Chapter 2
“The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content.”
~Albert Einstein
So begins this account, set in a land far, far away. This is not a novel, for there is too much to explain. But it is not a history either. It explains in the form of a story, a story of ideas and civilizations. A meeting between civilizations and the ideas they embody, glimpsed through the story of the people involved.
The story involves two civilizations, who are the real heroes setting forth into the cosmos filled with perils and illusions. But these are not young peoples. They are not akin to the youth beginning the hero's journey, finding what their place in the universe is and what it is they stand for. These are mature systems, with long histories going back through the eons. They have developed and matured, passing the age where they were victims of impersonal historical forces, and now emerging on the cusp of being able to rebuild reality in their own image.
Some have dared to call them utopias. This is perhaps apt, as both serve as an ideal type for a vision of justice, and of politics. They are the desirable no place turned into a real some place, and perhaps even a good place. They are not just materially affluent, but real communities built around a shared vision of a good life, one where the drudgery of survival is minimized to allow its citizens to focus on what its theorists believe really matters in life.
Our dramatis personae begins with some mea culpas by the author on the limits of language. For certain necessary concepts have long passed out of common usage in my native Marain, and for some concepts there have never been the right words in that language. This is further complicated by the difficulties of translation presented by the languages of the participants, Equestrian and Marain, into English.(1)
Thus, this account may find anachronisms abound, and the occasional tortured attempt at translating idiomatic constructions.
We begin with the land of Equestria, and the three (some say four) tribes of Ponies who inhabit there as the dominant species. At first glance, they do not seem to be much. They exist in a relatively low level of technological development, firmly rooted in the Age of Scarcity. But through the orderly workings of their polity, as well as their advanced innate mastery of physics, they have been able to accomplish a level of distributive justice that is truly rare among species of their developmental level.
There is a certain unfairness in comparing the accomplishments of different civilizations, but among the countless ones studied and cataloged, they are unique in multiple capacities.
The most obvious, of course, is their innate ability to channel the zero-point energy of the Grid common to all members of their species. While they are not the only organic species cataloged with such capacities (though their number are exceedingly rare), none have so general or great of control. Almost as rare for their given level of development is the generalized commitment to justice of their society.
While there are those who would argue that being so deeply rooted in the Age of Scarcity disqualifies them, there is a distinct utopian streak to Equestria. Unlike the utopias of modernity(2), Equestria is not concerned greatly with economic justice or social leveling. Their society is heavily stratified, with clear class distinctions and great disparities between the wealth of the most and least affluent.
This is not to say that they unconcerned with distributive justice. Whether it is deemed simple realism, or defeatism, they have accepted great inequalities of economic and political power. However, this is tempered with postmodernity's concern with the good life, which requires certain material justice be guaranteed. Thus, while there are rich and poor, masters and workers, there remains commitment to remove the worst excesses.
Thus, while there are poor, true destitution is very rare. While they are compelled to work by economic necessity, few toil. Society is bound together tightly by shared commitments to a good life not based around tangible goods, but the power of friendship and solidarity.
The Culture, on the other hand, are a very different vision of utopia. For a civilization that long ago spread amongst the stars, the Culture is fixated entirely on the problems of modernity. The Culture has one general answer for social problems: infinite abundance made possible by rational social planning.
The eleven thousand year history of the Culture has been dominated by two themes. The primary theme is unrestrained hedonism. With their level of scientific mastery, they have spread amongst the stars, building paradise wherever they wished. Culture citizens, whether organic humanoids or sapient AIs, live in a society without laws or even a discernible government. In the most direct terms possible, the Culture is an anarchist, communist utopia, a possible end state of a civilization's social evolution. The rule of people has given away to the administration of things, and with the cornucopia provided by technology toil is entirely unnecessary, whatever passes for “work” is synonymous with hobby or play.
The average Culture citizen busies himself or herself following whatever strikes their fancy over the course of their long lives. The AIs which fulfill the bulk of administrative work are so advanced and so powerful that it takes a tiny fraction of their attention, the rest of which is spent following the same hedonistic impulse to do whatever strikes their fancy as any organic Culture.
There is, however, a dissonant chord. Not everyone is content to just merely live in utopia. There is a strong, even zealous, moral urge to meddle in less advanced civilizations. The Culture has no prime directive of non-interference. But they are not rash about interference; they are careful, patient and calculating. Even down-right secretive and dastardly at times.
This is the role of the diplomatic/explorer/scientific arm Contact.
Our tale concerns members of Contact, specifically the secretive and conniving sub-group of Special Circumstances; those who do dirty work in the name of a greater good.
It was a very long time before any of the cowering ponies dared to stir. Scared witless by the fireball's near miss, even the bravest took a considerable time to collect their wits before slowly creeping out from their hastily prepared cover.
Twilight spent that time huddled together with Dash under a picnic table, feeling rather stupid. She was an intellectual, priding her self on her keen wits and erudite mind. A veritable once in an age prodigy and polymath, not given towards baser instincts. And yet here she was, sheltering under a wooden table.
True, it had been rather sturdily constructed by one of Ponyville's master carpenter ponies, and it was certainly made to last. But regardless of how she tried spinning her reaction, it was all irrelevant. A meteorite of that size meant that the table might as well have been made from tissue paper.
She didn't know what possessed her to make such a futile gesture, but she didn't like it. Dash began to stir first. With great urgency, she combed over the still slightly shocked Twilight, looking for signs of injury.
“Dash, stop it, I'm alright!” protested Twilight. “We shouldn't be alright with what happened...but we are.”
Dash sighed in relief. With some reluctance, she started looking for her other friends, to satisfy that pressing need to make sure they were okay. She knew it was totally unnecessary, but some deep, primal urge in her required her to see them with her own two eyes.
Twilight stumbled to her feet uneasily. For a long moment, she stared off at the burning fires and rising column of smoke on the horizon. That near miss hadn't been mere fortune, unless her eyes had deceived her. The strange, silvery smooth meteorite had changed course at the last instant, sparing the town of Ponyville from total annihilation. But that was just hard to believe...falling rocks didn't suddenly change course.
But it wasn't a rock. It couldn't have been if it looked like that, unless she'd hallucinated the whole thing.
“Okay Twilight,” she said to herself, “Let's a get a grip. Don't fret over the unexpected result of an experiment, verify. But don't contaminate. Confirm what you saw, but don't suggest.”
It was comforting to say it out loud. Enough for action, at least. She began frantically searching for Rainbow Dash. She needed Dash's sharp eyes and aerodynamic instincts right now. She weaved through the frenzy of frightened ponies with deliberate purpose, rushing to find the cyan pegasus.
It took but a moment to find her. Ever loyal Dash had found the rest of her close friends, was busily making sure they were all okay.
“Rainbow Dash! I need to talk to you, this is important,” said Twilight, out of breath from all this excitement.
“Can't it wait Twilight? I'm a little busy at the moment,” said Dash, not once taking her attention off finding the sprain in Fluttershy's wing.
Amidst the calamity of the night's unplanned excitement, Fluttershy was surprisingly calm. Must have been the pain of her injured wing, probably caused by some careless pony nearly trampling her, distracting her from the memory of the terror they must have all felt. Dash worked expertly in setting her wing back into proper alignment.
The din of panic slowly retreated, and the normal peaceful order of Ponyville was starting to return. The ponies who lived here were nothing if not resilient, but Twilight couldn't bear the thought of telling them that the worst may be yet to come.
“Dash! This is really important. Fluttershy's fine, I just need to talk to you. Now!” Twilight said sternly. She helped nudge Fluttershy to her feet, if only to get this done quicker.
Dash huffed with irritation. “Jeesh, don't be so pushy, nerd.”
“Don't make me have to be pushy then. I need you to tell me what you saw.”
Dash sighed, rolling her eyes with irritation. “Well, what was there to see...it was a falling star. Can't say I've seen any that up close before.” She casually swatted at a small insect with a flick of her tail.
Don't poison the experiment, Twilight Sparkle. Don't poison the experiment, Twilight Sparkle. She repeated this mantra silently. Confirming what she saw was more important than anything. “Look, Dash,” she cried, “What did the falling star look like to you. Just tell me everything you remember about it, and don't ask why. Just trust me that this is important.”
Dash gave Twilight a queer look, raising an eyebrow suspiciously. Nevertheless, she did what she was asked. “Well...it was surrounded by what looked like fire...and I could certainly feel the heat. But if you looked closely, you could see a smooth surface under the flames, sorta like a mirror almost. And for a moment, I thought it was flying. I definitely saw it pull up and bank at the last moment.” She swatted at the persistent insect again.
Twilight took a deep breath. So she hadn't been hallucinating. “So you saw it too then. You saw a falling star turn, just like I did.”
“Why all the cloak and dagger stuff, Twilight? Couldn't you have just told me what you saw?”
The insect buzzed near Twilight's ears now, but she ignored it. Science needed to be done. “I wanted to hear you say it unprompted. Look, it's kind of hard to explain, but I was reading this book about memory, and it said that a pony's memory can be easily influenced and details suggested to--”
“Enough! I get it, I get it. Don't bore me with this stuff.” Dash's suspicious stare was back now, boring a hole into the lavender alicorn. “Listen, what are you scheming? You've got this look in your eye, and that just leads to trouble.”
“Never mind that, are you going to come looking for aliens with me or not?”
“Whoa...hold your horses Twilight Sparkle, you're not actually suggesting that there were alien ponies inside that thing?”
Indeed she had been suggesting just that. It also didn't take much for Dash to get over her reluctance, and summon up the derring-do to go investigate the crash sight. By first light, when they'd agreed to meet to begin their adventure, she was already practically chomping at the bit.(3)
Spurred on by the promise of adventure, and the possibility of strange new worlds to explore, the pair set off, following the trail of smoke. It took about a little over than an hour to reach the unidentified falling object's resting place. They came to the source of the smoke and fog, with only a hazy impression coming through the early morning fog. The fires had mostly gone ought, only smoldering, and so they touched down.
The anomaly turned out to be a long scar in the ground, like a giant hoe had scraped across the earth, digging a long furrow overturning trees in its wake. The gash was over two hundred meters wide, and half that deep where the object made landfall. As it had dug into the earth, it created a great wave of dirt and rocks. As the wave built, the object must have leaped into the air again for a moment, for the furrow ended abruptly before beginning anew. They followed it on foot, gawking at the great yet casual destruction the falling star had wrought.
There were no words for this. Twilight had tried, desperately, to say something. To find anything to talk with Dash about it. It was unlike anything she had ever imagined. Perhaps even unlike anything she could have imagined.
Dash walked along behind Twilight. A silent terror filled her from head to hoof, as she imagined what would have happened to Ponyville had it been hit.
The rising sun parted the fog as they came at last to the falling star. It was a smooth, cylindrical object, fatter on one end than the other. Its surface had clearly once been polished to a mirror shine, but now was marred by soot, and somewhat wrinkled from the force of the impact. The fatter end was mostly flat, though it had four circular protrusions, arranged in a diamond shaped pattern. The narrow end came to a sharp point, almost like a ship's prow.
Whatever it was, it was enormous. Twilight cursed herself for not bringing a measuring tape, if only to satisfy her desire for precision. “Starswirl's beard!” she cried, “Look at the size of that thing!”
“Wow,” Dash said in awe. “It's longer than the tallest skyscraper in Manehattan is tall.(4)” It was an apt comparison; if it were set upright on its fat-end, it might easily pass for some stranger hyperfuturistic skyscraper. It was easily between four and five hundred meters long, and nearly one hundred meters wide on the fat end.
They walked uneasily along the ridge of the crater, not daring to get any closer.
“What do you think it is? It doesn't have any wings...how could it have flown or turned like that?” Dash flapped her wings uneasily, almost taking flight as she talked. As she trotted on ahead of Twilight, they both paid no mind to where they were walking. Their eyes were fixed on the strange falling star.
Before Twilight could respond, a hatch swung open on the side of the object, followed by a rush of vapor, like the steam from the pistons on a train. The two ponies jumped in surprise, barely containing their screams.
A tall, gangly creature was standing in the open hatch. It threw a line of some sort out, and began climbing down. With an eep of surprise, Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash tore down the outside of the embankment. Their beating wings kicked up puffs of dust and they half-ran, half-flew into the nearest cover, a pile of trees overturned into thick brush.
As she dove into the dense thicket, Twilight smashed into another warm, furry body. She almost screamed in panic as she tumbled and rolled with the other creature. The hooves on the other creature confirmed it was a pony as they smacked into her belly and legs. The blunt horn poking into her neck confirmed that the other creature was a unicorn.
The other unicorn gave a soft, feminine cry as she disentangled herself from Twilight. For what seemed like a split second, there was almost a look of complete shock on the unfamiliar unicorn's face. It quickly regained composure, calmly retrieving her olive drab fedora and replacing it on her head. She sat on her haunches in complete silence, staring impassively at Twilight.
“Hey, sorry about running into you,” Twilight whispered, “I wasn't really paying attention.”
The other unicorn raised an eyebrow inquisitively. She spoke slowly, just as quietly as Twilight had. “I'm sorry about being in your way. I didn't really see you coming, you were in such an awful hurry.”
An insect buzzed at Twilight's face again. With a shake, it was dislodged. “Well, now that we're both sorry, we haven't been properly introduced.” Twilight extended a hoof in greeting.
After a moments hesitation, the other unicorn extended a hoof as well, bumping her hoof into Twilight's.
The gears whirred in Twilight's head for a moment. Slightly strange accent + Somewhat unsure of the language + unfamiliar with hoofshaking = Foreigner. “Heh, you're not from around here, are you,” she said.
“I suppose you could say that,” the other unicorn replied, chuckling quietly.
“Well, my name is Twilight Sparkle. I'm here with my friend Rainbow Dash...she's the pegasus standing over there, scowling at us with that suspicious look on her face.”
“Hey! I was not scowling!” Dash half-cried, half-whispered, trying not to be too loud while still straining to vent her disappointment.
“Well, Twilight Sparkle, you may call me Diggy Whimsy,” she replied with a small curtsy. She was a cream colored unicorn, with navy blue hair and golden eyes. Along with a well worn fedora, she had some old olive drab saddlebags, filled with tools and gear.
“You must be here for the same reason we are.” Dash interjected.
“Why else would I be here?” Diggy replied.
“So you saw that strange falling star!” Twilight beamed with excitement. “Did you see that strange creature climbing out of it...I think we have a real alien spaceship here!”
“Exciting isn't it?” Diggy smiled.
“Exciting? That thing almost destroyed our town! Exciting isn't the word I'd choose to describe it!” Dash said in a huff.
“Rainbow Dash! Be nice, she had no way of knowing, did you?” said Twilight.
“Well, not right away,” Diggy replied, slowly backing away from Rainbow Dash.
“You're an archeologist, right?” said Twilight, “I need you to come look at something. I think I saw somepony climbing out of that spaceship.”
“I guess you could call me one.”
“Just wait til you see this thing, it looks so weird!”
Diziet Sma sneezed suddenly. Maybe some sort of irritant stirred up from the surrounding forest...
“Don't spit on me,” said the drone she held cradled in her arms.
“Look, Skaffen, you could be just a tad grateful for me carrying you around.” Sma had just finished gathering the gear she'd hauled down into her pack. She surveyed the surroundings, grimacing at the wake of destruction they'd left.
“Dizzy, you'd be a sourpuss too if someone cut your legs off.”
“As you are so fond of pointing out, you don't have any 'frail, meat appendages', so I'm afraid I don't see the comparison.” She stuck her tongue out him for good measure.
“I know exactly where that tongue has been. Get it away from me,” it snarked.
“Spoilsport,” she said.
Dizzy climbed up the embankment, her feet digging into the soft, freshly plowed earth. It was steep, and to avoid sliding back down she often balanced with one of her hands, clutching onto larger boulders or digging deep into the soil.
The brown earth smelled alive, and it was invigorating.
“You know, it's nice to go planetside some times. There's a lovely unpredictability to the ecosystems of a natural planet.”
“Yes, I suppose if you're not being drowned in a flood, or roasted alive by a heat wave, it might be considered lovely,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw remarked quietly. Its aura, which had finally flickered back to life around dawn local time, was a sickly green color of melancholy. “But what I'm more concerned about right now is that you let the Ship's avatar go gallivanting out into this wilderness alone.”
“Tsk tsk, you should know that it is nearly impossible to force a Mind to do anything.”
They reached the top of the embankment, almost level with the hatch she'd rappelled out of. Tumbling back down would be rather painful, Dizzy thought as balanced on the peak. An entire forest worth of trees had been strewn out like matchsticks by the crashing GCU.
“I suppose, Dizzy. But why are you bothering,” it asked, “we're stranded on a planet that hasn't even achieved spaceflight yet. What the hell are we going to be able to do by mingling with the locals?”
“You heard what It Belongs in a Museum said just as well as I did, old friend. There is a bubble of altered space-time being projected from this planet, and what from little data we can collect, the locals seem to be interfacing with that.”
The droned tutted in frustration. “All of our systems are compromised. All the data we collect is probably junk, and the Ship can give us no indication that the sensors that are still functioning can be relied upon. Damn it woman, the recon swarms can't even transmit a video feed through the interference. We're lucky we've even got audio.”
“We have to try. If there's even the slightest possibility that the locals are accessing both infraspace and ultraspace simultaneously, we need to find out for sure, and how the hell they're doing it. Without access to the Grid, we're stranded. Without being able to transition to hyperspace, we're stranded. If word gets out about this region, then it will be the Excession incident all over again.”
Skaffen-Amtiskaw groaned.
“You're groaning because you know I'm right,” she pressed on, “And what we do know for certain is that unless we can learn the secret of this altered region of space time, this whole planet is in danger. The laws of the universe are a bit different here. And the ship's stockpiles of Collapsed antimatter are slowly losing containment.”
Collapsed antimatter was an innocuous term, but it concealed an unfathomable potential danger. It combined all the inherent dangers of neutron degenerate matter, the hyperdense stuff neutron stars are made of, with the dangers of antimatter. A lump the size of a sugar cube could weigh as much as a mountain, depending on just how compressed it was. And when it reacts with the equal mass of degenerate normal matter, there is a total conversion of the mass into energy.
The laws of physics were different here. And this difference ensured that the force fields containing the GCU's stockpile of CAM were failing. The near absolute zero antimatter charges, whether used as energy sources or warheads were, were a ticking timebomb. Without forcefields to contain them, only the hyperslow atomic motion was preventing total collapse. It was only a matter of time before some tiny atoms began to escape, reacting with the container walls in the process. The resulting release of energy would eventually cause a chain reaction, which would cascade into a total containment failure, obliterating the ship. And the entire planet.
1. It is easy for the author of this account to make such apologies because he isn't the one translating. The aforementioned torturous translations will be annotated.
2. Like this one. Marain has a large vocabulary of words to describe historical and developmental epochs for which there is no easy English counterpart. “Modernity” and “postmodernity” are the only words in Earther philosophy that closely describe the eras of early advanced era rapidly developing industrial capitalist development and late post-industrial consumerist developed capitalism. Quite obviously, such eras would not be “modern” to the Culture, but rather quaint and archaic, a fact that the author was callously unaware of when he flippantly threw around technical jargon.
3. In review of my translation, the writer has urged me to assure you that these equine puns are not an invention, and are in fact an indispensable part of the Equestrian language.
4. Though it is doubly superfluous by now, the writer again urges me to make it explicit that I am not making this up, and that there is an Equestrian city that bears eerie similarity to the Earth city/borough of Manhattan, and has a such a similarly contrived etymological origin that it can only be rendered as “Manehatten” in English.
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The amount of 'win' in this chapter can only be described by referencing theory's pertaining to the density of matter at the center of an ultra-massive singularity.
this is getting good
Great chapter, really enjoy the style you have going here.
The the plot, as they say, thickens.
Looking forward to the next update.
~Skeeter The Lurker
Can't wait for more.... This is definitely a good read.
I might have enjoyed this chapter, had you not interrupted a perfectly good fic with an essay.
An essay about things I already knew. Equestria and the Culture can both be called utopias? Really? You're going to insert an essay into the middle of a fic to tell me that?
nice
The intro was intrusive. Most of it was irrelevant to the narrative, and the parts that were relevant would be better worked into the actual story. Also, the content reads like a foreword, but it's at the top of chapter 2.
Uh, you're kind of missing a verb here.
Oh, irony...
Anyway, fantastic stuff here. Nothing says "doom" quite like antineutronium, and the use of no fewer than two footnotes to confirm that the author did not make up the horse puns was brilliant. Definitely looking forward to more as the cultures collide. Especially when Pinkie Pie shows up.
Heh. Even a mind can't deceive Twi. Then again it's not at full potential.
Few typos again. "Ought" being the most noticeable.
2986108
Well, I didn't know any of that about the Culture, so I appreciated it.
2988375
I think that if you're going to read a crossover with a series you've never read, then not understanding the setting is a risk you have chosen to take.
2988578 I'd be a rather poor sport if I didn't give readers like them the cliffnotes version. The Culture has a strong, loyal following, and frankly I was surprised at how many turned up on fimfiction, but that doesn't mean I'm going to exclude people who showed interest but didn't know.
I'd hardly call it an "essay" anyway, and it's an integral part of the framing device I've chosen. You're free to not like it. But it is important, because it establishes a specific interpretation of the MLP setting. (And it gives me an opportunity, like any frustrated student, to poke fun at the figures I've been studying, but that's an author's indulgence that really isn't important :P )
Anyway...I'll get around to fixing the typos and accidentally omitted words sometime later.
2988669
But could you not have worked that exposition into the actual story instead of completely breaking the flow?
This is interesting, and very different from how I would imagine a Culture/Equestia crossover. (I would have had Equestria as a rogue planet, Celestia and Luna as avatars of an eccentric Mind(s) who are keeping the planet warm with Gridfire, and unicorn horns are biological Effectors...)
2990481 Whoever said that they aren't biological effectors
2988740
Well, trying to work that kind of thing into the narrative usually results in horrible clunky stuff like
2986793 Agreed. The entire first section could be cut, and it would only make the work better. My eyes were glazing over by the end of the first paragraph. "Show, don't tell," is one of the most basic rules of keeping a story interesting.
Just one thing: it is much easier to read footnotes online if they are consistently marked. If you use (1) in the text, using (1) to label the footnote makes it easy to find for. If you use different markings within the text and at the beginning of the footnote, either you have to know (and change in the Find box) the format for each one, or you have to find for the number by itself (and get a whole lot of false positives from things like read later counts, post numbers, timestamps, and so on).
Nice, I want to see it continued.
Two small typos:
@chapter1
Then came
@chapter2
over there,
3196243 Thanks for the comments. Chapter 3 is in the pipe, though things have been a bit busy as of late. Maybe by this weekend :)
This is interesting. I've heard a few things about the Culture series, though I've not read it. Maybe I should change that.
Also, might we have another chapter?
3488710 Though I'm obviously rather biased, IMHO it's one of the best modern sci-fi series, and certainly in the space opera genre. Starting with Player of Games is probably the best way, though the first book, Consider Phlebas, isn't bad even if it feels a bit pulpy, it has a lot of depth.
Anyway, third chapter is about half-way done. My classwork burden plus writer's block has cut into my writing time a bit unfortunately.
"Compressed antimatter was an innocuous term." Indeed, it's an innocuous term that makes your hair stand on end if you know what "antimatter" means.
More bug reports. Most of them stuffed in a rather small space that needs a bit of editing besides, actually.
Hmmmmm...
Oh.