//------------------------------// // Chapter 46: August 11 // Story: The Last Pony on Earth // by Starscribe //------------------------------// August 11, 2015 Dear Diary, I was worried that travel might’ve been difficult, since now a full three months have gone by, but I’m happy to say things have been relatively simple so far. As we got further north, we left the temperature extremes of the south, and diesel fuel here seems to be in good shape (we’re still on borrowed time, but at least we’ve got a little left). That meant we did things pretty much the same these last few days. Cloudy woke up earliest, did her animal stuff, loaded ‘em back into a freshly-swept truck with animal feed to eat during the drive. We set off about ten, and drive until dark, stopping for lunch to refuel in whatever small town looks good. Stayed mostly on the highway otherwise, so we didn’t see many signs of other survivors. Some fires at night, some light. A few scattered radio transmissions here and there. Again though, we weren’t really going out of our way to find other ponies right now. Chances are they already had stability in some form by now if they were still alive. Suggesting anypony uproot themselves to travel with us to set up a new city in the middle of nowhere only a few months before winter seems pretty silly. Ultimately we know we're going to need way more ponies than we have now. A single family alone can barely do everything they need to survive, let alone maintain the level of wealth and stability of an industrialized society. Our number estimates for how many ponies it might take to get something like the old level of technology back don't look good for us, and they look even worse for the HPI. It seems like 500 people aren't enough to do anything more than keep the species alive, and maybe not even that. That might be enough if it wasn't for the fact that the earth is now brimming with magic that would scour their souls from their bodies if it could. Neanderthal tech just won't cut it to keep the HPI alive. I wonder how many years it will take to have enough ponies to help. Luna explained that the return of our missing population was an exponential curve, with very few in the early years and many more in the later ones. Every year should have more people than the ones before it. Let's do some simple math, diary. 7 billion people / 10,000 years = 700,000 people would reappear each year if it was linear. Only most of them don't live in North America, only about 5% of them do. That means of the 700,000, 35,000 appear here each year. 95.9 of them would be reappearing each and every day, somewhere. Probably lots of them in the cities. I hope none of them show up in LA. It pretty much sucks there right now. We're going to have to think of a gathering system, at least in the short term. Some way to attract ponies from all over the country. I wish it was easier to cross the ocean, or we could look at Europe, Africa, Asia, those places... but I guess we'd have to learn lots of different languages. What about South America? I suppose the ponies there might wonder why we don't want to come down and live with them. Because it's hot and there are too many damn mosquitoes, that's why! Princess Luna seemed to indicate that ponies would be coming much slower than this to start. I wonder just how true it is. Too bad we don't know exactly where all the ponies were that Luna expected would still be here. She thought there'd be enough of us to have cities! Didn’t happen to run into anypony on the roads, which makes sense. Adrian’s been to several different colonies, and by his estimates, there might be 1000 ponies between the US and Canada, about half of which have collected into little groups. It’s a sorry story he has to tell, though not one we didn’t expect. Most people living today in the modern world just don’t have the skills to provide for themselves. Our society had grown so specialized and advanced that our short lifetimes wouldn’t have been enough to learn everything, even if all knowledge acquisition ceased completely for the species while we lived. Many skills required specialized talents that were rare in the population. What all this means is that most of the “colonies” have already started to regress in some ways, at least as far as Adrian explained. Those in areas without well-water or rivers had to migrate to those that did, or else survive on bottled water and be unable to bathe. Many have started learning the hard way that even huge underground lakes of gasoline (gas stations) are going to stop running their vehicles and generators long before they exhaust the fuel itself. Plumbing, he says, is rarely still working, and in many places ponies are boiling water to drink and bathing in rivers and ponds. The exception seems to be those who found RVs, since these vehicles have their own self-contained grids, and water can be poured in using a funnel if you’re patient enough. Given there are so few survivors, he thinks finding trailers or RVs has been a very common strategy. If this is true, we’ll have to keep it in mind for our colony. It may end up starting as a glorified trailer park, filled with farm animals. Alas, the ignoble fate of man. Not all of the colonies were having so much trouble, though. He apparently recently left behind a colony down in Bastrop, Texas that seemed to be doing okay, though he said something about them not sticking around for more than a few more months. Had some choice things to say about some of its members, but I’ll not buy into gossip. They probably won’t want to uproot themselves. Hell, we didn’t until the fire took our city away. We might have got to next year and decided to become a desert people instead. Animals and humans have been doing it before, it wouldn’t have been impossible for us. Just have to change our habits a bit. Grow some different crops. But we didn’t. Adrian said that actual starvation was fairly rare, and he never encountered a single pony who had or heard stories of it happening (but if they’d been all alone and eaten by animals, who would’ve known?). I’ve learned from Oliver that we can eat and even enjoy many grasses and shrubs, and Adrian thinks ponies only would’ve really been in danger in the really dry areas. Haven’t had a winter yet, at least not in the United States. Maybe some of us will freeze when that happens. The biggest news from Adrian is that somebody else discovered what “we” did with the satellite network! He discovered his phone was still working, and that it was no longer charging him. So he played around, and set up a few more. He’s been leaving them in every colony he visits, even the ones without electricity. Maybe five hundred ponies total are in settlements with access to the phones, and can use them to communicate. With the HPI keeping things working, we should have at least a few years with some coverage, so long as everypony doesn’t insist on a phone of their own and clog the lines. Called the HPI today, when we stopped to let the animals out and to refuel. Told them I’d learned enough that I could never tell them over the phone. They wouldn’t believe me. Dr. Clark agreed to have someone waiting for us in town when we arrive. Paris, Illinois. Their aircraft confirmed it was empty and told us so, which was thoughtful. We probably would’ve picked a different town if this one already had ponies living there. It wouldn’t feel right driving in and claiming all their stuff. Nor would it have been safe. They could all have guns. Tomorrow we’ll arrive. Tomorrow I’ll share my unbelievable story with the last humans on earth, and we’ll lay the foundations for a colony of some of its former humans. Tomorrow we’ll be somewhere permanent, where we can farm and grow and hopefully prevent a slide back into subsistence. I told Luna that I wanted the burden of protecting the human legacy. For now, I think that means protecting as many of the former humans as possible. Once there are enough others to focus on the needs of survival, I’ll start worrying about the lost knowledge. Maybe I can turn the saddlebags into storage for books and artifacts I could take with me even in the event of a disaster, once we’ve got all the Equestrian books out and onto shelves for ponies to read. I noticed something interesting today, while I was glancing back at some of my old entries: I may've acquired a photographic memory. I flipped through the journal before going on my usual refuel run tonight, and while I was doing the mind-numbing work of pumping fuel into each truck, I went back to reading the journal without even realizing what I was doing. I could still see the pages in my mind, sketches and all! This can't be normal, can it? I've never had a photographic memory before! Whatever. That's about the least abnormal thing about whatever the Princesses of Equestria did to me. Tomorrow, our new home. And peace, at least for a while. —Lonely Day Note: I probably should've drawn Adrian yesterday, but I was just so excited for my cutie mark! I drew him today. He's always got his left wing in that wrap. I wonder if I should ask why...