Shattered Worlds: The Cataclysm

by Puppeteer

Chapter 7 - Death's Respite

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
~Emily Dickinson

I looked up to see the grey mare frantically pounding the steel door at the end of the room. The doors in the facility weren't opened manually, but remotely opened and closed from a control room. If they hadn't opened the door for her yet, they probably didn't plan on opening it any time soon. She was trapped in the room with me. Based on the desperate look in her eye, she had most likely come to the same realization. A few words escaped her lips, but I didn't hear them. The blood pulsing through my veins was hitting my head like a drum, blocking out all other sound. It was what it felt like to be a predator: It was what it felt like to have prey. It was instinctive. I should have been able to think it through and act of my own free will instead of some predatory urge, but that part of my brain wasn't present. It was like I was only a shell of my former self; as if the part of me that would have overcome this was somewhere else.

The two of us acted simultaneously. I leaped forward, covering the short distance between us within a fraction of a second, and she levitated a syringe out of her labcoat, holding it in front of her as if to shield her from me. I plowed right into it, sinking my teeth around as much of her neck as my bite would allow and sinking them in deep. Using my grip on her, I flung her limp body into the wall to my left, ripping out her throat and spraying blood across the floor in the process. I spat the bloody mess out of my mouth and grinned in satisfaction at my deed. I felt like a spring that was ready to be released. Every motion I made was wrought with power.

My thoughts were quickly interrupted though, as I became lightheaded. Looking down, I realized that the syringe had been emptied into my chest. I pulled the wretched thing out and regained my balance. I'd be damned if I was going to let such a cheap trick stop me. Nevertheless the injection had an affect on me: I could think clearly again. The animalistic instinct clouding my thoughts receded. No sooner than that, the voice on the speaker system crackled back to life.

"Haha! That sedative was strong enough to knock a fully grown buffalo out cold in seconds, but look at you. You're barely tipsy!... Oh and don't worry about the lab assistants. I needed to get rid of them anyway, and it's a lot less work this way. It is concerning, however, that that was your first choice of action. We'll need to get that under control, now won't we?" The voice sounded more than just a little familiar.

"Do you remember me? I do like to think that I make an impression on ponies." I knew him somehow, but my mind was still to hazy to match his voice to a name or a face.

"Well that's a shame. Does the name Chrome ring any bells?" The name did ring bells, but not just in my personal memory. The pain, fear and rage of a thousand broken souls cascaded through my consciousness, and a screaming erupted from inside my skull.

"Tear him, bludgeon him, grind him, kill him! Rip the door out of it's place and crush his skull!

"No! Wait for him to let us out and slit his throat! Trick him! Make him bleed!"

"He... He did it. He did it to us... Hide; have to hide; hide now. Don't let him find us; never find us."

"Why? Why did he put us in the light? We have to get back to the dark! We don't belong in this place!"

I hacked up some thick yellow phlegm that must have been impeding my speech and screamed out at the top of my lungs.

"Get out! Leave me alone!" The voices ceased.

"Well that was rather rude." Came Chrome's voice.

"Tell you what. I'll open this door and we can talk in person. How does that sound? Would you like that better?" I was silent.

"I'll take that as a yes if you have no objection. First though, I need you to promise that you won't brutally maul me like the lab assistants back there. I would very much like all my body parts in the right places if you don't mind." There was another moment of silence before I tested my vocal cords again.

"Look, I wasn't... I'm fine." My voice didn't sound normal; it sounded like multiple ponies were speaking the same words in imperfect unison; it sounded unsettlingly similar to the voices in my head. I decided to ignore it temporarily. However concerning it was, I had a million other issues that demanded more attention, and the first thing on my steadily growing list was to get out of this room.

"Open the door."

"No please?"

"Open the door... Please."

"That's better!" His tone was irritatingly cheery, but sure enough, the door slid open.

It felt like forever since I had gazed into the hypnotically blue eyes of the stallion that stood before me. He flung his labcoat over my shoulders, and gestured for me to step out of the room.

"It's lovely to have you back with us. Tell me, how have you been? I'm sure you have a multitude of questions." I had too many questions to keep straight in my head, so I decided to ask the most pressing question available.

"What did you do to my head?"

"We didn't do anything to your head in particular. Is there something wrong with it?" After a moment I decided to keep my information to myself.

"No. It's fine. Why... Why am I alive. I shouldn't be alive. My time here was up. I don't belong in this place anymore."

"I assume you mean how are you alive, in which case it's because we revived you. We were able to reanimate your body using the liquid pony souls. Honestly, I'm starting to doubt you read any of the research reports. As for why you're alive, it's because I still have use of you. Blank thought it was because I wanted to give you back your command, but she was wrong. You have a much more important task to accomplish."

"Who is Blank?

"Nopony, really. Just some second rate desk worker who thought she knew better than me. I didn't really think she would be able to take on both of those guards, but it doesn't really matter. Things have gone too far for her to do any real damage now."

"What things? Every question I ask just makes things more confusing!"

"All things in good time. Come, walk with me. I have something to show you as well."

We began trotting through the endless steel corridors of the facility.

"The things I'm talking about are the events we have been preparing for. I know you spent most of your time regulating the Rainbow Factory, but that's not all this organization is."

I know, I know. You and your crazy theorists were always sitting on your flanks somewhere talking about the apocalypse and revolution and other garbage.

"That's where you are wrong. We weren't just talking about what might happen. We knew what would inevitably happen, and we were preparing for it. War is coming, Ms. Dash. After one thousand years of peace, war is coming once more."

"What are you talking about?"

"What I'm talking about, Ms. Dash, is what happened after you died." I shuddered at the memory. Not even I had ever dreamed up something as horrifying as what happened in that basement.

"You are one of the elements of harmony in case you've forgotten. That caused quite a stir. Your friend Pinkamena went all out." A facial muscle twitched at the mention of her name. Fear wasn't something characteristic of me anymore; all I felt was anger.

"Even though you never gave us much credit, that is exactly the kind of incident we were theorizing about. After complete order has been instilled for so long, our world has forgotten how to deal with something like this. Things like this just don't happen anymore, so when something like this finally does happen, it tips the threshold. All of the political and sociological tension that has been slowly building for all those years is about to be released, and we're going to come out on top because we knew that war was coming. We are the one's who were prepared."

"What the buck are you talking about Chrome? One murder turns all of Equestria to hell? Hate to break it to you Chrome, but murder happens. It doesn't happen often, but it has happened before. This doesn't change anything."

"Oh, but it does. You have absolutely no idea what happened do you? Well of course not, you were dead. Somehow, Pinkamena was able to develop a toxin that can strip a pony of their sanity. I must admit, I'm a bit embarrassed that a pastry chef came up with it before us, but what matters is that she utilized it, and she utilized during the cider festival when Ponyville was overflowing with visitors. It's not just a simple murder, this is the end. Or rather the beginning depending on how you look at it." His words shocked me. If what he was saying was true then most of my friends were probably dead, save for one cutthroat backstabbing excuse for a pony.

"I'm going to bucking kill her. I'm going to tear her to pieces."

"Well good, because that's the general idea. The rules of the game have changed. We're no longer just a manipulative political group infiltrating society; we're an army. This is warfare now, and we need every advantage we can get."

"My head hurts."

"Well it's a lot of information to take in. We're just getting started though!"

Somewhere in the back of my head, a whispering took hold.

"Don't Listen to him. Don't listen. Run away, run away. Please, please, please, please, please..." I shook it off and kept walking.

"And we're here!" Chrome called out. We were facing a large black door, made out of some dark, reflective material that I wasn't familiar with.

"Where are we?"

"The room where we keep prototype 3. Free from the moral obligations of normal pony society, we were able to make substantial scientific advancements as you know. This though... This is our crowning achievement. Somepony suggested the name M.E.C.H. for it. I rather liked the name Automaton. Well enough talk, it would be a lot easier just to show this to you than to try and describe it." On cue, the door slid open, and revealed a large hexagonal room of the same black material. The ceiling was angled upward from each of the six walls to create a kind of geometric dome. Far out of reach, up above, was a mess of wires, monitors, whirring components and mechanical appendages. The highlight of the room, however, was what was hanging from a tangle of wires and cords just over a short pedestal in the center of the room. It was a pony made of metal. It didn't have a tail or a mane, but the shape of the body was still obviously feminine. One of the eyes was covered up by a dark steel plate that had been welded over it, and the other one was filled with a curved glass lens that was tinted a dull shade of red. The plating in front of the torso and in the stomach were left open, giving a good view of the interior.Like the rest of the room, it was a mess of joints and circuitry, but everything seemed to be connected to one end of a large cylindrical tube that took up most of the space inside of it's chest. The other end was connected to a thick, transparent tube which ran out from the body and up to the ceiling as if it were an umbilical cord, and this room was a womb.

"What is this thing?"

"This my dear friend, is what we like to call an Automaton. It is a purely synthetic pony. A couple years ago, an inventor took some wooden pony dolls to Canterlot, filled them with gears and had them walk around and make gestures. That was when the term was first used, but this is quite different. Those dolls could only do one repeating motion that they were built for. They weren't machines that could be used in a war. These weren't built to carry out one set task, they are built to have the mobility and capability to carry out any task. You see, there are only a few gears in this thing to work a couple of non-vital components. Everything else is worked by joints and a series of cords which are synthetic of actual muscles in the Pony body, but stronger. This machine was not built to carry out one task, but to have the ability to carry out any task infinitely better than a normal pony could. It's a work of art."

But it's still just a hunk of metal. For something like that to be useful, it has to be able to think. Metal can't think."

"Oh, but that's where you're wrong. That's what sparked the idea of metal solders. Tell me, Ms. Dash: If metal can't think, then how am I holding an intelligent conversation with a corpse? Your body parts are held together by stitches, your organs are missing and your eyes are missing, but your functioning perfectly. Better than perfect in fact! You actually..."

He kept talking, but I stopped listening. Something he said had struck a chord with me. I knew that my organs would be missing, but what was that he said about my body being held together by stitches? And what was that part about my eyes? I brushed Him aside and gazed at my reflection in the black metal surface. It wasn't me that I saw staring back at me. Black thread zigzagged across me body, sealing what would otherwise be horrifying gaps in my skin. If it had just been that, I would have almost looked like Frankenpony from the old storybooks, but it wasn't. What he had said about my eyes was true. I didn't have eyes. They were just dark holes with two glowing dots of red light coming from deep within. Whatever happened to me, it turned me into a monster. I thrust my hoof into the wall with all my might, directing all my anger into it. My reflection cracked and splintered.

"I'm going to make her pay. I'm going to tear her head off!" Chrome actually looked slightly startled by my outburst.

"Well of course, but all things in good time. We need to prepare before we can think about..." I cut him off.

"I don't give a buck about your petty little war, Chrome! I'll work with you if you want me to, but I'm going to Ponyville now, and if you want to stand in my way I'll tear your head off! This is something I'm doing on my own. Now get out of my way."

Comments

[Puppeteer]

3022697 All right. This computer is going offline for a day or two, but I got the chapter up just in time. There might be a few typos since I didn't have time to reread it, but it's up. Thanks for the support.

[lone marine]

Thank you this is the best story can't wait till you make more socool

[lone marine]

If you didn't get my other one here this the story is cool can't wait till you make another ,awsome

[Max Caulfield]

Okedokes, I'm never using google chrome again...