//------------------------------// // Part 3 - Interlude // Story: Founders of Alexandria // by Starscribe //------------------------------// October 29, 2015 Dear Diary, Sorry about not writing this week. I would call this last week suboptimal, but I feel like that might make me liable for some sort of criminal understatement suit. Okay, it might not be completely fair to say this entire week hasn’t gone well. After all, the first wave of immigrants arrived five days ago and that went pretty well! Not all of them plan on staying, and some aren’t sure whether or not they want to stick around. Already it looks like the colony is splitting off into cliques, but… forget about all that! The day started with a phone call I’d really rather not have gotten, now that I know everything else that would come of it. Hindsight, right? It was the HPI, using the communicator they gave me last time I visited. Well, visited might be a little weak. Last time I volunteered myself as a living subject for experimentation. The goal was pretty obvious: determine what about pony bodies makes us immune to the damaging effects of the thaumic field. Got DNA, brain scans, that whole bit, but none of the scientists looked that thrilled about any of it. Honestly I’m not sure if it helped… but what they got was just the first wave of results, right? All kinds of great things might come when they get the chance to fully sequence my genome, get down into the really nitty-gritty stuff. It took decades of research to perfect the first antibiotic! Spending time with the HPI reminds me a little of Princess Luna. Edmond Clark… I’m sure you’ll remember him… he’s the one in charge. He’s more far-seeing than anyone I’ve ever met, maybe even more than the Princess herself. To hear that man speak is like hearing the schemes of a Greek god. To be fair, I would be quite surprised if there was a single person in that bunker with an IQ lower than 130. Say what you want about IQ not being a comprehensive or even accurate evaluation of intelligence (and you’re right), but there’s a POINT! The point is that they picked the very best humans in the world. Strongest, smartest, fastest, you get the idea. To lead them, the greatest of all. Clark isn’t frightening until you hear him speak. His plans stretch centuries after his own death, a comprehensive branching web of goals and projections. Some good news: The HPI have accumulated more nuclear material than any organization has ever possessed. So much, that he tells me the heat generated by the fuel supply is actually used to generate much of the ordinary electrical demands of the bunker. He shared some other numbers with me. Based on optimistic predictions of existing hardware lifetime, the bunker should last about a century. Assuming they are able to make repairs and replace the components of the CPNFG (and that the exotic matter they invented for its core doesn’t degrade somehow), then Clark’s engineers give them somewhere between 500 and 1000 years, depending on how much they’re able to salvage during the next few decades (and everything rots). You’d be correct to say that’s an awful long way to be making predictions, that they’re all pretty meaningless that far. You’d be right. I think it underestimates the value of advancing technology. After all, weren’t we convinced we were going to run out of oil at one point? I’m serious. It used to be a big deal, back when hu-MANs were men and meat was tasty. I spent my childhood hearing about things like “peak oil” and how we were sucking the planet dry. If the Kimballnet’s still a thing, go ahead and look at the known reserves of oil by year, and compare it to production. Even though humans made more and more each year, the known supply of untapped oil kept going up! How is that possible, you might ask. Probably because you think oil comes from olives or soybeans or flax or something by this point. Peanuts? Didn’t one of the first diesel engines run on peanut oil? I think I saw a Mythbusters episode about that once. I think the point of my stupid rambling is that TECHNOLOGY is what stopped us from running out of oil. We kept getting more advanced, so we were able to tap resources better, find them better, make what we found go further. The HPI will need to do that in order to survive. The absolute key for them, the project that’s consuming more of their resources than any other, is making survival in the thaumic field possible. Ultimately, they wish to perfect an inoculation or vaccination against its effects. They have technology down in that bunker I didn’t know existed. Apparently, in the few years leading up to the Collapse (as they call it), there was a wave of unprecedented cooperation and innovation all over the world, a sort of interdisciplinary renaissance to create everything the last survivors of mankind might possibly need. Much of it was brought to their bunker, but much of it remains at large. After all, once everyone was dead, they would be able to fly all over the world and collect it, housing it in the hundreds of underground warehouses that have been built to receive them. A number of cultural artifacts are already there. If you had the bright idea to raid the Smithsonian or maybe snatch up the Declaration of Independence, forget about it. Objects of similar worth had been brought in from each of the member nations, since of course the HPI is not a merely American endeavor. I learned some fascinating things about my own physiology during my time in the bunker, though I’m not sure how much the HPI have learned about magic. They’re working on an entirely robotic research station, one that will soon be running nearby. It will be able to take measurements of our interactions with the thaumic field, which of course doesn’t exist in the HPI bunker. They are somewhat limited in what they can learn about magic when no magic is allowed inside. If I sound like I’m avoiding an important subject, it’s because I absolutely am. Ultimately there wasn’t much to say about my visit with the HPI. I know they’ve got things well under control, and I trust the management there to make the best choices for humanity’s future they can. I made it back a little sick from being away from magic so long (not to mention what passes for food in that place, I don’t recommend it), but that was ultimately it. They gave us a Hummingbird. Gorgeous machine, one of the most impressive creations I’ve ever seen. I can safely say that my understanding of mechanics gives me very little insight here. Ultimately things turn and it moves, that’s the familiar part. The rest? God only knows. I got such a wonderful chance to learn more about it yesterday. As fun as I’ve had flying the ultralight (flying on it, technically), I think I might prefer the ground from now on. The HPI gave it to us because they trust us now, and because we can go out into the really dangerous areas (or areas with ponies in them), and recover things for them. They’ll give us manufactured stuff we ask for each time we bring something in, so it’ll be a bit of a trade. We go on adventures, they give us some crap we don’t know how to make. We don’t have much use for anything like that right now, since we can pretty much salvage anything we want. But I fully realize that won’t be the case forever, and that having this relationship established now will make a huge difference in the years ahead. Getting distracted again. No, distracted is the wrong word. I’m avoiding the subject. The HPI detected something big in Philadelphia, something bigger than the arc radio transmitter Sunset Shimmer used by an order of magnitude. My thought was that they’d spotted an Alicorn, perhaps arrived here by accident, or (my hooves tremble at the prospect), born of a returning human. It wasn’t that last one, thank god. According to Equestria, the chances of that happening are astronomically small. Hopefully smaller than one in seven billion. That’s pretty astronomical. Something tried to attack us as we got closer to the city. I can only call it a something, because I didn’t get to see it. We’ve only got Moriah’s word and some frightening readings from the ship’s computer. She described it as a “goddamn dragon made of fire.” I didn’t have my doubts at the time, because I was at the time having one of the worst days of my life. She had to use most of the power to run the CPNFG, which makes sense. I tried to get everypony into their restraints at the first sign of trouble, but there was one pony who didn’t make it in in time. Me. We started a dive, then we started spinning. The ceilings are fifteen feet in some parts of that plane. Or, if you’re traveling vertically, the bottom can seem like forty feet away. Those of us not pegasi have no recourse but to pray we don’t break our necks. It felt like something broke. I bled badly, felt some stuff poking out where it shouldn’t have. I’ve never seen an injury that bad, and I’m thankful I haven’t yet. One of those little blessings I guess. When I came to, things were much better. Oliver and the others were pale as death, and he’d just finished with some medical miracle. We were on the ground by then, had been for awhile. The others were just relieved, but not Oliver. I met his eyes, and I saw at that instant that he knew. Probably something to do with that medical cutie mark of his. Unfortunately, my accident and recovery was eclipsed by what we discovered. I wasn’t allowed to go out and see on account of what had happened, so I spent the day getting casts from Oliver I didn’t need and getting fitted for a neck-brace that I was not looking forward to wearing. The stories the others brought tortured me, though I could do nothing to investigate. True to what Adrian told us, there was a fairly large group of ponies living here. It’s hard to guess at numbers, but they had huge painted signs and didn’t really try to hide anything so it’d be hard to miss their handiwork. They’d turned some kind of shelter or halfway house into their home, and it looked like they were doing quite well. Apparently it’s burned. Not the city! Not like what we saw in Los Angeles (though talk of a “fire dragon” makes me want to break somebody else’s neck this time). The shelter is apparently burned, along with lots full of cars and trucks, a nearby warehouse, a church… basically all the buildings on that block, but the fire didn’t spread to the surrounding blocks. The others found bones in the wreckage. Oliver is the only one with any hope of piecing together how many they were, and he refuses to leave my side even now. It’s incredibly kind of him. Not that I’m interested in company, but if I was, I could do worse. He’s given up being there on the scene to care for a patient who needed much more emotional support than she needed physical. Does being still alive after these accidents make me lucky? Or am I unlucky because they keep happening? There were runes everywhere, at least according to what I was told. Oliver can’t read most of them, though he was able to translate a single passage based on what he’s studied of the “unicorn alphabet.” Apparently it says “Odium Forgives.” I don’t have a clue what that means. We’ve radioed back to Alexandria. Sky’s not happy we’re staying away. She doesn’t know the half of it. We don’t want to say anything until we’re sure something bad happened, particularly since it’s obvious at least some of the immigrants came from this direction. Perhaps the shock of surviving something like this is why Ryan is so reticent about where he came from, or why Carol is so often on her own. I’m no psychiatrist. Psychologist. Not even psychic. Need Joseph and Moriah for that. Sorry, Doctor’s pestering me about sleep. Apparently I shouldn’t be making so many movements with my neck and head, and I should be laying down. I guess I’ll do that. See if I don't have nightmares again, Oliver! This is what happens when I don’t get to properly decompress with my diary! —Alex