September 19, 2015
Dear Journal,
BREAKTHROUGH!
Yes, I did take the time to write that in capital letters, despite the fact I haven’t had hands for half a year and it took extra time. No, I didn’t rip through the page with my pen this time, ‘cuz I’ve become such an amazing BAWSS.
You might ask what the breakthrough is, because that would be a very sensible thing to wonder about. It has to do with the radio, because we knew that was going to be how we met people. We have ourselves a pretty nice rig now, even if it’s nothing near as nice as what they must be running out of the CMC for a signal to reach all this way.
We’ve been announcing our intentions to found a colony here, as well as advertising the library and its instructions for how to reboot Equestrian society. We didn’t want to start until we had a way to keep the books safe, since making them public almost certainly makes them one of the most valuable things in the world.
You might think that the HPI would be able to provide something similar for rebooting an industrial economy. Unfortunately, you would only be kinda right. The HPI is in a far worse situation than simply losing everyone to keep industry running. For them, the Earth is deadly. They cannot revert to more basic technologies without facing certain death. It’s not about giving up video games or air conditioning, it’s about running the shield that keeps them alive.
What does this mean for us? Mostly that we have to do our own research. Joseph has anything we could care to look up cached on the Kimballnet, and the HPI can get us digital versions of anything from the Library of Congress if we want it. Unfortunately we’re several generations too early to be able to actually reboot anything. With a population this small, it will be all we can do just to keep our existing machines running.
Equestrian industry is radically new, and we have the only guide to it in all the world. Instructions for earth ponies like me to grow crops in a third the time, keeping weeds from choking them out through force of magic instead of pesticides. Instructions for the pegasi on how to create weather. Granted, this seems a little like a luxury good right now, but in the future… can you even imagine the consequences?
Humanity has always been forced to bow before the natural might of the planet, as much as we say we don’t. Even at the height of industry, a storm barreling down the coast meant all we could do was board our windows and drive for our lives. Imagine a world where hurricanes never strike coastal cities. Where if there’s a drought, ponies just bring some rainclouds and end it. A world where we create our own rivers, and thunderstorms only rage away from where anyone lives.
I look forward to seeing that field mastered one day.
And the magic of unicorns? That power almost defies prediction. I know from personal experience the right magic can literally slice between worlds, take back what time has stolen, or change you from one species to another. Levitation is a great substitute for hands, but it’s only the exposed edge of the possibilities ahead of us.
What’s going to happen when we put magic and technology together? Will we see nuclear fusion at last, with magic spells containing the reactions? Flying cars animated by thaumic fields instead of gasoline? If humans had been given access to magic instead of being destroyed by it, it could’ve let us revolutionize our world.
Ponies all over the world will know about the library. Hopefully when Adrian eventually moves on, he’ll be able to find those ponies running the radio and they can get the word out to more than just the ponies in the few hundred miles around us. If I was a magical unicorn and I could teleport the way Sunset Shimmer could, I’d be teleporting myself around with satellite phones to give away.
Guess Adrian won’t be leaving for a little while. He’s walking just fine, but he’s still real tender. You know there are several major arteries in a pegasus wing? Who knew! It’s nothing short of a medical miracle he kept that wing. Medical magic, really. Don’t nopony say earth ponies can’t do magic in our own way.
Riley the changeling doesn’t like that she can’t spend more time with him. Not sure what Adrian thought. I wonder if he realized rescuing her was going to come along with such serious responsibilities. I guess you could say today was another kind of breakthrough with that pony, but that's probably a subject for after talking about the important one.
So, Moriah’s our radiophone. Radio operator. Radiologist- No, that’s something else. Anyway, she’s been in contact with several little groups since we got the radio up and running.
A caravan is on its way up. Several ponies looking for a place to live, plenty of others who intended to stay and study before bringing digital copies of the most important books back with them to wherever they came from. They’re on the clock to get here and learn what they can before winter freezes the roads (not to mention the fuel going bad all over the country). We expect the population of the colony to double if not triple when they arrive.
It’s going to change all kinds of things. The community we built isn’t going to feel the same, and who knows how we’re going to balance things with lots more people around. I’m not worried about food, and the water purifier supplying the RVs can handle way more load, but the social dynamics are already getting tricky. We can barely hold together with six, what are we going to do when there are eighteen? Fifty? Thousands?
Obviously, we’ll need a real government at that point. Make ourselves a real city, just like in the old days. Hopefully I don’t have to be a part of it, and I can go back to my farm. Err… my auto shop? Guess we probably won’t need auto shops by then.
I had another dream today, strange enough I thought it might be worth writing down. I’m not sure if dreams really mean anything. You’d think I would’ve taken advantage of my time around Equestria’s spirit of dreams to ask about a question that important, but I didn’t. So many questions I would’ve asked, if only I’d considered them at the time.
I was in a dark and dreary waste. I traveled for the space of many hours, and never saw another face. The wind howled, and I had only crude animal skins to hold against my bare skin and keep out the chill. Snow drifted as high as my knees, and hunger gnawed at me. I grew desperate for meat, but my arm was weak with cold and I could not throw my spear hard enough to catch anything.
When I felt as though I had spent the last of my strength, I collapsed to the snow and resigned myself to death. There was a shape already waiting there, and I nearly tripped on him. It was Huan, though even larger and stronger than I remember. I saw the flash of his teeth against the drifting snowflakes and knew I was doomed to die.
“I see your struggle,” he said. “I watch your crude hunters blunder in darkness, passing easy prey to follow those large enough for you to see. Take me with you; we will be one pack, and hunt together. Swear your friendship to me, and we will triumph together.” So I broke my spear, and wrapped it around his neck (don’t look at me, it made sense at the time), and we were one pack. Together we could conquer any creature. I hungered no more, nor did I fear I would be devoured in my sleep. Together we brought ruin to all creatures who opposed us, hunting many until none survived.
It did not last. The frozen waste dried, and the snow vanished from before my eyes. I stumbled knee-deep through dust, and beside me Huan’s fur became caked with it and his eyes clogged with it. We had hunted our largest sources of food, hunted until we had consumed all and again were left to hunger. The berries and fruits I found could not sustain us. Eventually I could walk no further, and I collapsed in the center of a grassy field to die.
The grass rose up all around me, into the shape of a great woman. “Why do you hunger?” she asked, her voice the whisper of a thousand thousand grains.
“There are too many,” I replied, “and the prey too few. We have hunted and bred and now I starve all over. Dog and I will die. Who are you? Why do you care?”
“I am Wheat,” the grasses said. “I am a rare and feeble grass. My fruit is not large or delicious, and I am too weak to war with all the other grasses. Alone, I will die.” She extended her hand. “Fight for me, and I will feed your starving children.”
I took her hand, and I planted a field that fed the world.
Dog and I starved no longer, though we didn’t hunt anymore. I met many other creatures, and they too struck bargains with me. Those that would not swear had to flee or be trampled into oblivion.
Yet still I was not content. I sat in the quiet of the night and looked up at the stars, and I wondered. I climbed the highest tree atop the tallest mountain, but still I could not reach them. I threw the largest rock I could with all my might, but I could not strike them. I did not understand, and I knew it.
In my despair, I thought I was doomed to die anew. Yet at my feet was the stone, a large black lump that had failed to strike the stars. In my haste to throw it, I dislodged the dirt, revealing a rock unlike any I had seen before. “Why do you despair?”
“We have overcome so much,” I said, of Dog and I, “but there is so much we cannot reach. If the boundaries of our lives are set already, why take the time to live at all?”
“Take me from the ground,” said Iron, extending his hand, “and together we will conquer the world.” And so we did.
The dream ended there, though. I’m not exactly sure what it meant. I think maybe I should stop glance-reading through the Harvard Classics. I think they’re doing strange things to my subconcious. When Equestria wasn’t so far away, I used to think that Princess Luna might still be trying to communicate with me, and that every dream I had might mean something. But that universe has drifted far, and might not ever return. Beyond that, I’m not sure how Luna could possibly know any of those things. I never told them the history of my species, not like that. Our conversation couldn’t have been more than four hours, if you count her explanation and then that encounter with her and her sister that evening.
“You are humanity,” they told me. “You are the will and the spirit, the dream and the soul.” What did they mean? They never said anything about what would happen to my memory. Their spell didn’t say anything about being impaled or surviving car accidents. Why does everything about magic have to be so esoteric? Magic needs to be more empirical. There have got to be some fundamental laws at work, right? The laws of physics as we understood them might have been lacking, but I don’t know why very much of it would’ve changed. It’s the same universe. I’m not going to throw out everything I learned in school just because we’d never seen real magic before.
Riley was the only one who saw. She’s the only one who knows; it is our little secret.
Today was a big day; I told her what I’d read about her species, the changelings. I will speak to the others tomorrow, though I fear what their reactions might be. She is (and has been) a literal emotional parasite. Adrian’s weakness, and occasionally my own, is directly explicable because of her being here. It’s never been anything serious, never enough to slow us down, but imagine the paranoia when I tell everybody that she’s sucking on our souls and taking the little bits that float to the top. Okay, that might be a silly way to explain it. Probably not that way.
I’m not sure why I feel like we have so much in common, Riley and me. Don’t say that it’s because we’re the closest in age either, because if you do I’ll break your face with one of these earth-pony hooves of mine. Maybe it’s because we’re both freaks now, though me more because I opened my big dumb mouth and less something I had no control over. Maybe it’s because we both like these stupid, shallow chick movies, the ones with a two dimensional romance and a few attractive actors. Cloudy Skies likes them too; just a little drama but generally super uplifting. She’d never watch anything with me if she knew Riley was going to come along.
But what am I supposed to do? Cloudy Skies is my friend! Riley needs companionship she can relate to better than a 26-year-old stallion. She already lives with him; Adrian needs some time to spend apart or else he’ll explode and we both know it. Nobody else will take Riley. Yeah, I guess she’s twelve. Yeah, I guess she could spend some time on her own… but I’m not sure where.
What’s worse, is that she can get into twice as much trouble. The Changeling section of the big book with all the different things people can turn into was only a few pages long, as I’ve ranted about before. It does say they can use magic, just like unicorns. Those wings aren’t vestigial either, they can also fly like Pegasi (but no mention of being able to kick down metal doors and grow plants, guess you aren’t stealing my abilities!) I told her today, and she looked as excited as a little girl on Christmas. Guess that makes sense: I was “giving” her all sorts of new powers. Well, she’d kinda guessed at the flying thing, but thought that her wings were too weak and holey to actually lift her.
We’ve got one pony who can fly: Cloudy Skies. Chances of her being willing to teach the changeling to fly? 0%.
We do have a unicorn, though! Riley would be much more able to contribute if she could magic things around with her horn. If she could do that, I could use her to replace Joseph! She’s much more fun to be around, actually laughs at my jokes and doesn’t mind it if I decide I just wanna run around and enjoy the day for a few minutes. No judgemental looks like keeping Moriah in the car with me.
Also that would free up Joseph for important-type work with computers. Also it would mean she could actually be useful to the settlement, instead of being just another mouth to feed, literally draining our emotions. Also, Joseph isn’t frightened of her like Cloudy Skies. He never really has been, doesn’t seem to care much about her either way. Didn’t have to overcome it like I did, or if he did there wasn’t much to overcome.
I don’t even feel weird around her anymore. I don’t see a freaky monster bug, I just see a scared little kid who lost her family. We’re her new family, and we’re a pretty lousy substitute. Doesn’t mean we can’t try, though! Or I can’t try. The big question remaining to me is: how do I get Cloudy Skies to get over her instincts and give Riley a chance?
- Alex