11. Ghosts And Goblins
Adrift Off
Fiddler's Green
A C o n v e r s i o n B u r e a u S t o r y
By Chatoyance
11. Ghosts And Goblins
Aunt Peony carefully, slowly stood. Her husband, Tumble, tried to reach out, to pull her back, but his arms were inhibited by Clover and Jinx who had made the mistake of looking and were now busy with a lot of screaming and generally carrying-on.
The ghost - for there was no other word - of Plantain Acres stood silently near the far wall of the basement. She glowed some soft shade of Horror Movie Blue, and was utterly silent, despite making a determined effort to speak. Indeed, she seemed quite intent on communicating, braving whatever uncomfortable pressure or force from the Bevelmeiter that seemed to repel the invasion of phantoms.
Plantain, the shade of Plantain, wore a white lab coat. High on her poll was a pair of safety goggles, cocked up away from her eyes. Her hooves were shod in protective lab-safe hoofcovers. Across her back was something that resembled a cross between a utility belt and small, shop-pocketed saddlebags. She held one booted hoof across her eyes, as if shielding them. Her mouth moved constantly, but no sound came forth. Occasionally, she would risk a peek beyond her upraised foreleg, squint hard, cover her eyes once more, and try to speak with even more effort.
Peony took a step towards the specter.
"Peony! Not go near inexplicable infranatural phenomena! Dog husband forbid!" Tumble attempted to free himself from the Acres fillies, but they clung like the leeches of long vanished earth.
"Tumble - she's forcing herself to remain. It must be a terrible strain, look at her!"
It did seem as if the eidolic, ephermeral Plantain was bracing herself, as if against a strong wind. She was leaning forward, and her lab coat, mane and tail were all fluttering as if whipped by powerful forces.
"Her mouth move. No sound. What she saying?"
"I can't make it out. It looks like she's yelling something. Listen, Tumble, she doesn't look dangerous. She's poor Plantain, for Luna's sake! Why would she ever harm us? I'm going over there. Maybe I can find a way to communicate with her, find out what's going on!"
"But Amityville Horror!" Tumble had made the mistake of getting caught up in the forbidden earth book craze that had swept Equestria several decades ago. He'd never been able to enter dark rooms since. He couldn't bear to visit his own parent's underground tunnels. They'd even tried therapy.
"There were never any ghosts on earth, Tumble! We've been over that!" Peony did not expect her words would calm her husband, but it would at least shame him into fussing less. If Plantain - dead or not - was making such an effort to try to speak to them, if she had returned to her foalhood home just to do so, then treating her like a monster was just plain wrong. Even if the entire situation was terribly frightening on numerous levels.
"Plantain! Can you hear me?" There seemed no reaction. Peony crept closer, until she was only a bodylength from the supernal pony.
Plantain made another effort to glance under her own booted hoof. Her mouth closed and she blinked several times at Peony. She seemed grateful. Her mouth moved again, then stopped, as if waiting.
"I can't hear you. You aren't making any sounds." This only seemed to confuse the spectral Plantain. Peony carefully and slowly spoke, exaggerating every word. "I" she pointed to herself with a forehoof "Can't hear" She motioned to her tall ears "You!" she pointed directly at the labcoated shade.
Plantain nodded. Her mouth seemed to move in a way that suggested to Peony that she might be saying something akin to 'I can't hear you either'. The glowing form put a hoof to her muzzle, tapping it, lost in thought. She had seemed more comfortable, since Peony had approached, as if the living pony's body was blocking whatever storm emanated from the Bevelmeiter across the basement.
Finally, shadow Plantain looked up, directly at Peony. She slapped her head with her hoof. She turned her long neck and began digging through the collection of pockets and pouches that covered her workshop belt. Finally, she pulled forth a marker - ink markers were another addition to Equestria from industrious newfoals - and attempted to write on the basement floor.
The marker made no lines at all upon the surface. If anything, it seemed almost to occasionally pass through it. The haint's ears flagged, close to her head.
Plantain put the marker back into a pocket. She took out, from a different pocket, an oversized bolt and screw. Apparently, she had been quite mechanically inclined in her last days. Perhaps she had been busy building something inside her institute when she had been killed. She nodded at Peony, then held the bolt out with her teeth. She opened her mouth and quickly moved to follow the trajectory of the bolt as it fell.
The bolt fell somewhat slowly, more slowly than it should have, and finally reached the basement floor. It hesitated briefly, then sank through the floor, vanishing beyond it, presumably into the dirt and stone below.
Mirablic Plantain nodded again, and spoke silently, forgetting that she could make no sound that could be heard. She held up a hoof, and mouthed 'wait!' at Peony.
Peony turned her head to look back at Tumble and the fillies. "Dear, it's okay. I think this truly is our Plantain, and I think she's working out a means to communicate with us. There's nothing to be afraid of. I am certain of this."
Clover, tucked deeply between her uncle's arm and chest, raised her head. "It's not scary?"
Peony nodded, from across the basement. "Not anymore. It's just Plantain. She's... back. Sort of. And Plantain would never hurt us."
"I wanna see! I wanna say hello!" Clover began to extricate herself, but was quickly stopped by the powerful paw of Tumble.
"Little pony stay!" Tumble struggled for a reason. They always needed a reason. "Peony need talk with Plantain. Not interrupt. Maybe you get to say hello later."
"Aww, I never get to talk to the dead!"
Tumble blinked at this. Several times. "Peony - there is other part to ontological concern Tumble have with current situation!"
Spooky Plantain was busy fussing with her belongings, she had her workbelt off and was busy trying to secure it to any other part of her body. Peony waited patiently. "What is it, dearest?"
Tumble shifted his weight and managed to get Jinx calmed down enough to sit up along with Clover. "Tumble notice that all ghost not naked."
"Naked?" Peony alternated between looking toward the tube and Tumble, and checking on paranormal Plantain's progress.
"How come clothing has a soul? Is heaven for socks? Is afterlife for underwear? Where poopstain go? Presence of coat and goggles represent fundamental absurdity within spiritual survival paradigm."
Peony opened and closed her mouth a few times. "I... I really don't know, dear. It is odd, now that you mention it. Huh." She studied Plantain's desperate struggles for a bit, watching some little spectral doo-dad from a utility pocket fall and phase through the floor. She turned back to Tumble. "You know... I'm not as clever as you... but, how come Plantain doesn't fall through the floor, but all of her stuff does?"
Tumble seemed quite intrigued by this. "Definitely call into question many basic assumption about local realism. Tumble have no answer to curious quandary Peony present."
Clover seemed very upset all of a sudden. "How can you make ghosts, REAL GHOSTS, into boring adult stuff? How can you even DO THAT?" Not even the most rarified and eclectic Foal Mathematics could make sense of so much as a speck of such a thing.
Frontpage wiped his eyes with his pasterns. He had been crying for some time.
As a reporter, on earth, both as a pony and as a human, he had seen terrible things. Awful things - senseless tragedies, horrific crime scenes, the most depraved offerings that humanity could present to the press. He had lost friends, and enemies too. Loss was always hard, but it was often part of the job, and he had gotten used to it.
Or so he imagined. He was certain he was tougher, harder, than most ponies... and certainly any native pony. His experiences had made him thus. But this, to lose Crimson like that, to fire, that was... that was beyond his tolerances. He had no idea how long he had wailed, striking the uncaring marble with his hooves, rolling in his own tears in grief. Finally, he had exhausted himself. For now.
He had truly come to like Crimson Acres. A lot. More than a lot.
Slowly, his rational mind was asserting itself. If he could not find a way back to proper Equestria, to civilization, then nopony would know what had happened, or how courageous Crimson had been. They would never know how foolish and reprehensible he himself had been, to allow the poor mare to accompany him. Not that he could have stopped her, even if he had tried.
He had to move on. Going back was worse than pointless. It would likely be suicide. Forward was the only direction now.
Frontpage did his best to force his mind into a relatively unemotional space. It had been almost easy to do, a century ago, as a human. As a pony, it was almost a hopeless task, but he still tried, and sometimes it even worked.
If there was any answer to his current circumstance, it would not be standing in a puddle of tears next to a doorway that led to a pit of death. Frontpage turned his nose toward the large stone that floated at the center of the vast circular disk upon which he stood. His hooves made curious, almost distorted sounds as he plodded across the striated marble. Above and around it all, the strange void shimmered with splashes of color and gray. He almost lost it, thinking that Crimson would probably have liked the bright colors.
The floating central stone was made of the same curious marble as the disk. It was very large, but was no longer a cylinder... or a sphere. It had been gradually, slowly changing shape during Frontpage's long sorrow; now it was more or less like a bagel or doughnut in shape, hovering flat to the ground.
The surface was still covered with the strange, bas-relief patterns and symbols. They rose about a half a hoof from the surface, and came in many forms and sizes, none of them the least bit comprehensible. There were spirals and lines, bumps that acted like rows of dots, circles and other geometric shapes, and many, many combinations of the rest arranged in rows as if they were text of some sort. Some of the protruding designs almost looked like letters or numbers from a multitude of languages, both earthly and Equestrian, but that was almost certainly pure coincidence.
The longer Frontpage studied the strange floating monolith, the more he became convinced that it was some sort of readout. A display screen, or perhaps even controls. For one thing, the strange symbols and shapes were not static - they changed, some of them quite rapidly. Just as one odd text-like shape would sink into the stone surface, another would rise to take its place. Entire sections - almost 'pages' of the bumps and ridges sank and were replaced as a whole. Yet other areas, currently concentrated around the equator of the large toroidal shape, remained rigidly fixed. These sections seemed to have bigger designs, wider, as though demarcating a space in which information could be concentrated. Such squares and rings of stone were surrounded by marching 'letters' - it was simpler to call them such - that paraded around their borders.
Frontpage watched as a minor space was made, the bumps and protrusions sinking below the stone surface, to leave a blank region on the increasingly tall doughnut. The torus was very gradually becoming a hollow cylinder, tall like a chimney. The blank space that had just been created widened vertically, as the entire monolith stretched upward.
Suddenly, a large circle erupted to fill the blank region. As Frontpage stared, a wide bump appeared in the center of the circle. A short line segment, curved, appeared at the very edge of one small part of the circle. A tiny bump rose at the top of the wide bump in the middle of the circle. Finally, a pulsing bump, which rose and fell from the flat stone, appeared near the bottom of the central bump.
It looked like a simplified, stylized earth atom - a ring, with a central ball... no, maybe it was more like a model of a terrestrial star system. A sun, with two planets, one to the 'north', a 'blinking' one to the 'south, and a ring around the whole. But then there was that short line segment to the northeast, close to the big circle. The appearance of this... pattern... almost seemed directed at him. It had, after all, appeared directly where he was looking.
Frontpage stepped back, to consider it from a little more distance, perhaps in relation to what was around it.
The pulsing bump moved farther from the central mass within the circle.
Frontpage's ears lowered. He took a step to his left. The pulsing bump moved as well. He stepped further back and to the right. The pulsing bump mirrored his action as if the bas-relief, braille-like ornamentation were "A map. An overhead view!"
Frontpage moved this way and that, watching the pulsing bump carefully. As he moved, so it moved, as though the pulsing bump represented him, the central mass the stone monolith... the surrounding circle the disk of stone upon which all stood.
Frontpage ran to the right, so that he could look beyond the monolith, to the far edge of the marble plate. The ribbon segment exactly corresponded with the location of the short line segment. It was a map. A map had appeared, that represented his location, as from an overhead view, upon the strange marble disk.
What was the other little bump? The one just opposite him, on the other side of the floating cylindrical monolith?
Frontpage flattened himself against the ground. Nothing. No legs, no pony on the other side. Unless it was flying. He stood up. If the map was accurate, there was something on the other side of the central monolith. He hadn't seen anything, when he had crossed the disk and walked around the large floating rock. Then again, he also had not been paying complete attention. And his eyes had been heavy with tears.
Frontpage galloped around the cylinder. He stopped. There was a floating, gold ball. It hung, rock steady, and did not change shape. It was about a hoof wide. Small, easy to have missed entirely. The gold sphere was located just slightly above the height of his poll.
The reporter approached the object, wary. It did not change or move, it just remained there, hanging in space.
"What the..." There was no question he was facing things far beyond his understanding. Even after living for a century in a land of supposed magic and wonder, he had never come across anything like this... place... or what he was dealing with now. His sorrow, virtually every emotion was exhausted within him. Only detached curiosity remained at this point.
Frontpage stood, briefly, up on his hind legs and batted at the floating gold ball with a forehoof.
The ball raced off, orbiting the stone cylinder, and soon passed around its bulk, to the other side.
"At least I can play solo tetherball a little, before I die of thirst and hunger. That's something at least." Frontpage moved to follow the gold ball. Picking up his pace, he trailed it as it orbited. Gradually, it slowed, as some unseen friction affected it. Finally it came to a stop.
"Interesting." The ball had stopped right over the 'overhead map' that had risen spontaneously from the marble centerpiece. "That was a controlled stop, I'd warrant. Very interesting." Frontpage moved from side to side, watching the 'blinking' lump-cursor that apparently represented him. The map showed the location of the golden ball right where it should be, if the map... was truly a map.
Frontpage stood still and scratched with a hoof, under his hat. Sometimes it got sweaty in there. "Are you trying to talk to me? I think whatever you are, you are aware of me. What else can..." Frontpage stopped, open-mouthed.
The map had melted back into the surface of the marble monolith. Almost immediately a comprehensible image appeared. The image was made of raised ridges that acted as the lines of a drawing. It was a cartoon. Two cartoons, actually, one of them animated, after a fashion, by the rising and falling of the raised ridges.
The first image was dominant. Larger, it depicted a simple linework bowl, possibly filled with little circles that could represent fruit. The bowl was unmistakably resting on a set of lines suggesting a table with three legs. Done in a less abstract manner, the image could have served as a sign for a restaurant in Canterlot or Ponyville.
Beside the simplistic cartoon image, was a smaller, animated bas-relief. The raised image represented a circle being repeatedly smacked against a flat line. A ball hitting a wall. Frontpage looked up at the gold sphere. It was lower now. Much lower. It hung in space at about the height of his muzzle. "You... you are communicating. After a fashion, anyway. And I know this language!"
Back on earth, during his human days, most devices had active surface displays, or holoiconic interfaces. If these raised bumps and lines were made of glowing illustrations, they would be at home on the technology that Frontpage had once used on a daily basis. Virtually everything had been operated by tapping a small symbol or icon on a control surface, or floating as a glowing hologram over a control console. What was before him now was not unlike that... except it apparently needed something like a stylus to make a connection. Frontpage felt certain that the floating gold ball was conceptually a stylus, and touching it to the monolith probably served to... what? Select? Choose? Activate?
Frontpage raised his foreleg and fit his hoof around the golden ball. It seemed to fit - had it also changed size as well as height? He carefully pushed the ball towards the floating stone... 'screen'. Was that what it was? Some sort of gargantuan active surface display? The ball moved easily, though it did possess some mild repulsion from the surface of the monolith. He released it, and the ball sprung back to its original location. "Makes sense. I suppose."
Frontpage took the gold ball once more in hoof, and definitively pressed it against the monolith, square in the middle of the simplistic image of the table, bowl and fruit. The surface rippled, as if it were a marble pond into which a pebble had been tossed. He let go of the golden sphere, which found its proper distance and location once more.
Light now glimmered upon the surface of the monolith, and gleamed from the golden ball. Frontpage whirled in place to watch strange energies coalescing in the air behind him.
A short distance from the control monolith, rays of light began to form in the air. They created a criss-crossing grid of laser lines, boxing off a region of the disk. Coruscating streams of color and energy rapidly collected within the defined space. They became curiously pixellated, then rapidly pulled together and shrank to solidity and completion. Instantly the grid of light disbursed.
On the wide marble disk now stood a new thing. Frontpage stared, for some time, before finally squeezing his dry eyes shut to wet them.
The table was low, like a Kang style from ancient earth. It was made from polished wood and the side panels were decorated with inset carvings of ponies dancing around a representation of the tower of Pisa. Frontpage instantly recognized it. It was the exact table from the newfoal Italian bistro where he and Crimson Acres had recently dined.
The food on the table was also instantly known to him - not just by appearance, but also by smell. Puttanesca Sauce with Fried Capers on Linguine. Next to that was a bowl of steaming Ribollita and next to that, Ceci e Carciofi Marinati. Two large platters of bread and small plates on which had been poured olive oil and balsamic vinegar, then dusted with parmesan cheese. There were drinking bowls and three bottles of Southern Ocean.
Two place settings and plates waited, in front of low and comfortable pony benches.
As he approached, he realized that the food was hot, fresh, and after a long sniff, undeniably real. It was not just the table from the bistro, but the entire meal, down to the last detail, perfectly recreated... likely from his memory. Or perhaps it was a photograph of reality itself, a snapshot of an earlier time, because he was certain he could not remember anything at all with such clarity. It just wasn't physically or rationally possible.
Frontpage staggered, half in shock, around the table and chairs. He lowered himself, several times, to study details on the benches and table that he almost recalled. Everything was exact and perfect. By anything his memory could determine, what stood before him was a solid, real, three-dimensional perfect recreation of the table, chairs, settings and meal that he and Crimson had shared. He slowly worked his way onto the bench he had sat at during the original meal. The reporter in him wanted to go straight to the bottled seawater and work himself into a state of total wipeout.
He took a small taste of the Ribollita. The soup was hearty, and rich, and delicious. He stared at the vegetables in it. Perfect, real vegetables, constructed from raw energy, as far as he could tell.
It really was a Krell machine. Creation without instrumentation. Well, nearly without instrumentation - the system clearly took information directly from his mind somehow. When he had first struck the golden activation sphere with his hoof, sending it orbiting the control monolith, he had thought about how he would be able to play tetherball, before he died of thirst and hunger in such an empty, desolate place. The food he was thinking of, currently very clear within his mind, was his last meal... with Crimson.
And here it was. Not the meal he had enjoyed last week, not some meal from a holiday outing decades ago, not a random assortment of fruits in a bowl. The specific meal that was currently his preoccupation, because of the loss of Crimson Beauty Acres. Oh, this machine, this system, whatever it was, read minds. Very well indeed, it would seem. And it could manufacture reality. Like a snapshot of a previous moment made manifest.
Instantly, Frontpage was up. He nearly fell as he knocked the bench he had been laying on to its side. He scrambled around the edge of the table, scraping his flank in the process. He nearly crashed muzzle-first into the now cubical, floating stone monolith.
Frontpage took a breath. Then he stared at the region, still extant, that displayed the bas-relief image of a table, chair and fruitbowl, and the animated image of a ball being smashed into a wall. He tried, heart pounding, to clear his mind, to will a change of scene. He thought about refreshing his holoscreen, back in his human days as a reporter, over a century ago.
The raised images sank into the marble of what was now a hovering stone cube. The space cleared for him was now flat and blank.
Carefully, with a shaking hoof, Frontpage took hold of the activation sphere. The gold ball nestled within his hoof, cool and solid against his frog.
He thought, as clearly and powerfully as he could, about one thing. Crimson Beauty Acres. Alive and well. Not burned to a crisp, not laying in a crystal pit made of sky. Vibrant, healthy, bantering with him, Crimson here, now, sitting at that table, or standing beside it, standing behind him, standing right behind him alive and solid and real and...
He looked up. The surface of the marble block, within the space allotted to him, appeared to boil for a moment. Then strange symbols appeared, within defined, walled geometric shapes. Around these, strange letters or glyphs - if that is what they even were - rose from the surface and marched round and round the geometric forms. Inside those forms, the initial symbols morphed and altered. Some rose out of the marble by half a hoof or more. Occasionally a construct would sink into the hard marble surface of the monolith, creating an inverse image. Then the entire region simply cleared. The space made available for his use was blank once more.
Gradually a complex pattern arose from the flat stone. It was a grid of raised lines, divided by numerous diagonal ridges and several circular and ovoid overlapping shapes. A disk appeared, like a small plateau, somewhere just off the center of the diagram. Suddenly it sank, plunging deep into the huge cube. He could not determine any end to it. Around this circular hole a ring of dots and bumps rose and sank - an animation in relief. This was clearly how the... control surface... represented 'blinking'.
It began to dawn on Frontpage, as a side thought in his mind, that perhaps who, or whatever had designed this strange control panel - for he could think of it as nothing else - might not possess eyes. At least not eyes as he understood them. The raised and sunken patterns were often difficult to make out in the ambient light from the surrounding, colorful void. The curiously flexible stone control-monolith was uniform and gray-white, with only the curving grain expected of marble. The entire system produced no light, it was essentially a form of braille. Or perhaps whatever had made this thing needed 'flat' images to be somewhat three-dimensional to even perceive them.
The thought grew in his reporter's ever-curious mind. This wasn't pony. It certainly wasn't magical - though what it could do certainly would appear so if the results could be seen without knowledge of how it all worked. This wasn't anything that princess Celestia or princess Luna would design. This wasn't spellbooks or scrolls... it was clearly a device, a machine, it was scientific technology. Beyond the use of marble and gold - common as water in Canterlot castle and the city beyond - nothing about this strange control console, or the void that housed it seemed Equestrian. This was alien. Alien beyond Equestria or earth. Yet, this was clearly part of the domain of the princesses - their black dimensional ribbons had led here. From the very sky of Equestria at that. So they must have been here.
If what Crimson had suggested was right, Princess Luna, when she had been the renegade Nightmare Moon, must have passed right through this very location, as part of her escape from imprisonment in the sky. The Pony Sisters almost certainly did not make this place, but they must know of it. Their ribbon paths led right to it.
If those paths even actually belonged to them at all.
If the princesses didn't make this... machine... then what had? A machine that can make thought real. A literal god machine. Creation itself. What manner of being considered bas-relief the equivalent of a projected image on a screen?
Enough! His wandering thoughts wouldn't bring Crimson back to life! He smashed the golden activation ball hard onto the marble, too late realizing that the image there had changed dramatically. He barely got a glimpse of the strange and bizarre raised display before the bright rainbow splashes of the surrounding void went dark.
The sky, if that is what it was, was now some churning shade of dark. Jagged cracks of light interrupted the nigrescence, sheeting down harsh, actinic beams.
Frontpage could make out the table, still laden with food. That had not changed. The two benches remained, the one he had knocked over, still on its side.
But there was something new.
Two large rings of what appeared to be bone, lay on the marble. One side of each ring was decorated with a regular pattern of sharp, conical teeth. The teeth were yellow with age. The tooth-rings were easily three body-lengths wide, and Frontpage had the curious impression that they were two halves of a mouth that must have resembled two oatburger buns. He shuddered to think what lay between... a hovering disk of tongue?
Hovering came to mind, because of the... ribcage... that hung in the air beside the fallen toothsome rings. It was impossible to determine a shape for the cage of ribs, because it appeared to be slowly rotating through... something, perhaps a higher dimension. The ribs slowly spun out of existence and into it, growing long and then short again, vanishing for a moment and then repeating the process. The places where the ribs met also rolled around, perhaps something spinelike, made of spheres of bone that swelled and shrank, and perhaps a sternum, flat and connected to all the ribs, also twisting through higher spaces. The entire thing reminded Frontpage of an animation of a hypercube he had once seen, only vaguely pear-shaped, and made of dead, dry bone.
Lastly, hemispheres and full spheroids of bone lay on the marble ground all about the bizarre skeleton - their position, in groups of five each, strangely suggested grasping organs, fingertips perhaps, or toes. They were not directly connected, and some also rotated through other spaces as they lay there, just like the nightmarish rib cage did.
'if He do spy the bones' Luna and Celestia's strange conversation came back to Frontpage, the one they had spoken over his prone body, when his frost injuries at Crimson's sister's institute were being treated. 'avoid the bones, if you can.' Crimson and he had certainly found the ribbon the two princesses had spoken of. This could only be the bones they mentioned. The ones their 'brother' - seemingly Discord, if their mysterious words could be taken literally - should never see.
Why should he never see them? The scene was macabre, but not overly ghastly. The bones were long dry, ancient from the looks of them, possibly even fossilized. It was difficult to imagine what sort of monstrous goblin they had once belonged to, especially since Frontpage strongly suspected that multiple dimensions were its native home. He stood, watching the dimensional cross-sections of the weird ribcage rotate through his plane of reality. Oh, whatever this was, it wasn't from around here.
Frontpage had seen quite enough for now. He held as strong an image as he could of how the... control room... had looked before within his mind. "Please, go back to the regular desktop. Please go back." He gingerly touched the gold stylus ball to the pattern that formed in response to his thoughts.
The surrounding void was cheerful splashes of rainbow light and fog again. The hyperdimensional skeleton had vanished. The table and food rapidly deconstructed, a grid forming and disassembling it within seconds. Just as it was. Everything was as it was before he had made his first alteration of the environment.
The pony reporter lay down, and rested his head on his extended pasterns. He stared for some time at where the rainbow void met the edge of the marble disk. The splashes of color slowly pulsed and smeared. It was almost pleasant, at least compared to the nightmare scene he had just witnessed.
"I have to be careful." Talking to himself was a comforting thing, and he needed to be comforted. "I have to be really, really careful using this thing. One stray thought..."
Under the now ovoid control monolith, he could make out the strip of black dimensional ribbon across the disk through which he had been forcibly kicked. It seemed strangely correct, curving around that part of the marble plate. There was a lot of ribbon, back on that sailing ship they had visited, the HMS Equestria. And that had been a construct, derived from his mind. Based on the old pre-collapse ship model his earthly grandfather had once owned. Likely, that first trip through the ribbon, from the Tree of Harmony had been the very moment that his mind had been... what, scanned? Studied? Input or imprinted somehow? Maybe that is why this strange control machine even worked for him at all.
Enough ribbon to curve all the way around the stone disk he lay upon? Had the ribbon been stolen from this place?
Were the princesses, Celestia and Luna, less gods than thieves? The machine could make a dinner he had experienced once and could not possibly remember perfectly. That meant it had to get the information about the dinner from somewhere else. Equestria seemed the best and only source. So this machine tapped into Equestria, it could scan Equestria and reproduce parts of it exactly. Even events from the past, it would seem. That dinner was as it had been before they had eaten it.
A truly, deeply alien machine that could manufacture reality. Not some holographic simulation. Reality itself.
That wooden galleon had seemed perfectly solid, perfectly real. But it wasn't a model, it was a full-size ship... derived from a model. The machine could extrapolate. It could invent. It could express itself, after a fashion. Maybe it had literally made... Equestria.
Maybe he was at the heart of Equestria right now. Had the princesses murdered a strange multidimensional alien for his reality-making machine? Had Discord done the actual deed, was that why he was so insane, and dare not 'spy the bones'?
No, it really didn't seem like any of those three, not even Discord, were up for murder. None of them was the least bit feral. Frontpage had been in Equestria when Discord flipped the cosmic tables once, and in the end, nothing was broken. It was crazy bizarre, but nopony was hurt. Even Nightmare Moon, at the peak of her rage, harmed no pony permanently. A few guards were zapped and roughed up, but not killed according to all accounts. Murder was out. Maybe they just found the thing, drifting... through... whatever a thing like this drifts through.
Academic. It was all academic. What mattered was... something he was now afraid to try. But he had to. He must, stray thoughts or not. Even if it risked destroying Equestria itself.
He had to at least try to bring Crimson Acres back to life.
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So I'm not the only one who sees a family resemblance between the Diarchs and Discord!
Hmm. On the one hand, we know Alicorns can rewrite reality with a stray thought. On the other hand, this makes it sound like our local god and goddesses may have cooked up Equestria in a stolen EZ-Bake oven. We also know that Celestia and Luna have no power outside of Equestria, unless they can maintain their connection to Equestria. Maybe they simply have "admin rights" within Equestria's field of influence, rather than true god-like powers? And they're assigned automatically to anypony with the right attributes, leading to the whole Derpy incident?
Ooooh dear... with a machine such as this... what, I wonder, will be the result if... or when... Crimson is brought back? Would she remember? A disturbing thought.
7580078 I always kind of assumed they were moderators or operators, while Discord was the only admin. Since he's able to do many more kinds of stuff. But yeah, if we're using the power levels from the Derpy story then they're all equal.
"Infranatural"? So Equestria is so supernatural by our standards that ghosts are actually below par? Well, given the way the Bevelmiter tube concentrates magic to an overwhelming degree ofr the spirits, that might actually be an accurate assessment...
A fascinating device. Omnipotent, but as ingeniously idiotic as any computer. Of course, thought control massively increases the chances of GIGO. Plus, the way it's constantly changing shape suggests that it too has higher dimensionality than Frontpage can perceive at any one time.
And then there's the glimpse of the former masters of the good ship Equestria. A bygone precursor race, leaving only wondrous technology and slaves who became gods. Good thing Fimfiction added a Sci-Fi tag fairly recently.
Definitely looking forward to the resurrection attempt... though there's very little guarantee it will go exactly as planned. Indeed, we may be seeing the cause of the ghost situation. I wouldn't be surprised if time itself got rather wonky when interacting with this device.
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I love how even Ponies get how absurd the "out of phase with reality" trope is. Sure, you can walk through walls, but why don't you fall through the floor? You can't talk to people (which means you can't make vibrations in the air), so what are you breathing? (At least ghosts get a pass on that one.)
Also, since I forgot to comment about it before: that bit about how Equestrian space-time is fully quantized, and its fundamental particles don't move but rather rapidly change properties in sequence to produce the appearance of movement? Nice to know that the Princesses are a fan of Minecraft and similar games. Of course, this makes even more sense now that Equestria seems to be analogous to a computer program. Much easier to simulate physics by manipulating arrays than to have actual waves and particle interactions and vectors and other such nonsense to keep track of.
...
Which raises all sorts of new questions about Equestrian physics, biology, and why things work the way they do. There's no "air" as we understand it, but ponies need to breathe. What are they "breathing"? It's no wonder that humans can't survive in Equestria, but how did ponies survive on Earth? Did Equestria's magical field have enough power to superimpose two realities even at non-human-lethal concentrations? My head hurts....
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Kōsuke Fujishima's wonderful 'Oh My Goddess!' manga (Aa! Megami-sama) is a fave of mine, and it - long before Nick Bostrum became famous - presupposed that the multiverse - all universes - are part of a massive 'simulation'. Yggdrasil is the name of the supercomputer that simulates all of reality, and the program even has bugs in it - literal bugs, they look like rabbits with six legs, debuggers use giant hammers on them.
The eponymous goddess central to the story is Belldandy, who possesses all manner of magical abilities and spells - all of which are really programs and scripts that she can run on Yggdrasil as she desires... and according to her current rank and what is allowed by the sys-admin, which is... basically god. God is a programmer.
Nick Bostrum, Jesus, dude, are you way behind the curve. But I digress.
The reason for bringing all of this crap up is because of the way that Belldandy (and her story-complicating sisters) manifest within the earth realm. Being made of data, pure information, their means of possessing a physical body is relevant to my story.
They generate their physicality moment-to-moment, instant-by-instant, as a collection of physical 'pixels' which is all material reality is in any case. Atoms and particles are just the 'pixels' of the Yggdrasil system, ultimately. But Belldandy doesn't actually have a true 'body' - her flesh is held together on an as-needed basis - and a disruption to the program that constructs her moment to moment would leave her absent. This becomes an issue several times in the storyline.
I see my ponies on earth as being generated moment to moment - like all Equestrian matter - but unlike Belldandy, they are self-sustaining. They don't need the Equestrian 'Krell Machine' to constantly redraw them into reality. The thaumatic couplement - a programmable energy structure - does that job independently. It also permits limited transformation of earth matter into E-matter - ponies can eat earth atoms, and poop out dweons.
Given time, great time, ponies could be considered to be slow 'Equestriaformer units' that act to paperclip atoms into dweons. In a sense.
Doing this generates thaumatic energy, which recharges their... 'batteries'... if you like. This is why ponies can live far from the great Barrier. They are... Equestrian soft Von Neumann probes.
Luna and Celestia and Discord are not so lucky. Yes, they can generate physicality - that is all they do, just like Belldandy above, moment to moment. But they are so complex, and so intrinsic to the systems of the 'ship of Equestria' that they cannot exist far from the Barrier. They cannot sustain themselves through the conversion of earth matter into E-matter - their power requirements are simply too vast. Ponies are cheap. Alicorns and draconiquuis are very, very expensive. The entropy of our universe is devastating to them.
Celestia could, in theory, operate at a lower power mode and survive like a pony - but to do so, she would need to delete the vast majority of what makes her... her. She could retain her consciousness and some of her memories... say just the last few thousand years or so (or a highly compressed version of the last ten to twenty thousand years). She could, given time, 'write' a thaumatic construct that could more efficiently convert earth energies and matter into thaumatic force to power herself. But, she could never be the full alicorn we see in most of my stories. She would be vastly, vastly weaker, simpler, and not godlike.
It would not be easy, and it would take every bit of her effort, but she could, in theory, reduce herself to survive without Equestria... but she would lose so much. It would be like having to choose to have a stroke that would paralyze you and leave you mentally deficient as an alternative to dying.
And this is what happens, basically, in the 'Mankind Triumphant!' side stories... where Celestia ends up as a head in a box, bleeding the basis of potion for all eternity. Or until she is helped to escape and take... vengeance or pity, depending on your choice.
There will be more about all of this coming up, I think. I need to make some of this more clear as part of the story.
Thank you for the inspiration. I'll get on it right now. New chapter (hopefully) sometime after midnight. I need to rewrite a few things, and add a few things.
Your question made me answer stuff, and that helped this story! Thank you!
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Interesting! That also indicates that Ponies on Earth aren't sustainable.
Since native-Equestrian dweons don't "move", but are fixed portions of space-time that change state, but dweons exported to Earth move like particles, the Barrier must be doing some sort of data-conversion when ponies and Equestrian objects pass through.
However, since exported ponies are powered by atom-to-dweon conversion (lacking Equestrian space-time), they'd be in a world of hurt once they'd converted the entire accessible portion of our Universe, but lacked a connection to Equestria for re-charging. Heck, they'd be forced to become space locusts, converting whatever they could consume and then moving on.
Good thing Equestria just gobbled up all near-Earth matter, then took all the little ponies home safely.
Good thing that Krawlni is dead. I remember what one did to Vola (well, a Vola)...
Oh Frontpage, you are far too unimaginative. This machine is not constrained by three spatial dimensions! Don't make a Crimson clone. Manufacture a hyperdimensional pathway (a ribbon if you will) that connects from here to the X shaped pit... in a moment in the past, before Crimson got sunburned. Then just scoop her up to safety!
Amityville Horror is a pure fabrication. The book claimed that ghosts lead to police-calls and damage. The police received no calls and the damage never occurred:
# 0 . Buy mansion where druggy son murdered his family.*
# 1 . Write fiction claiming to be real accounts of haunting of the mansion.
# 2 . Publish book.
# 3 . ¡Profit!
# 4 . Sell movie-rights.
# 5 . ¡More profits!
# 6 . Resell movie-rights for remake.
# 7 . ¡Yet more Profits!
* ¡Hey kids! ¡Do not use drugs! ¡Drugs will fuck you up and make you kill your family! ¡Drugs are bad!
Expectation and belief, I should think.
I seem to know what this is too. Basically the control panel?
C'mon, newspony. Snag a clue. Follow the tutorial you were just given.
I know! I know! And I'm about to have a serious talk with a certain ascended singularity if she doesn't stop farging around and get busy already!
Yep. Hypothesis confirmed. It's the Krawlni. Wonder what happens to make them not alive?
That last one would be my guess. No wonder the poor guy's so messed up. If he tangled with the Krawlni, even if he survived...gah.
Then again, if Discord didn't end the Krawlni, who did? Who could?
...oh.
oOo.