So it began. Archive had been recruited to protect the HPI from Athena’s influence. Now she realized that influence had been Athena’s feeble attempts to slow the expansion of Gideon’s Outsider faction. Instead of working to root out Athena, she began moving to support and conceal her.
Even so, it was not difficult to contribute in other ways. Working directly with Athena meant the two of them could easily fabricate “victories,” such as “inventing” systems Athena could not monitor. What gains Archive made “against” the AI were really just sacrificing the types of control they didn’t need anyway.
Along with her work as an engineer and her internal security hedging out Athena, Archive took full advantage of her religious and political significance. Where she had never used her power before, she now called upon it on a daily basis. Athena knew who believed in her and who didn’t, so it was easy to collect allies.
A full third of the HPI belonged to a sub-faction that called itself the Order of Endurance, their enemies. This included four-fifths of the heads of departments that actually ran the HPI, and the newly elected Director Miranda Salazar. Still, two-thirds of the HPI was a significant pool from which to draw friendly recruits, if they were careful.
Archive’s rise to political power had to be a slow, orchestrated affair. Move too fast, or emerge as an open opponent of the cult, and she might just as easily find herself ejected. Fortunately she was an ageless immortal, and could afford to move slowly if that meant a greater chance of success.
Gideon’s death without becoming a pony started a trend that the cult soon standardized. This meant fewer ponies for Bountiful, but also an end to the Order’s influence over it. Those who were not aligned with it still chose a second lifetime, even if that meant they would be branded as “cowards who died like animals.”
Politics left Archive with little time for hobbies. She stopped attending flying lessons with her friends, though she tried to be supportive by getting them plenty of free time and even transferring in an instructor from Bountiful. She took a keen interest in their lives, though at some point she stopped seeing Jackie except at meals.
It took Jackie months to make real friends, and little Ezri even longer. The changeling kept growing, on a steady diet of affection from Alex and Jackie, but she stopped looking as plump as she had during the trip across the continent.
Alex had imagined Jackie getting herself a degree in Bountiful University of Engineering. As they weren’t living in Bountiful, she got Athena on a tablet computer and a classroom with two desks. Ezri had no children her own age to play with, aside from the son of a prominent Centurion of the guard, Isaac. Even if spending time in the anti-magic sections of the city caused her pain, Ezri braved it anyway for his company, and their friendship seemed as genuine as any Alex had ever seen.
Years passed. Alex caught up on all the engineering she had missed, mastered a few more disciplines, and helped Athena build a fusion reactor at the bottom of the crater. Not that she had to design it from scratch or anything: Paradise Crater’s reactor was basically just a scaled-up version of the Raven Stellarator 13-E.
Jackie didn’t have the patience for any of the engineering or scientific disciplines, no matter how much time she sunk into her practice. Instead she started custom-building dreams, in a little parlor she converted from her own quarters. She was good, good enough that word spread to Bountiful and ponies would take vacation time to a desolate crater in the middle of a salty wilderness just to visit. Jackie made herself a small fortune before the novelty wore off, and kept up a modest trade once it did.
Most of her dreams were visions of Old Earth, lifelike cities filled with people, that could be explored and enjoyed as long as the dreamer desired. She charged extra for dreams where the dreamer could be human.
With the reactor complete, Paradise Crater began to expand in earnest. Scaffolds of the numerous floors were soon expanded into huge skeletons of steel and aluminum, with thousands of structures. When it was complete, the city would replace Raven as the central location of human life. All of the lower levels would be filled with humans in time, with room for tens of thousands.
Through it all, Archive tried to figure out a way she could help ponies on the outside. Athena had made a valid point: what little help she had provided over the years hadn’t really made much of a global impact. Every day ponies returned, and many of those would be returning to suffer. What could she possibly do to help all of them? How could she be in more than one place?
Archive found her answer after about a decade with the HPI. She brought her solution to the one pony in all of Paradise Crater she thought could accurately judge its value: Jackie. The young mare had grown into full adulthood over the last decade, through like all ponies this did not mean her youth had faded any. It would be several decades more before she began to show any signs of age.
Her quarters were only across the hall, but it had been so long since Alex had visited them that she felt a little uncomfortable doing so. Instead, she visited her at work. By then, Jackie had used some of her fortune to purchase space in an actual building, and even recruited a few more thestrals to help run the place. As a result, as Archive slipped through the door that day, she found an unfamiliar face waiting for her behind the counter.
The parlor itself was dark. In many ways, it looked like a fortune-teller’s parlor might’ve before the Event. The operative difference was, of course, that Jackie’s magic was real. Incense burned from several decorative burners on the wall, whose metallic surface was entirely obscured by silk hangings. Even the ground had been covered with carpets and rugs. Thick beaded hangings separated the entrance from the parlor beyond, giving her other customers privacy.
Archive was wearing her usual uniform, a light jumpsuit in black and white fabric. Markings on her collar designated her as the Head of Information Security. Her cutie mark had been sewn into the jumpsuit, the only sign of her other role. Even so, it was generally enough to make most ponies show her respect. Today appeared to be no exception, as the thestral behind the counter lowered his head.
He was not young; no pony in the HPI ever was. He did look clumsy, with the “fresh” look that newly transformed ponies always had. A little under half of the HPI still elected to transform into ponies when they got too old or too sick to survive as humans, and all of those were the sort of ponies to know Archive.
In order to reinforce her appearance as a being with abilities beyond the mortal, Archive used her powers much more than she used to. Among the HPI, that meant she could know a person’s name, disposition, and even their history with just a glance. Not even those most influenced by the forbidden knowledge of the Outsiders could hide from her yet.
“Saul Arnik, isn’t it?” She gestured for him to rise, stopping in front of the counter. Archive met his eyes and held her expression for several silent seconds, letting her magic show him a flicker of her purpose. “I am happy to see you are adapting to your new body. Three weeks isn’t so long to get used to walking on hooves, eh?”
He nodded, struggling to form words for a few seconds. Most ponies did. “Not so hard with practice, Honored Memory. I’m afraid it’s too late to buy a dream today. The mistress is waking the last of the dreamers as we speak. But I’m sure for you she would—”
“No need.” She raised a hoof. “I’ve come to speak with Mistress Jacqueline, but not to buy. I don’t want to interrupt her, though. If I wait here, could you make sure she talks to me before she goes home? It’s very important.”
“Of course! I’ll inform her right away!” The thestral scampered away, and vanished into the clattering beads.
Archive sat down on one of the cushions to wait, her wings twitching at her sides where they emerged from holes in her jumpsuit. Her wings were laboratory clean, each feather aligned and shining with wax. It would be clear to any pegasus who saw her that she had never flown a day in her life. Heck, Jackie’s wings looked more ragged, and she didn’t even have feathers. For all her body felt trapped, she still spent almost all her time underground. There would be plenty of time for personal interests when the human species was secure.
She had to sit a few minutes, watching half a dozen ponies leave in turn. There were a few thestrals, not just Saul, but most were clients. She didn’t interrupt them; these had the look of ponies that had just woken up as they dragged their hooves from the room and out onto the street. Saul returned, ran a little push-vacuum over the rugs, then departed with a bow.
It was another ten minutes before Jackie finally appeared. Alex had to suppress a laugh as she saw her in the doorway, dressed in her “work outfit.” Archive hadn’t ever come to buy dreams, yet now she wished she had if only to see her old friend dressed up. Jackie stood in a colorful silk robe, with swirling patterns like Van Gogh's Starry Night all over it. An ornate headdress rested on her head, covered with Equestrian runes. The pattern looked impressive, but Archive’s trained eye recognized it as nonsense immediately.
She rose to her hooves, and for once it was she who couldn’t look a pony in the face. “Hi Jackie.”
“Hello, Archive.” Alex had never heard her name spoken with such bitterness, not even by Odium. “I’m sorry I took so long, I had work to do. You understand.”
She lowered her head, not objecting. She deserved anything the thestral wanted to say, and more. “I’m sorry Jackie. If it helps, I don’t think I deserve forgiveness either.”
The thestral hesitated. Alex couldn’t be sure, but she could almost feel another gibe dying on her tongue. She sighed. “What do you want?”
She ignored the question. “Ezri said you were doing well when we had dinner last Sunday. Still have plenty to do as a dream designer?”
Jackie sat down. The hat slumped off her forehead, and she caught it with a hoof. Her big ears must’ve been part of how it stayed on, because they were almost flat. “It’s just great.” She tossed the hat onto a nearby cushion. “Learned how to store dreams, so we can make them in advance and reuse them. Working on ways to send them... even to a human, if we want.”
“Really?” Alex raised her eyebrows. “Isn’t that magic? How would you get through the CPNFG?” She sat up, watching with sudden interest. If there was a way humans could be exposed to magic without hurting them, and she hadn’t even known about it—
“The Skein has every sleeper, no matter their species. If you travel through it, you can make changes. I’m not really sure where it is, but...” She shrugged. “We might be able to sell dreams to humans one day.”
“That’s wonderful news. I’m really glad that you’re innovating. I hope you’re writing down your methods... There wasn’t very much in what Equestria gave us about oneiromancy.”
“Is that really why you’re here, Alex?” The thestral sighed, her wings going limp at her sides in thestral frustration.
First name, that’s a start. Alex shook her head. “No. I didn’t come here to waste your time, or to remind you to do things you probably already are.” She lowered her voice. “I’m here because I’m... well, I’m worried. I’d like to show you something, so that if something happens to me...” She trailed off, then shook her head. “Well, you’re one of the few people I can trust.”
Jackie raised an eyebrow. “Trust? Alex, you... I know you saved me from that mine, and you’re Ezri’s mom, so I guess you’re my mother-in-law now or whatever... but that doesn’t mean I’m going to help you. Where were you when I opened my shop? At a political rally. Where were you when I needed help getting permits to recruit ponies in Bountiful? Campaigning. Where were you at my wedding? In a committee meeting.” She whimpered, brushing away the moisture from around her eyes. “If you need help so bad, why don’t you get one of your political friends to do it? Or maybe one of the fanatics from the Church of the Ancestors. They seem to just love you down there.”
Alex stood still, and she did not look away as Jackie chastised her. Sure, she had reasons for missing all of those events. The rally had been scheduled for months, and it had been her first appearance. The “committee meeting” had been the HPI’s board of directors, who had scheduled it on the day of the wedding precisely so that Alex wouldn’t attend and they could vote her off. Every other event she had missed had a reason, which she had considered perfectly valid at the time. Yet the common theme between them all was one single fact: Alex had prioritized her role as the Archive higher than her responsibilities to her family and friends. She had sacrificed her own life on the altar of her duties. As such, she deserved every angry thing Jackie had to say and more.
Jackie fumed, panting from the emotion of the moment. She seemed as though she wanted to scream, glaring at Alex and daring her to defend herself.
Instead, Alex nodded. “You’re right. You don’t have any reason to think of me as your friend anymore. Ezri probably wouldn’t, if I hadn’t raised her. I don’t deserve her loyalty, and I don’t deserve yours.”
The thestral's ears flattened again. “W-what?”
“You heard me. I don’t deserve anything from you. If you don’t want to help me, I won’t blame you. But...” She advanced a step closer, lowering her voice again. “What if it wasn’t me you were helping, Jackie? What if you were working to prevent abuses like what happened in Motherlode? What if there was a way to prevent ponies from abusing the ignorance of refugees like you? Would you help them, even if you didn’t want to help me?”
Jackie sat back down, staring in open shock. It took her a good minute to finally put words together. “You mean this isn’t about politics? This isn’t about the Honored Memory or that movement to get a vote of no-confidence for Salazar?”
It was Alex’s turn to be surprised, though she hid it much better. Jackie claimed to have no interest in politics, but apparently she had been following current events quite closely. “No, nothing about that. It’s not about the HPI at all. Rather, it’s some work I’d like to protect from the Initiative. As you’re one of the few ponies I know with any connection to the outside...”
“What is it?”
Alex gestured towards the wall of beads. “Could we talk about it inside?”
“Sure.” Jackie rose, then turned. She paused only long enough to undo the clasp at her neck, tossing her robe casually to rest on one of the low benches. “My parlor is classed as a medical building, so there aren’t any monitoring devices in here. Your friend Athena is pretty sure there aren’t, anyway.”
They descended a set of spiral steps, cut wide and short enough that ponies could walk over them with ease. The facility had clearly not been built for humans; the ceiling in the stairs was too low for that. The reasons for that were obvious enough: humans didn’t do very well when explicit magic was cast directly at their brains. “Not just the privacy of your parlor. I was actually hoping I could use a dream to show you. It would be... faster that way. Information density and all. I figure... if you know how to store dreams, maybe you can store what I show you.”
“Shouldn’t be that hard.” Jackie glanced over her shoulder, and a faint smile hovered on the edges of her lips for a moment. She looked away before Archive could be sure of what she had seen. “I won’t need you to write the rune for me anymore, that’s for sure. Will I...” She hesitated. “Will I get to see that library again.”
“Yes.” Archive stepped off the stairs and into the parlor proper. It was a spherical room, or very nearly so. There were perhaps a dozen different beds on two levels, an upper balcony level and then a circular level at the bottom. Several doors to private rooms split from the upper level, vanishing into the darkness. The parlor had a very similar theme to the lobby above, though there were no real flames down here. The lighting was much lower than most ponies were used to, and Archive had to take a moment to let her eyes adjust. It wasn’t total darkness, or even quite so gloomy as night. At least she could see at all.
“We can use these.” Jackie gestured at two of the beds. “The spell is already worked into the fabric. Put your head on a pillow, and you should be asleep within a few seconds, and dreaming within a minute. I will join you there.”
“No vows?” Alex made her way to the side of the bed, loosening the zipper around her neck a little. She didn’t actually remove the jumpsuit, though. “The Equestrian spells always have promises when dream-travel is involved. Protecting dreamers from nightmares, and...”
Jackie shook her head. “Those ethical constraints are really just formalities... and they don’t really have a place when I sell dreams for entertainment. I can’t promise I’m going to prevent nightmares if I’m selling them. This spell works without promises. It’s actually less expensive, magic-wise. Makes for less stable dreams, but... honestly, if something happens to cause instability, it’s probably better if the client does wake up. I’m no therapist.”
“Right.” Alex climbed into bed, laying on her side. “That makes sense.” True to Jackie’s word, she felt the sleeping spell take hold almost immediately, pulling her inexorably down towards unconsciousness. She could’ve resisted, or rolled out of bed, had she needed to.
The ways of dreams were not the ways of waking life. Even a neophyte to Luna’s strange arts like Alex understood that much. Transitions, for instance, were never as explicit as they were in reality. Rather, dreams were places of harsh cuts, changing from one location into the next. Archive found herself standing in her library. Jackie was there, though of course Archive could not remember her arrival. “You really want an answer?” Archive didn’t look away from her old friend. She could be embarrassed about many things, but not this. The torches of her library grew brighter near where she stood, responding to the determination that filled her.
“You know what, I think I fucking would.” The thestral stopped less than a foot away, throwing down the book. It landed awkwardly on the floor, pages splayed. “You drag me away from all my friends, tell me I’ll never get to see them again... Oh, wait. Then you ditch me so you can turn yourself into a fucking prophet.”
That was another truth about dreams, a truth they happened to share with alcohol: whether someone wanted to be honest or not, they generally were in their sleep. To lie in a dream, even by omission, was far harder than in mortal life. As such, Archive was not surprised to see Jackie’s thin veneer of tolerance wiped away for the anger she really felt underneath. A few surprising or kind things in the mortal world could not erase a decade’s neglect in a few minutes.
“There’s no excuse.” Archive took no joy in tormenting her old friend. Perhaps it would be more kind to leave her ignorant. Yet the consequences might be even worse if she did. “I still think you might be more forgiving if you knew. Ezri does— or I think she does. She still seems supportive.”
“You’re wasting my time, Archive. Explain or I’ll wake us up.”
Archive called upon her will, and in an instant the body of a mighty alicorn was replaced with her human shape. No longer a child, this Archive stood a full six feet, her body muscular and golden armor outshining the torchlight. The transition was abrupt enough that even the dream crafting thestral stumbled back a pace, eyes widening as she looked up. She looked afraid, like she might be about to run. “NO, JACQUELINE KESSLER!” With a gesture, the thestral was lifted into the air, to her head level. Archive stepped forward, putting a hand on the side of her head. In the real world she had never been a unicorn, but here she was a master of every magical art. It was hard not to be when you knew every spell. She wrote her own, and fueled it with her strength. “You are going to see!”
Jacky’s body twitched and kicked in the air. Her mouth opened and closed a few times, though no words came out. Mind magic of this complexity and power could not be resisted by a mortal pony, no matter how much experience they had with dreams. “The first time we shared a dream, I showed you the memories of my life. You want to know what could be worth your friendship over these last few years. Open your eyes and see the world as I do.”
Archive took in her memory of humanity since the Event. There were millions now, far too much for a mortal mind to hold. If she tried to show Jackie, the thestral would probably be driven insane. Since coming to live with the HPI, Archive had come to understand her powers a little better. When it came to memories, she had two distinct abilities: to see the human memories of a living person in her presence, or the memories of a dead human no matter where or when they died. She still didn’t know if the older memories, the ones before the Event, were fabrications of her subconscious or genuine history, but it didn’t matter now. She called upon the second power, and searched for every refugee who had died alone.
There were tens of thousands. Ponies who returned in jail cells or collapsed buildings, ponies who starved in the wild or were eaten by predators. Ponies who returned only a few miles from thriving cities but died of loneliness before they left their houses, or came back in the snow and froze. Archive found all these, and selected moments from each. Moments of absolute hopelessness, moments of rage and terror that all went unanswered. She let Jackie see it all.
The thestral no longer struggled to free herself from the spell. Her whole body had gone limp, and she wept openly. “Can’t save them all, can’t save them all, can’t save them all!” Jackie whimpered, opening one eye and looking up. “Stop! Make it stop!”
Archive stemmed the tide. “We both have nightmares sometimes. The difference is that mine really happened. Pain I should’ve prevented.” She gestured, and the thestral dropped from the air in front of her.
Jackie shivered, struggling to her hooves. Her whole body seemed paler. She didn’t meet Archive’s eyes anymore, anger entirely replaced with fear. “We’ve been offering to help you for years, but you always said it was too dangerous! Why are you—”
There was no sense in lying. “I think they might kill me soon. If they do...” Her stance faltered a little. “Someone has to continue my work. I would give it to my daughter, but...” She shook her head. “Ezri is a drone, not a thestral. Her mind isn’t meant to take knowledge from dreams. Yours is. First, I need you to take a look at this.” She gestured, and a slim book appeared in one of her hands. “I’ve got a real one I can give you too, and Athena has the manuscript should something happen.” She held it up, so the thestral could see. The cover was bright, lined with extremely intricate runes around the edges. In the center were bold letters, filling most of the space:
TRANSFORMED HUMAN, READ THIS!
Jackie stared. “What’s in there?”
Alex grinned, thrusting the book under her nose. “Why don’t you read and find out?”
* * *
Human!
Before you panic, before you freak out or run away or do something you regret, please read me! No, you don’t have to read the whole book, but you should at least read this. You won’t regret it.
If you’re reading this, then you’ve returned. You were living your life, perhaps working a field somewhere, or sitting at home or at school when suddenly the whole world disappeared. Buildings vanished around you, and you were suddenly outside. Your whole city vanished before your eyes. That, or it was transformed, and suddenly filled with strange animals.
You feel lost, confused, and alone. What’s worse, you’ve been transformed into a monster yourself. You’ve got fur, and maybe hooves or claws or fins. You can barely figure out how to move, and everything you feel is strange.
Let me be honest: You are lost, you are confused, but you do not have to be alone. All of humanity’s billions have or will suffer as you have. We share this pain as we have shared little else in our long history. First you will probably want to know why. I make a fantastic claim as answer: let the present transformation of the world be my fantastic evidence.
On May 23, 2015, a cosmic transformation took place centering in the core of our galaxy. In one moment, all the galaxy was bathed in a form of energy totally lethal to humanity. Had nothing been done about it, we would have all died in agony. Fortunately for all of us, our cosmic neighbors, adapted to living within this radiation, created a mechanism to transform each of us into their image, enabling us to survive.
Unfortunately for all of us, this mechanism did not just transform us, it scattered us about in time. Our population would not remain, but be distributed across the millennia to come. If you are reading these words, at least three hundred years have passed since this Event, and perhaps many more. Civilization has gone on, triumphed and been brought low, and many of us have returned to live out our lives in peace or suffering.
In all these years what has slowed our recovery the most is our ignorance. We have yet to recover to our pre-Event levels in population or technology because every one of us who returns is stripped of all that made us in our familiar world and left to our own feeble devices. Some of us get the benefit of experienced teachers to show us how these new bodies work, but many do not. Likewise, many of the innovations that enabled our previous society to live comfortably and well are not terribly difficult to recreate, but few of us had a reason to know them in our age of advancement and security.
This book endeavors to solve both difficulties in one. In its pages, I have detailed the basics of every species you may’ve become. You will find a few pages devoted to your eating habits, new lifespan, and new abilities, no matter what you have become. I have devoted several chapters to the working of high-energy radiation we now call “magic,” the existence of which can be readily demonstrated with the instructions I have provided.
Far vaster than this is the knowledge our species accumulated, as we grew ever-closer to understanding the universe. Detailing all of this would have been impossible, much as I wish I could have simply compacted the internet you knew into some easily consumable form and duplicated it for each of you. This could not be done, nor could any significant percentage of human achievement be summarized with a volume short enough to be easily carried and reference throughout your life.
Instead, I have with this book attempted to distill a seed of knowledge, which will readily unfurl and grow as it is investigated, presenting the next avenues to explore. It is likely you find yourself in a world backward and primitive compared to the one you knew: you need not be reconciled to live out the rest of your life in these conditions!
You do not have to retread all the steps we took in our first climb to sophistication and scientific understanding. Much of that development was a series of fortunate accidents, and often we wasted resources chasing blunders and technological red-herrings. Instead of retracing our steps, you will find in these pages several alternate routes plotted through the darkness of ignorance. Take whichever you prefer, in whichever order seems to best suit the situation you find yourself in.
This guide is not comprehensive, and much of what is contained here will suggest further avenues for innovation. Don’t give up because this book goes no further or assume no future advancements are possible.
We were all of us cruelly used, and now we suffer for it. Yet however discouraged you may feel, remember the legacy resting on your shoulders. Since our birth humanity has struggled through adversity, but we triumphed over all of it. Our time of complacency is over. I wish we could face this latest danger together, and overcome it together as we have many threats before... but that option was taken from us.
Many you meet will not understand you. This book contains tools to help you with translating and learning their languages. This will not help those you meet understand your world or the culture you come from, however.
Understand that every intelligent creature you meet was once human, or is the child some number of generations removed from you. Thanks to the scattering of time, that unsympathetic horse you meet today might actually be a distant grandchild of yours, descended through children who returned to Earth before you did.
Everyone you meet is part of this human family, if you look back far enough. Don’t isolate yourself, but learn the new world you’re in and integrate yourself with it. Find others like you, or make friends with those who never knew our world. Either way, don’t try to live alone. We were never a solitary creature, and we certainly aren’t solitary creatures now. You need family to survive the difficult life ahead.
Many you meet will ascribe to strange and fantastic ideas. The culture of magic and superstition may be alive and well in whatever time that you’ve landed in. It is true that a force we call magic exists, and can exert an influence over physical matter. Do not let this or your transformation take away the rationalism we fought so hard for. The universe behaves according to deterministic laws which can be measured, experimented upon, and verified. “Magic,” as it is now known, is just one of these forces we did not well understand before the Event. Do not be convinced that just because now some people can influence objects without touching them that suddenly superstitions have merit and must be considered: they do not.
This book, then, might be considered as much a quick-start guide to rebooting civilization as it is a set of tools by which to verify the claims people or societies make around you.
This book has been constructed according to these principles of magic. It is the culmination of hundreds of years of labor post-Event, and tens of thousands of years of labor prior to the Event. It is what I hope you will become: a fusion of the achievements of humanity and your new alien form, with the advantages of both and the disadvantages of neither.
You are not alone. However awful and upset you feel now, don’t ever think you don’t have the power to make the world around you better. We are all united in this, across the gulf of time. The diligent labor of millions before your return has tried to make our world great again. Before you go, I hope you’ll do your part to improve the world to come.
It will not get better unless we make it so.
—Archive
* * *
Time was a fickle thing in dreams. Archive wanted Jackie to see as much of the book as possible, but she was also powerfully conscious of the danger they were in. There was an urgency here, one she couldn’t ignore just because she wanted Jackie to see her manuscript. She would have plenty of time to do that in the real world... if she needed to. Jackie knew most of what the book had to say, after all. Ultimately, it was not the reason she had wanted to speak to her in a dream instead of in reality. She rose from her nearby chair, clearing her throat. “Jackie, I... Do you understand the idea?”
The thestral blinked, then looked up. “Oh, yeah. I guess I do.”
Archive reached out, setting one arm on Jackie’s shoulder. At her will, they teleported with a flash, moving several floors up in the library, standing right in front of a single locked door. She reached around her neck, removing the key. She slid it into the lock, but didn’t turn it. “No other human has seen what I’m about to show you.”
“What does—” The thestral shook her head. “You make even less sense than when we first met. Is this secret about helping humans, or about fighting the cult, or—?”
Archive unlocked the door, then reached over and draped the key over her friend’s neck, and pushed the door open. Stars apparently zoomed around a massive dark space, vast enough that none of its boundaries were visible from where they stood. “Come and see.” She started walking, hoping her old friend would follow. There was no floor in the vast space, but Archive ignored that. She had more important things to do than pretend to obey physics right now.
After a few moments' hesitation, Jackie took off and followed. Every foot into the room lit it better, as the spell reacted to their presence. A few shooting stars revealed themselves to be runes, written in a script so fine it would’ve taken a magnifier to read. The spell pulsed like something alive, responding to the humanity in them. It pulsed like a heartbeat, light flickering around the room. By the time they reached the center, the pulses came so regularly that the whole room was aglow. Standing (or flying) in the center, the spell was a divine masterpiece.
“You wrote this?” Jackie soared around the room, bringing flickering light with her as she went.
“No.” Archive took her book up from its sheath on her belt and flicked it open to an illumination spell. She read it, and filled the space with light. The room was a single sphere, a full half mile in diameter. Every inch of interior space was written over with the shape of the spell. She had to shout for Jackie to hear her. “The Equestrians wrote it. If what Sunset Shimmer told me is true, there were tens of thousands of authors. Some of them were spellcasters so powerful they could move stars. What you’re seeing is the preservation spell; the reason any of us survived the Event.”
“Why are you showing me this?” Jackie’s eyes scanned the spell, though of course she could understand very little of what she saw. “Unless... unless you’re going to change it? Can you—” She started to cry, fighting through her tears to keep talking. “Are you going to bring our families back?"
She started walking down, towards one particular section of the spell. “I would if I could, Jackie. Unfortunately, the spell has already sent ponies forward in time. I cannot call them back, and I don’t expect that to change. That doesn’t mean we have to abandon them, though. We can still help them.” She gestured, and a book appeared again in her hand.
“You saw the book I wrote. You read... well, you read some of it, enough to see the point. With a book like that in the hands of every refugee, we could change things. Think about... all the awful things that happen to refugees. Lots of those happen because we don’t have a clue what’s going on. When I started I was no better; I spent months wandering around like an idiot when life would’ve been so much easier if somepony had just told me what the hell was going on. This is my answer... all the answers a returning human might need, along with a few basic... utility functions. As much as I could cram down into a tiny, portable package.”
Jackie glanced between the sprawling room around them and the spell, her eyes wide. Archive could almost see the gears turning in the thestral’s head as she connected the two facts. A book she wanted to give to everyone and a spell that had sent everyone forward in time. She gaped as she finally put together the answer. “Hell no.” She retreated in the air a pace. “You do want to change the Preservation Spell! Didn’t you just tell me something about... tens of thousands of pony wizards made it or whatever? About the power that went into it coming from... gods?”
“Modify is a bit of a misnomer. As I said, there is no way to change the spell. It’s already run its course, it doesn’t truly exist anymore. The only bits of this that are left are the little threads binding every refugee, the ones that sent them into the future. Only those traces remain.” She gestured, and the two of them moved sharply sideways, towards one wall. As she did so, all the runes covering it began to illuminate. “Don’t feel the need to memorize all of this now... just store my whole dream. I’ve crafted a construct to explain all of this to you in the event of my death. She’s waiting—”
Jackie interrupted her, shoving on her shoulder in sudden indignance. “You can make figments?”
Archive had to search her memory in order to find the specific meaning of the word. As she guessed, it was a term from oneiromancy: a non sapient “actor” within dreams, which could respond in certain preprogrammed ways but lacked a soul or any flexibility. Most characters in most dreams matched this description. Making them was probably one of Jackie’s most basic jobs as a dream merchant, since she could custom-design just about anyone or anything a client might want.
“Not quite.” Archive shrugged. “Remember, the rules in here are whatever I want them to be. I can do unicorn magic. What I made was... well, a golem, I suppose. She’s on the bottom floor. I suppose she’s a figment, but... I promise she took me more work. I had to use principles of magic as I understand them, and that meant she was quite difficult. At least I was free to create as much magical energy as I wanted to power her. ANYWAY.” She nudged the thestral’s head, gently turning it to look at the wall again. “I know you won’t understand this yet. Just understand my intention: though we cannot call back the people that have been sent ahead, the Preservation Spell still has traces. It would be possible for someone clever or powerful to use those traces to locate each and every person, no matter where in space and time they arrive.”
She snapped her fingers, teleporting them again. Jackie landed on solid ground beside her in a smaller room, though... this one was just as important. It looked like a massive college lecture hall, though without any seating. Instead, multi-story rotating whiteboards lined every surface, each of them covered with markings. “This is the draft for my spell.” She gestured forward, at the largest section of wall. Transcribed onto plain paper, the spell probably would’ve had 10,000 lines, and many more runes. “This is the most important part. Locked into the Preservation Spell, it can create temporospatial gates to everywhere returning humans appear. No matter where in space or time they are, this will find them and open a door. A door big enough for one of these.” She set the book down on the table in front of them, from behind which a teacher might’ve lectured if one were here.
“I guess that makes sense.” Jackie turned, taking in all the other walls and the spells on them. “And what are... what are those?”
Archive frowned. “Being able to open a door isn’t the only thing we have to do, Jackie. The spell has to get power from somewhere; I’ve started drafting my solution on these boards here, but I’m not there yet. We don’t have enough Alicorns to get it running on their own, so it’ll probably take some creativity. Not to mention... we need billions of these books. It took centuries and automated printing to distribute that many bibles, back in our world. We... don’t have those things anymore.”
She walked up to another large section. “I determined it would require far fewer spells if the books themselves were locked into a sort of stable time-loop, returning to the distribution center when the life of the refugee ended. In that way, we would only need as many books as there would be refugees surviving simultaneously on the whole planet. This number would not be small, but... it wouldn’t grow so fast, either. Of course...”
She turned towards the last section of boards. “This brings us to the final problem. The book must survive that long, which requires a number of stasis spells be cast upon it to prevent various kinds of damage. More importantly, it needs to be written in the language of whoever receives it. Athena and I are both excellent translators, but we can’t know how many of a specific language to prepare and when they’ll be needed...” Archive stood a little straighter, unable to hide the pride she felt at the text on the rest of the boards. Even if Jackie didn’t know what the spells did, that didn’t make the accomplishment any less significant.
“This spell makes the book resonate with the soul of whoever gets it, kinda the way the Preservation spell does. It translates the text into whatever language the refugee knows best, using their own knowledge instead of any repository that would have to be created and maintained.”
Jackie collapsed to her haunches, taking in the room. “What do you expect me to do with all this, Alex?” She gestured around them with her hoof, though she indicated far more than just the one room. There was the whole library to think of, and the vast copy of the Preservation Spell.
“Maybe I’m the best dream pony there is. But dreams are all I know. I can’t print billions of magic books. I can’t figure out how to power this world-changing spell… what makes you think I had a chance to do that if even you couldn’t?” She frowned. “I know Ezri would move the moon for you if she could. For her sake, I’m happy to contribute whatever I can. It’s just… what I can isn’t that much.”
“I know.” Archive turned away, studying the lowest and currently unfinished board. “I just…” She slumped forward, catching herself against the wall. Her whole body started to shake, and tears streamed from her eyes. “I think they’re going to kill me, Jackie. If I’m gone next year, my work can’t die with me.”
“Why would that matter?” Jackie tilted her head to one side. “You’ve died since I met you and you seem fine. Aren’t you immortal?”
Alex turned around, facing the thestral. She couldn’t hide the terror and desperation from her expression. “The Initiative now serves Charybdis, a demon that came through from Equestria. It had a brother, Odium… it almost killed me for good the first time we fought.”
“If Odium knew how to kill me, Charybdis does too. I think his followers have been… planning something. I don’t know what. I think Athena got Isaac switched into the duty roster next week when we think it’s going down, but we can’t be sure.”
“Why bother killing you?” Jackie rose to her hooves again, indignant. “If you’re a political problem, can’t they just throw you out?”
“I know the Initiative's secrets, Jackie. I know you never figured out where this base is— I know. I know where all their little research posts are. I know where their hidden nuclear installations are, the ones ready to defend the city if ponies attack. I know all their safe houses and supply caches.”
“They think you’d betray all that?”
Archive shrugged one human shoulder. “It’s too big a risk.”
“Okay, so… why not lock you up? House arrest, somewhere.”
“Ah.” She looked up again. “It wouldn’t work either. No matter how secret about it they were, people would find out. I’m… Well, the majority of people down here respect me. Some even worship me. Or… what I represent. If the cult’s faction moved against me openly, it would be firing the first shots of a civil war.”
“But they can kill you?”
Archive nodded. “If they kill me for good, I can’t ever tell my supports what they did. Maybe all their preparations are a way to make it look like an accident. I work with dangerous machines all the time— if I died nice and publicly, but didn’t come back… well, my immortality is proof of the divinity I represent, at least to lots of people down here. If I blunder something, then don’t come back, I take away the people’s faith. My followers can claim foul play all they want— all the cult has to say is to ask me when I come back. When that doesn’t happen, well… who’s gonna even remember how I died? It won’t matter.”
“So you leave!” Jackie stopped only inches away, her ears and wings flaring with emotion. “You and ‘big sister’ are real close; have her steal you a ship and fly out! With you gone, Ezri and I should probably go too, but… God, they’d probably be coming for us either way if something happened to you, wouldn’t they?”
Archive nodded, resting a hand briefly on Jackie’s shoulder. “I’m working on evacuation plans. If anything happens to me, you two are gonna be out of the city before the day is out. You can live the rest of your lives far enough that not even the HPI can find you.”
She gripped Jackie’s shoulders tightly, tight enough that the thestral whimpered in pain. She ignored that. “If I can’t get myself out, you’ve got to keep my mission safe. Pass it on to somepony who can finish it, keep it safe until Sunset finds another candidate to be her human alicorn— whatever. Just don’t let it die with me. Please.”