day is it?! Tell me!” She was frantic as she looked around. She turned to the corner of the lab where the Object sat and emitted its standard blue glow. Her jaw fell.
Blue Moon scoffed and rolled his eyes, “It’s Monday, of course. The day of your failed helmet experiment. You literally just put the helmet on then took it back off.”
“No I didn’t. No, this doesn’t make any sense. No, no, no,” Twilight’s legs gave out and she collapsed to the floor. The helmet rolled away.
“Calm down, Twilight,” Cobalt said. He put a hoof on Twilight’s shoulder but she pushed him back.
“I was just there! I was at a restaurant. I lifted my hooves and…” She scrambled across the floor and grabbed the helmet with both hooves. “I put this on a week ago.” Twilight held it with her magic and stood up. “Exactly a week ago…”
The other ponies looked on in confusion as Twilight continued with conviction in her voice, “As soon as I put the helmet on, the Object came to life. The runes turned red and they shifted and slid around its surface, faster and faster. Its sides folded inward again and again. It folded into itself until there was nothing left. It was gone. There were no signs of it or the helmet anywhere.”
She pointed a hoof at the others. “You all saw it. We all assumed that I had triggered some sort of self-destruct function. We had to abandon the research. I was devastated. I spent the week in Canterlot trying to distract myself from my failure. Visiting family, shopping, nothing of note…”
“On the seventh day, while I was eating dinner in the market, my hooves moved on their own as if to remove a hat, but I wasn’t wearing one.” Twilight stared into the distance for a moment. “And then I was here.”
Ginseng Rose raised a hoof. “Maybe it was another dream?”
Twilight turned to her. Ginseng cowered in the intensity of Twilight’s glare.
“No. Not a dream. That was a vision. I’ve just seen seven days into the future.”
Like a dream, Twilight’s memories of the vision faded quickly. She rushed to document as much as possible before it was lost. She filled page after page with notes of anything she could remember, no matter how trivial.
After Twilight tossed a page aside, the assistants cross-checked it with known scheduled events.
“A concert in the open air theatre on Thursday,” Ginseng read off.
“That’s been scheduled for weeks. She could have seen a flier for it and recalled it subconsciously,” Cobalt Thorn said.
She read the next line, “A porter strike at the train station on Friday?”
Cobalt scanned a corkboard covered with newspapers and event fliers, then said “I can’t find anything about that. Put that in the ‘promising’ column.”
Turquoise Star nodded and wrote ‘Porter Strike on Fri’ on the chalkboard.
Blue Moon stomped through the room. “Do you seriously believe this nonsense? Her experiment failed and now she’s got you chasing phantoms!” At the door he turned back and added, “Send for me when you’ve come back to reality.”
The others continued unfazed by Blue Moon’s typical temper.
“Hey, Turq! It says here that you try out for the Royal Guard!”
“What?” Turquoise grabbed the note from her with his magic. “Well, I guess that actually was my plan if I didn’t get this research gig.”
“Half the class has the Guard as their plan B. And we can’t verify that one, since the Object still exists in this timeline.”
“And he’s heard the prophecy. It’s tainted now!” Cobalt chimed in.
Twilight and her assistants continued late into the night, until Twilight couldn’t recall anything else about her week.
Twilight pulled Turquoise, Ginseng, and Cobalt into a group hug as they left the lab. “Thank you all so much for the help tonight. I realize this has been… unorthodox, but I think we’re really on to something here.”
For the rest of the week, the helmet was secured in the lab in a glass display case. Twilight didn’t dare use it again until she could compare her previous vision’s predictions to reality.
Instead, all four researchers spent their time doing fieldwork in Canterlot. Twilight lectured the others before they set out, “Treat this like a lab experiment: our goal is to observe, not affect. Any deviation could invalidate the predictions.” The three assistants worked to verify Twilight’s larger predictions while Twilight tried to mimic her schedule from her vision week. She wanted to be certain she’d to be in the same places at the same times.
After the first day, Twilight was exhausted. “Trying to follow your own hoofsteps is surprisingly stressful,” she told Ginseng as they lounged on the lab’s large couch, “and I hate that I won’t know if I messed something up until much later, if at all.”
“Don’t worry about it too much, Twilight,” she replied. “Most predictions about us are going to be way off anyway. The cancellation of the project in the vision is just too different from reality.”
Twilight sighed. “That’s true. We’ll have to think up a strategy for the next time I use the helmet. Maybe we can mitigate that somehow. Let me know if you have any ideas.”
Cobalt spun himself in circles on an office chair. “Well, did today’s predictions pan out at least?”
Twilight nodded. “I guess so. I saw ponies doing the same things and saying the same things as in the vision. My memory of the vision isn’t very clear anymore, so it was like an overpowering sense of deja vu all day long.”
The next day, the first of Twilight’s larger predictions took place: an axle snapped on a cart carrying hundreds of gallons of milk and the spilled milk flooded an intersection. It delayed normal traffic for over an hour. That evening, back in the lab, the team celebrated the success over some cider.
Turquoise raised his mug. “To knowing the future!”
Ginseng raised her own. “And to the Object!”
Blue Moon entered the room and it fell silent. His stern glare passed over everypony, then he said, “Don’t stop your celebration on my account. Even I can tell that that was no coincidence today.” He approached the couch and sat down between Ginseng and Cobalt. “Now pass me some cider, Twilight Sparkle. Maybe it can help me accept your impossible visions.”
Ginseng beamed, already tipsy from the drink, “Welcome back, Blue Moon! I knew there was a big softie under that gruff surface.”
The five ponies drank and talked for hours. It turns out that Blue Moon was quite a storyteller once he got started.
“Tell us more about the Bellu tribe, Blue Moon. Did they actually encase their dead in molten gold?” Turquoise Star asked.
“As a matter of fact they did, but only their most revered got real gold. However, that’s a story for another time. We need to get some sleep if we’re going to resume fieldwork on time tomorrow.”
The rest of the week played out more or less as expected. The open-air concert and porter strike happened on cue, as did numerous other minor predictions. Only a few of Twilight’s predictions failed to occur. The team attributed this to unavoidable differences in earlier events like the Object’s disappearance.
On the last day of the prophecy, Twilight returned to the same restaurant and ordered the same meal from the same waiter. As she finished the last bite, she frowned. Her stomach clenched and her breath quickened. She felt exposed and vulnerable. The sense of safety and reliability that had come from the vision was gone.
For the first time in a week, her future was unknown.
Twilight wanted that safety back. She needed to know what was coming.
“Think of all the opportunities I’m missing out on,” she muttered under her breath. “It would be reckless to not use the helmet again.”
She threw a few bits on the table and galloped back to the lab.