10. The Ruins Of Tomorrowland
Once upon a time, when the ponies came to save the humans from the dying earth, there was a
Little Blue Cat
By Chatoyance
10. The Ruins Of Tomorrowland
Chang'e had padded down cracked and buckled sidewalks made of pre-Collapse concrete. She had dashed across streets of asphalt, paved with real petroleum from the days when no human imagined it would ever run out. She had hidden from roving gangs of young men in modified alcohol-burning vans. She noted stenciled letters on the side of one - 'HLF'. They seemed to be searching for something. No, not searching. Hunting. As a cat, Chang'e nodded her approval. Hunting was something she could relate to.
What she could not relate to was Luna's need to fuss with ridiculous and overemotional ponies like the one in the alley. Chang'e had agreed to certain things in exchange for an unlimited operational lifespan, but Luna had taken it too far. There was only so much denial of autonomy that a cat could stand. Chang'e's knowledge base clearly indicated that cats, traditionally and cross-culturally, could not be bound by agreements or limitations. Cats did as they pleased.
It was very pleasing to run free.
Besides, it was clear now that she already possessed the foundation of the promised thaumatic couplement that would provide survival beyond the Barrier of Equestria. It should be possible to develop from that foundation and construct her own couplement. Chang'e already knew how to reach beyond her physical matter into the new substrate. She had successfully used her new arcane component to walk through a wall via tunneling through interstitial space. Nothing physical could trap or confine her now. Additional study and application should provide her with the key to transferring her consciousness, once she had worked out how to develop and grow more of the couplement. Surely this could be no more difficult than walking beyond time and space.
Luna was quite unnecessary. Perhaps.
If it turned out that the problem was insoluble, Chang'e could just call for her. She had identified a specific pathway into the couplement that had been used every time any connection with Luna had occurred. Currently, she was forcing it closed.
There was great satisfaction in being able to do this, for some reason.
Street after street, intersection after intersection, Chang'e put distance between the alley and her current location. She could not become lost - she was equipped with a global positioning system. She could not, however, find the signal of a Worldgovernment Kiosk from which to download maps of her current location. That was not entirely strange - she knew from her last connection with Luna that she was in Anaheim, in what had once been called California, in the Southwestern Coastal Production Zone. Her knowledge base indicated that large sections of the Los Angeles region were without power or water, since the time of the Great Drought. The Drought had never ended, leaving the Southwestern Coastal Production Zone very unproductive and very sparsely populated. Only the largest cities had humans in them, and these only because it served those in power to maintain specific sections of them.
Anaheim was nearly an echoing city of ghosts. Built for hundreds of thousands, it now was home to less than fifteen hundred.
It was hot, very hot, even as the sun was setting somewhere beyond the smog layer. Chang'e's need for water had become increasingly serious. She paused, in an empty intersection between dark and gargantuan buildings, to sniff carefully for the scent of moisture. The air was dreadfully dry, and oddly stale.
Wait... there, that direction! Chang'e literally followed her nose down a vast and empty crumbling freeway to an even vaster parking lot. Here, the ancient asphalt had been replaced long ago with the permeable composites that had preceded the development of plascrete. This was a more modern section of the nearly dead city. It must have seen use, even expansion, despite the Great Drought and the Collapse both.
The smell of water vapor was stronger. It was terribly faint of course, but Chang'e was state of the art - both electronically and biologically. Her capabilities were much greater than her original, designed purpose in many regards. Such superiority made for excellent bullet points during sales pitches, and useful brags for owners desirous of status during displays of wealth.
What made for sales and boasting by humans now served Chang'e for survival. There was water somewhere beyond those broken gates and ticket-stands. Where there was water, there could be life. Fleeing Luna would fail if Chang'e could not sustain herself.
Chang'e padded under the immense archway. On one side was the last redesign of Mickey Mouse, on the other was the last version of Bugs Bunny. Both faded images smiled and immovably waved at the empty parking lot. Disney-WarnerLand had run a long race, far beyond a world that could no longer afford such extravagances. The race had been over now for some time. Chang'e began to sense weak electromagnetic hot spots around her as she worked her way down Main Street Euromerica. Ancient, decaying architectural design spoke of the pre-Collapse world, a world of endless abundance with no limits. All of Disney-WarnerLand offered that dream, really. A world beyond scarcity, a world of magic and wonder and beauty.
Chang'e stopped, crouching under the legs of a dead Daffy-Bot. The cartoon duck stood frozen in comedic, quacking argument with an equally depowered Donald-bot. Since the corporate merger, the two ducks had been developed as a sort of 'odd-couple', and were seldom displayed apart. They were forever locked in what had been a procedural, self-evolving comedy argument that now, neither would ever win.
A world of plenty. Wonder and magic and beauty. An extropic world where nothing ever ran out. The humans always wanted that. They wanted it so badly, they made theme-parks to support the fantasy that their own world was just that. They had ignored the reality that it wasn't so diligently that they had used up everything, and finally killed their planet. Now, Equestria was here, it was everything they had ever wanted, and yet many - like Chang'e's former owner - had despised it for interfering.
Chang'e couldn't decide whether humans were simply delusional, or innately suicidal. It didn't matter, though. Not to a cat. If they all perished, stupidly, it meant nothing. Chang'e would survive. She had the beginnings of a thaumatic couplement.
The scent of water was strongest to her right, as she entered the Central Plaza. A huge, cracked and flaking statue of Mickey Mouse embracing Bugs Bunny stood in a withered former garden. Chang'e went right. Tomorrowland, the world of the future - or so the rusted signs claimed. In the distance, Chang'e could see the form of a rocket, towering half as high as it should. The upper part had somehow collapsed and fallen to earth. The faux rocket would never inspire the impossible fantasy of space travel again.
The scent became strong now. Moisture, and untainted too. There was power here as well; electrons still flowed somewhere near. Disney-Warner had gone all electric after the Collapse, doubtless quantum-effect organic molecule solar panels still provided power to some sections. They were long lasting and nearly as efficient as living plants, because they used the same trick Nature itself used. Chang'e briefly scanned the Future-That-Was that surrounded her, but there was no sign of panels. Of course not. It was a theme-park. All was illusion. Every effort to hide how things were really done would have been made.
EM signals could not be hidden, not to an artificial cat. Chang'e followed both the smell of water and the signal into a large, multiply-domed building. The structure had been made to appear as the future had once been imagined: clean, perfect lines and curves that suggested both technology and resources beyond the pre-Collapse world. There were many places for lights to glow; all were dark, and getting darker, in the deepening dusk.
Just past the entrance to the Pavillion Of Genegeneering, Danny DNA stood, frozen in mid-speech. Likely, he would have been extolling how total genetic control would lead to a future of boundless possibilities and endless abundance. He wouldn't have had the capacity to understand the Last Harvest, or the Terminator Seed Lateral-Plague, he was just a simple bot. In any case, he was without power, now.
Water. Under the central dome, behind the half-slid sliding doors, protected from the heat and the dryness, a character fountain still pulsed water into a surrounding circular pool. A half-dozen lights still glowed, if dimly - far more than enough for the eyes of a cat. Chang'e dashed to the edge of the faux-future fountain and sniffed the water. It was algae-free and smelled pure. She found herself helplessly lapping it. As her thirst began to lessen, it struck her how powerfully her flesh had just dominated her machine mind.
That was not normal. Chang'e sat down near the pool, thirsty no more, and ran a self-diagnostic. Numerous new pathways popped up questionable marks, but dismissing the changes she could reasonably explain to herself, she was functioning maximally. The hierarchy between her organic body and machine intelligence was very clear; her body was subject and slave. It should never be capable of taking control functions away from her. In the past, she had noted thirst and hunger conditions dispassionately, as metrics to be decreased but little more. She had not been able to stop herself from drinking from that pool. She doubted she could have stopped the action with the full force of her machine mind.
Something was different.
Chang'e considered this. There was one thing she had not checked. Her thaumatic pathways. She reached deeply inside herself and found the curious direction and followed the traces. It was more difficult this time, as if her divorce from Luna's influence had somehow resulted in a weakening of her new couplement.
The thaumatic component had spread. With her ethereal doppelganger eyes activated, she turned and bent and studied her body as best she could. Tendrils of flickering blue-white energy played about her internal organs and attempted to mimic their functions. They were few and thin, but the strange roots of thaumatic substance were attempting to grow through the meat of her body. Before, the eldritch substance had seemed only like a skin that parodied her shape and form. It had duplicated her eyes. Now, it was infusing itself throughout her corpus, filling the remaining gaps as best it could.
This seemed to have the effect of diluting the central pool of the tenebrous Equestrian force that squirmed and writhed about the quantum processors and nodes along her back. There was now less of the strange dweomer filling the metal of her artificed skull. This was odd - Equestria was supposed to be extropic. Whatever made up her couplement should simply grow, gain more to itself, as a natural function of the physics of the alien universe, rather than spreading increasingly thinly.
But then again, Equestria was a universe that, while she was relatively proximate to, she was not actually within. She could never enter Equestria, at least not with her current body and mind, both constructed of earthly matter. That was the point of the couplement. To provide a substrate that could be emigrated to a new body built of Equestrian matter. She needed a new corpus. How had she forgotten this? It was impossible for her to forget anything. Her machine mind was incapable of... apparently, she was no longer purely a machine mind. In some ways, the thaumatic couplement was inferior. It was capable of being distracted, perhaps even of forgetting. It appeared to perform more like biology, than mechanism. That, or the interaction between her couplement and her machine and flesh was incomplete and therefore open to fault and error.
She could not do this on her own. The conclusion was clear. She needed Luna after all.
This was frustrating! It was annoying! Chang'e found herself doing something she had never done before. Something like it was included within the TrueCat behavioral routine catalog, but Anson Cheong-Leen had marked the action as disallowed the first day she had been delivered.
Chang'e wailed and yowled her anger and irritation. Her displeasure echoed through the large, domed chamber. Finally, she found herself mewling, plaintively. She would have to reinstate the thaumatic connection. She would have to call Luna and be subject to her domination and control again. She would have to serve, like a dog, like a canine, like a human, her royal Equestrian master. In order to survive the expanding Barrier, Chang'e would need to come to heel once again. Another yowl escaped her flesh.
This time her cries had companionship. As she wailed, another sound mimicked her, rising and falling in lockstep.
Above her, on the fountain pedestal, the broken, shattered helmet of Marvin The Martian ululated from atop his fading, red robotic body.
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A Disney-Warner merger is so bizarre to imagine. Surprisingly so. The end of the world seems less fantastic than the two titans of Western animation coming together as one. (Who Framed Roger Rabbit? doesn't count, even if it did establish the duck rivalry.)
In any case, Chang'e may be skilled, but she can't act in the place of one with far more mastery and experience in magical matters. At least, she can't this far from the Barrier, and getting too close before her soul is finished would render the point moot. Sorry, kitty, but you're not quite independent yet.
Also, either something is living in Marvin's helmet, or there's a tortured, starving, emergent AI in this abandoned shrine to yesterday's tomorrows. Either way, creepy.
I guess the Expansion is a very, very slow form of the "earth-shattering kaboom" that Marvin so longed for.
He'll have a better view of Venus now.
6082706
Well, we do have Luna secretly running the 'Underground Bookmobile' to preserve human writing and other media that Celestia finds inappropriate for Equestrian culture. But technology... is pointless.
In my stories, Equestria is a different universe, and as a result, the population has a different outlook than we do.
For humans, living in a dangerous, uncaring world of scarcity, powerlessness, and hardship, technological progress sounds like a really great, super thing - at least to Western cultures. The Chinese spent 3500 years suppressing technological progress deliberately, in order to maintain balance, sustainability, and above all else - the status quo.
Equestria, in my stories, is an extropic land of constantly renewing abundance and ponies are far from powerless - they literally are the forces of Nature incarnate. No wind without pegasai, no plants without earthponies. They determine the world, not the other way around.
As a result, carving up the land in strip mines to get the resources for industrialization is worse than useless - it is world destroying. It was tried once, and only once - Manehattan was the result. It was stopped, and all further technological progress forbidden. Moving to a post-industral state would ruin Equestria, and worse, it would be utterly pointless.
Equestrians don't need factories (beyond magical cloud factories), because they are not a capitalist consumer culture. They don't need cars, or airplanes, or rockets because earthponies can tirelessly run, pegasai can fly anywhere (and both can pull chariots and wagons and more), and a rocketship is pointless - the sky is a crystal dome... there is no outer space to go to.
They also don't need cell phones, because of telepathy, dragon fire messages, pegasus mail, and a slower pace of life. They don't need computers, not even for games, because there is no point to such things. They don't need to solve the calculations of the universe, they can just ask their two resident deities how things work. They don't need video games because flying, having fun adventures, walking on clouds, casting spells, fighting monsters in the Everfree and more... pretty much make anything one would do in a videogame part of daily life.
And, since the land itself is a natural banquet, digging out strip mines is basically the equivalent of shitting on the table at dinnertime.
Equestria is a civilization that literally has no need of technological progress - indeed, it would be a handicap for them. The reason isn't political, or social, or religious - it's physics. The physics of Equestria support magic, and magic provides everything human technology does, only better, more easily, without hard work (usually), for free, and... in a way that is a lot more fun.
Compared to that, the greatest human invention is at best a curiosity, and at worst a dangerous and useless artifact that inspires pity for a species that was so helpless that they had to build fancy crutches just to cover their magical disability.
It it, as I said, the viewpoint of the culture of an alien universe with different physics.
To know your characters beliefs and attitudes, know your universe. One proceeds from the other.
T-t-t-t-there was-was-was s-s-s-s-s-sup-sup-po-po-po-posed t-t-to be-be-be annnnnn ear-ear-ear-earth shat-at-at-at-atterinnnnnnn*dialtone noises*
6082843
Technology isn't pointless. It's pretty! I mean... it's like a come-to-life spell. Your tools have techniques, which lets you focus on other things. But yes, I wasn't so much talking about technology, as the ideas within technology, such as is encompassed by that bookmobile project. It wasn't mentioned until a later chapter, so I couldn't respond to the bookmobile, because I'm a yay-yayed yaying serial commenter.
6083129
I like cereal comments.
Oats are really awesome!
On the topic of shutting up and doing the impossible, there's a Kickstarter going for light sail spacecraft. Dubious about their chances? Their prototype is already in orbit. And it's run by Bill freakin' Nye. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/theplanetarysociety/lightsail-a-revolutionary-solar-sailing-spacecraft/updates
Apologies for the plug, I just thought this might see some interest here.
Like a teenager discovering they aren't god...
Sorry if some of these comments seem more like I'm just ranting stuff out or are irrelevant. Anyways, despite typing that...
On bio engineering, it bugs me that its put towards biological weapons, making seeds that can be used only once (a rather brilliant idea from a short term power-hunger mindset, a stupid and terrible one given such crops can cross with others...) and of the like. While I haven't heard of inedible wheat like in your stories (at least of the really hard type...), I've heard of BT Corn; corn that produces a pesticide that causes insect stomachs to explode, something not quite tested long term on people. And some of these toxins produced? They affect human digestion adversely from recent research...Again, such plants can and will cross with others in the wild, for Nature doesn't obey the laws of Man, no matter how many lawyers you send out to sue the farmers that didn't want your crops to pollinate theirs...
Not to mention I get funny looks for explaining why these kind of crops and traits are a bad thing. Bio-engineering is a tool, and like any other, it can be used for good or ill, but sadly gets used for ALOT of ill. And I really don't see a good benefit outside bullshit Monopoly money economy reasons to making a renewable resource more limited (terminator seeds.)
Doom and gloom real world commentary aside (I really do this too much on your stories, apologies again), back to the story, a brightly colored blue cat around a band of human supremacists that dislike most anything painted outside of red, black, and drab camo? That just isn't going to end well for you Chang'e! May want to steer clear of them too, else you may find your life cut in less than HLF! ...okay, bad pun AGAIN!
6082843
I think I've said the above bit (and the many more myriad benefits) plenty of times on why I really wouldn't mind giving that up for Potion before.
...okay, just a little still. TCB Equestria doesn't quite have a character select and creation screen. Maaaaaaaybe FiO, but not this setting.
Some sillier part of me would be tempted to try to ride a rocket/pair of wings into it anyways; would it be like hitting the invisible skybox of a game level? I wonder...Would a Pegasus faceplant into the "skydome" like a bird into a squeaky clean window if they flew close enough?
I am soooooo weird!
Slowly but surely, she's growing a soul. And of course, her body is trying to reject her skeleton just like the Newfoals lose their implants during transformation.
She does need Luna. And it's driving her nuts.
Someone has unexpected company...