Adrift Off Fiddler's Green: The Final Conversion Bureau Story

by Chatoyance

12. Remembering Crimson Acres

12. Remembering Crimson Acres

Frontpage had spent the night sleeping on his bed from his apartment in Canterlot. Indeed, he had spent the night in his entire apartment building. It still sat, taking up most of a quarter of the stone disk that hung within the colorful, misty void.

The degree of detail was astonishing. He had made many notes within his reporter's notebook to check at a later time, in the real structure, if he could manage to return home. He felt that escaping the void-shrouded, truly alien 'control room' should be possible - the strange device seemed capable of literally anything.

Or, for Crimson's sake, he at least hoped so.

The apartment building in which Frontpage lived in Canterlot city, in room 9732, had been bought and entirely remodeled by two of the very few newfoals that had avoided being shipped out to the Exponential Lands. Proper Equestria had about ten thousand such fortunate, escapees from the necessity of having to start new towns from prepackaged scratch out in vast and empty lands. Some suggested as many as twenty thousand newfoals, but only the princesses knew for sure. For decades, they had been the only former humans that existed anywhere near 'proper' Equestria. When Pointer's Relocations made long distance teleportation common, that changed, dramatically. Newfoals came and went through the Canterlot region constantly now. But the original lucky few had established themselves well before that.

The Ennis-Bradbury was a strange, almost gothic building, and it stood in stark contrast to the normal architecture of pony civilization. This was a large part of the reason that Frontpage had decided to take residence there. Living in minarets of marble and gold, inlaid with jewels, with trotting-rails of platinum or silver was fine, but ultimately remarkably dull. When every building was made thus, they tended, surprisingly, to blend in with each other - and for quite a few years, Frontpage found himself regularly getting lost and having to ask for directions.

The newfoals that had remade the original building, a couple with the names Sandcastle and Summer Raincloud, had the resources to do an astonishing job of the place. Apparently, they had been survivors of one of the unfortunate and tragic groups that had been dumped out in the Exponentials carelessly, lacking in everything they needed to survive. A group of ponies had schemed to isolate the formerly human immigrant invasion as far as possible from native lands. They had become terrified of earth, and believed newfoals were a threat to everything they valued. Hundreds of newly transformed people had suffered and died far from any hope of rescue, when their supplies ran out. Sandcastle and Summer had been the only survivors of their entire party - a group of over 300 newfoals.

They had gotten to stay in Canterlot, as a result, for life. They had been granted a fortune as some degree of compensation, and had, for a while, become the face of the betrayed immigrants as a whole. It had been a stain on the honor of Equestria itself, and the two stallions who had miraculously survived had been accorded every indulgence. They had brought the human game of football - soccer - to Equestria, blended it with elements of basketball, and adapted it to serve three breeds with very different abilities. The new game, Hoofball, had become very popular and a deep new part of Equestrian culture.

They had also created a nostalgic place to live within, a place other newfoals would find familiar and reassuring - the Ennis-Bradbury. Amidst the shining white-and-gold-and-rainbow surroundings, it was almost a dark castle by comparison. Angular, art-deco, moody and odd by pony standards, some were anxious around it a century later. Frontpage absolutely loved the place.

Frontpage took one last look up at the tall building that he had created from nothing just yesterday. Every detail, every room, including ones he had never entered, had been reproduced to the smallest detail. It was as much a test, as a comfort. If he got home one day - WHEN he got home one day, he intended to check his notes and truly confirm that the great alien machine could perfectly copy reality itself.

He needed it to. Because it was his intention to bring Crimson Acres back from the dead.

The ethical problem of what he felt driven to attempt nagged at him. It might not work - more to the point, it might not work fully, or entirely correctly. If what he intended partially failed, the result could be a twisted nightmare, suffering agonies. It could end up lacking memory, or personality, or be physically malformed. Or, it could be as perfect a recreation as the entirety of the Ennis-Bradbury, with every room and every possession within them - apparently - accurately reproduced.

But the bottom line is that he had access to a god-machine, nearly a literal deus-ex-machina, that could indeed, potentially resolve the tragic loss of his partner in this whole mess. A partner that had saved his life at the sacrifice of her own. It would be, he reasoned, as morally cruel to fail to use the machine as the risks it presented. If there was even a chance that a life could be saved, Frontpage felt, then that chance should be taken.

He stepped up to the central, floating stone. Currently it resembled an eight-sided die - an octohedron - and he needed to position himself so that he had use of the widest part of an upward-pointing triangular face. The stone monolith must itself be a hyperspacial object, its morphing the result of the machine slowly rotating through reality, showing various cross-sections of its true, higher dimensional form. It would be literally impossible for his brain, he realized, to picture what it actually looked like. All he could ever comprehend was its shadow in three-space.

The magnitude of what he was playing with shook his confidence. But then he recalled how helpful, how user-friendly the strange system was being. As he watched, the triangular surface in front of him flattened to smoothness, all of the lumpen patterns and designs melting into flat and featureless stone. It was making him an open, free workspace. It knew that he was near, and that he had the intention of using it.

Frontpage tried to avoid thinking of how Crimson Beauty must have died. Burning under the passing of a continent-sized sun-disk as it slid overhead must either have been horrific... or over very quickly. He focused on his memories of Crimson when she was alive - bantering, arguing with him, laughing, sharing dinner. Her amazing flanks and highly attractive legs. That swishing tail. The way she tilted her ear when...

Frontpage shook his head. The whole package. It was important to remember all of Crimson Acres. Smart, refined, a little too proper at times - that was her defense mechanism - her amazing ability to handle pressure and make brave choices... that last thought forced Frontpage to pause. Her courage had been his salvation. He owed her. He owed her any risk, to try to bring her back.

He worked to form as complete an image as he could of Crimson Beauty Acres within his mind. He pictured her exactly at the moment she had kicked him up into the air, above the blue excavation within the dome of the sky. Curled onto her back, kicking his keister with all of her might, right into that patch of ribbon. Crimson, giving her life for his.

On the marble before him, a clear bas-relief image of Crimson Acres formed. This was very different than before, when there had been a circular pit surrounded by strange markings. The relief image rotated, animating, the image showing Crimson from all angles. It was still strange to see hard rock changing shape to form images. This was it, this had to be it. The image looked just like his imagination, Crimson on her back, in mid kick. Frontpage took the golden stylus ball in his hoof.

He slammed it, purposefully, against the stone representation of Crimson.

He turned to face the shimmer of light behind him. The now expected three-dimensional grid formed, laser lines hanging in the air. Streams of force and energy coalesced within the cage of light, collecting into a region the size and rough shape of a pony laying on its back. A wave of existential dread swept over Frontpage. He was resurrecting the dead. He was literally playing god.

It had been said, he had once heard, that the elite of the earth, who once lived within a special masada on the backside of Canterlot Mountain, had petitioned Celestia herself to bring one of their members back to life when he had died. She had refused utterly. Frontpage didn't know the whole story, but it struck him that he was daring something even the local goddesses - for all intents - were unwilling to do. And they must know of this machine. It might even be the source of all of their considerable power.

It hit him, only now, that he might get in a great deal of trouble for merely having seen this place, much less played with what was within it.

Too late now.

Crimson Beauty flopped to the ground. She had been curled, her back against the azure wall of the carved canyon of sky-stuff, now she was suddenly without support. Her body uncurled as she fell, her head smacking the marble. She rolled to one side, in pain, her forelegs brought to her skull so that her hooves could massage it. "OW!"

Frontpage stared. He was terrified to move. The full meaning of what he had done flooded him.

"Ow... oh, what... ow, ow... where? How? What?" Crimson Beauty Acres had forgotten her pain and was looking around in confusion. Her gaze lingered on the improbable apartment building standing on the stone. Her eyes searched the color-splashed gray mist of the surrounding void. Gradually, she noticed the floating stone control monolith, and then Frontpage, standing in front of it. "Frontpage?"

Crimson had almost certainly died, turned to a charcoal briquette within that pit of sky. Frontpage shivered as he watched her carefully stand. Crimson's original body was ash, through that strip of ribbon on the far edge of the marble disk. It must still be there. Yet here was Crimson, recreated, as she was, just moments before becoming pony barbecue. Remade, from pure energy by a truly alien technology.

She was Thomas Riker.

Frontpage had enjoyed many pre-collapse holoshows. Most were presented in flat mode, as images on a plane, because before holoprograms, all visual media was two-dimensional. Even supposedly three-D works were just tricks of stereoscopic projection onto two dimensional planes. But some shows enjoyed remastering. Clever Artificial Intelligences worked over certain popular old shows and reworked them into true holographic representations. They extrapolated missing sides, details, and entire environments. Whether the program had been live action or animated, a fully holocompatible, three-dimensional representation could be generated. Sometimes, if the shows were popular, expanded editions existed of them where human artists had been authorized to generate entirely new content - allowing for user exploration and even interaction with unseen but implied locations and even characters.

One of the many such retroholoed series and their spin-offs was a show called 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'. It had one episode that immediately came to his mind, as he goggled the reborn Crimson Acres. Within Star Trek existed the conceit that matter - including human beings - could be broken down into a stream of energy, stored temporarily, then beamed to another location where it would be recreated again. Called a 'transporter', the technology allowed cast members to effectively teleport from ship to planet or even from ship to ship without requiring shuttle or air lock.

One episode explored the existential implications of transporter technology. In it, a main character, named William Riker, beams up from a planet. He goes about his life for over a decade. Returning to the same planet, the crew of the ship discovers that down on the planet there is a second William Riker. From his perspective the transporter failed to transport him at all, and he had stepped out, abandoned and lost. He had lived out the last decade alone on an empty planet.

When the two Rikers meet, they are the same man, yet they have lived different lives. Each claims to be the true and 'real' person, and each has a completely valid argument. In the end, the planet-bound Riker takes the name of 'Tom', and the two versions of the same man settle for considering each other brothers, 'twins', because that is the easiest way to resolve such an impossible, horrific situation. But worst of all is the implication - that all any person is can be summed up by describing them as a pattern of information, and information... can be duplicated.

Frontpage resolved to lie, as hard and as fiercely as he could about the full nature of what he had done. He had last watched that episode over a century ago, but what little he remembered of it suggested that not a bit of it had been easy, nice, or fun for any of the characters on the show. The original Crimson Acres had burned to death, turned to ash like the end of the pencil he had pushed through the snippet of dimensional ribbon. The newly created Crimson was alone, singular, the one and only version of the unique pattern that defined her, the only Crimson Beauty Acres in all of time and space.

Crimson did not deserve to be forced to question her own legitimacy with regard to being herself. She had died for him - spending the rest of her days suffering the existential horror that she might be some kind of copy would be terrible. It just wouldn't be right to shove such an unsolvable quandary upon her... not that any conception of 'right' or 'wrong' had much to do with such morally transcendent technology. He had left such concepts as good and evil both far behind the moment he had first touched such a godlike machine.

"Crimson..." His voice choked. The tears he had been willfully suppressing were attempting to make up for lost time.

"Frontpage! How did I get here? What is this place? What's an apartment building doing here, and... Frontpage? What's the matter? Oh, you're crying! Poor dear frontpage! What's happened... come here, come here, what's the matter, hmmm?"

Plantain - the ghost of Plantain - had worked out a very clever way to communicate. Her lab coat had been repurposed as a sort of impromptu whiteboard. Laying on her side, the lab coat spread and held taut across her four wide-spread legs, she bent her long neck, marker in mouth, and struggled to write in mirror-letters. The ink seeped through the cloth, mostly becoming legible to Peony, Tumble, Jinx and Clover.

Plantain had been joined by another specter - her old friend, Crème Bûnnée, the lapine Dance Master of the Royal Equestrian Happy Pony Show. The two had worked as a team to make the clumsy writing surface work, and Crème served to pass Plantain markers, and to anchor Plantain's belongings, preventing them from falling through the wooden floor.

Now confident that the massing spooks could not affect solid matter - including ponies - in any way, they had returned to the upstairs, away from the ghost-repellent Bevelmeiter tube in the basement. There had been breakfast for the living ponies - the dead seemed unaffected by hunger or thirst - and even Jinx had settled down and come to see phantoms in the yard and house as the new normal. It was essentially necessary, because their number had been steadily increasing.

"You know, Tumble... this really isn't that different, when I think of it, from when Celestia 'haunted' the Good Families, back when I was just a foal. It's easy to not even think of them as 'ghosts' as such, now." Peony had allowed the two fillies to go play in their room, since it seemed clear that the apparitions presented no threat whatsoever. They had become bored with the effort to communicate... slowly... with Plantain and desired to go romp out in the yard. Tumble hadn't felt comfortable with that, he was still somewhat suspicious thanks to having read forbidden earthly horror novels, so the compromise of allowing Jinx and Clover to repair to their room was reached.

"Me not forget story love tell of time before Equestria. But surely spirit invasion different?" Tumble had brought the last of the melonade out to slake their thirst. Waiting for clumsy backward responses scribbled on a stretched lab coat, while writing questions on a blackboard turned out to be slow, thirsty work. It was also problematic - the labcoat was running out of room to write on.

"No, not functionally." Peony was waiting on Plantain to finish describing what being dead felt like. Presented with such an opportunity, it was a question that could not help but be asked. "Celestia passed through walls and objects, she wasn't translucent - I couldn't see through her - and she didn't glow, but neither did she cast a shadow. And I could hear her, clearly. Or I thought I could. Nopony else could. Or see her. We each got our own Celestia, that only we could see and hear. Drove my mother... actually, it didn't bother my mother as much as it did the other Good Family parents. I think my mother rather enjoyed the experience, though she didn't dare admit it at the time."

Haint Plantain had finished. ᖷIЯST WAƧ GOOD. THEN WORSE. ИOW ИO FUN. LIKE BAD GAMƎ. NO ƧOUИᗡ BAD GRAPHIƆƧ.

Tumble mouthed the shaky printing. Plantain occasionally failed to mirror-reverse some of the letters. It was clearly difficult for her. "Answer much curious. Me not expect heaven suffer from signal degradation. Entire day nothing but ontological nightmare. Troubled dog need hug."

Peony walked to her husband and held him tight, as they lay on the large sofa together. She gave the diamond dog an affectionate kiss, and then relaxed in his arms.

Spooky Plantain and creepy Crème took this as a time out, and relaxed their efforts. Peony watched as Plantain pulled her extended legs to her, allowing them to rest on the wood plantation house floor. She visibly seemed relieved, as if there had been real effort involved in holding the spread-eagle position. Her geist was breathing hard. She used her mouth to massage her transparent, glowing legs.

"Tumble... why would a dead pony... a spirit from beyond... have tired limbs? Why would they be out of breath? Why would they need to breathe at all?" Many things about this supernatural event did not seem to add up. The lack of hunger or thirst was reasonable - why would a ghost need such things, with no body to feed? But breathing was just as much of a bodily function, and Plantain, shade or not, clearly looked exhausted. And of course there was the matter of clothing and belongings having souls, somehow. Universal animism aside, it was at least weird that 'nonliving' spectral objects were unaffected by the floor, while the formerly living definitely were. It apparently took effort for a 'living' or animal ghost to push through a horizontal material surface, but no effort if the surface was vertical. That was a bizarrely specific 'law' of spook physics.

"Me not know. Right now, me not care. Tumble also tired."

Peony snuggled for a while. Plantain, across the floor, was laying on her side entirely, with little Crème pressed possessively into her. They had been apart for so very long, it must be overwhelming to finally be together again.

"Tumble!"

"Mnnn... what precious Peony. Tumble sleepy. Up all night."

"Tumble!" Peony had found her second wind. She was upright on the sofa, raised on her forelegs. "This is fiction!"

"What? Me no understand. This happen now. This real. That problem. That big problem for Tumble."

Peony stared at Plantain and Crème on the floor. "In all those earth stories, and in the old movies - I saw old movies, when I was still human, way back when - in every last one of them, ghosts could walk on floors and pass through walls! They never just fell through the ground. Got sucked down, deliberately shot down, but never just fell, helplessly down. And they didn't float that much either. They walked. Creaky hoofsteps in the dark, stomps on the floor - they had weight and could make noise, but most of all, floors were solid for them but walls weren't!"

"Yeah, Tumble seen too." The huge diamond dog was weary and had fussed entirely too much with vaporous apparitions for now. In addition to forbidden books, there were secret showings of equally forbidden films that could be indulged in. The rumor was that a lot of old earth material that Celestia had banned somehow made it to Equestria despite her prohibitions. There were many theories - humans scientists had somehow perfected a process for converting earth matter to Equestrian dweons - but the wildest notion was that Celestia's sister, the princess Luna, had secretly rebelled. In light of her... history... some considered this the most likely explanation.

"Well, we know that's fiction, because earth's universe had no spiritual component at all. Just chemicals and random chance. Finding that out for sure, from Celestia when she stayed with the Good Families... as a sort of ghost... was one of the biggest things that convinced the worldgovernment to allow the Bureaus and Conversion!"

Tumble realized he was not going to get any sleep, any time soon. He sat up from where he had comfortably slumped, and rubbed his rheumy eyes. "Tumble tired, Peony. Not understand. Just say!"

Peony waved at Plantain and Crème. The little bunny raised a paw and waved back. "Tumble, the way these ghosties act, the way they interact with everything, it makes no sense. It's ridiculous. They have clothing, and tools, and all the stuff they had on them when they died. Just like the fictional ghosts from old earth stories and movies. They can walk on floors, but walls - anything vertical, but not horizontal - is just air to them. And they need air, or something like air, because they can get out of breath. And have sore muscles, which doesn't make sense since technically, they don't have bodies! Do you see?"

Tumble thought for some time. He was weary, but he could tell his pony wife had a valid point. "Is suspicious. Not make sense except in reference to old earth ghost stories. Those silly, if think about. Rules for ghosts arbitrary. Good for ease of filming creepy picture, bad if considered rationally. Me agree." Tumble sat erect now, fully awake. "What if... Celestia crudely make world based on earth, then make afterlife in same manner?"

Peony nodded, excited.

"What if Celestia make death based on poor understanding of what glimpsed? What if Celestia make death same accuracy as she imitate earth sun and moon?"

Peony kissed her beloved dog and nibbled his ears. "Exactly! You are such a smarty! That has to be it - on earth, the sun and moon were gigantic balls of fire and rock that spun through an infinite darkness. In Equestria, the sun and moon look similar, very similar, but they are disks sliding on a crystal dome. She only had the appearance to work from... or maybe, with life and death..." She stared at Plantain and Crème "...maybe she used stories that... humans... told her. Somehow."

"But that would be far in past. Equestria exist long before collide with earth. Celestia must..."

"Celestia must have made contact with human beings ages before the time of the Bureaus. She must have visited, at least once, and she must have either talked to humans, or heard their stories about what they believed... about what death meant. There was a rumor..."

Tumble gave his mare a loving lick. "Rumor?"

"Yes. That one of the families of the court itself is descended from an ancient human. Maybe that's why Celestia bothered with earth at all!" Peony kissed her dog back. "No. It would have to be further back even than that. Death has been a part of Equestria for as long as history records. There are no ponies alive from the dawn of time - well except for Soliloquy, of course. The mare that was part of Plantain's show? She was preserved in stone from the very first ponies ever, or so I was told. That was ten thousand years ago. They must have had death then."

Tumble scratched his chin with a claw. "What if they not have death? What if that come later? How we know? All dead now, and history never trustworthy. History always serve political necessity."

"We need to contact Lady Soliloquy! We need to ask her!" Peony was up and moving towards the blackboard that had been propped up next to the dining table. "I'll tell Plantain and Crème!"

Tumble groaned. "Tell spooks we sleep first, then go find stone pony show star. Ghost can wait, have all eternity!"

Peony stared at her husband. "No, Tumble. That's what I'm getting out of all of this. I don't think they do. Not any more at least."