Pendulum

by IonBeamIceCreamMachine

Prologue

Location: Black Neighsa, Time: August 26th, 1466

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“Maybe we should shut it off?”
“Of course not. This is the highest reading we’ve gotten all month. Keep it running.”

There was a thump, and then a responding whirr. There was the mare and the stallion, standing in front of the machine.

Standing in front of three meters of titanium-reinforced heavy duty glass, the two watched intently. They never took their eyes off the machine, save to look at the data being printed in front of them at a ridiculously fast rate. It was another day at work.

“Dilation of around… six. Around the continuum in area A.” The mare took off her glasses and closed her eyes. “That’s still not enough. It won’t work at this rate.”
Her colleague sighed in turn, and shook his head. “We have to shut it off.”

“I won’t let that happen,” The mare said, with a sudden steel to her voice. “If we turn the machine off we might not ever be able to balance the four-vectors, and that’ll be another three months of us standing around again.”
Her colleague scoffed, and threw a coat over his back. “The directors are going to be pissed. They were expecting tangible results last week and yet we still can’t make this thing work within a damn eighth within expected results.”

A heavy blast door opened behind the mare, and the stallion paused. “Welp, I’m going home. Tell me if you manage to solve the secrets of the universe without me.”

Hoofsteps were heard on the cold tiled floor, and the heavy door sealed shut with a click.

The mare barely even reacted, staring intensely at the readings in front of her. Spacial fluctuations, EM detections, constantly changing mathematical structures. To other ponies, what they would have seen was a tangled mess of lines and numbers sprawled across a console, but to this mare, it all made complete sense to her.

This was exactly what was making her so exasperated.

“I don’t get it…” she whispered to herself. “Everything is running within operational limits, so why isn’t anything changing?”

Her piercing gaze was alternating between the readings in front of her and the machine behind the glass; inside the white-walled test chamber stood a giant machine with a glass panel. Dead center in this contraption was what the mare's team had been testing on so feverishly for the past year - a pendulum, swinging back and forth, caught in a controlled perpetual loop.

The mare's hooves darted around the control panel as she made a series of micro-adjustments to the machine’s output, increasing the intensity of the disturbance inside the test chamber. A small warning played, indicating that the energy output of the machine was becoming so high that the almost absolute-zero temperature inside the chamber was barely enough to contain the heat emitted.

“The directors don’t know what the hell they’re asking for,” the mare spat. “Oh, yeah, bend the laws of physics for us, would’ya? Thanks!” Her hooves still barely skimming across the control panel, buttons being pressed faster than a machine gun could ever hope to fire.

And then suddenly, the rapid tap-tap-tap of her inputs slowed. The brown-coated mare leaned forward in her seat, squinting through the thick, protective glass at the center of the chamber.

“Did that pendulum just stop moving for a second, or was that just me?”

With a renewed sense of purpose, the mare input a flurry of commands into the machine, boosting its output by four hundred percent. She drew upon the auxiliary coolant tanks, balancing the temperature inside the chamber, and pulled up a log.

“Coffee Pot, August 26th 1466, control test 76-B, lab 3. I could have sworn I just saw the control stop in mid-swing, just for a second...”

She watched intently as the machine drew upon more and more power from the lab’s titanic underground reactor system, and projected waves of electromagnetic force upon the swinging pendulum. A smile lit upon the mare’s face as the total output of the generators hit 640%.

The pendulum stopped moving in mid-swing.

“Yes!” Screamed the mare, jumping out of her chair. “Hah! That’ll show him! I did it! The control has stopped moving. Dilation has reached one hundred. That’s a perfect temporal plume if I’ve ever seen one!”

The mare walked away from her console, chittering into her log, pumping her forelegs in celebration. In fact, she was so happy, she failed to see the output of the machine climb higher and higher.
Seven hundred percent output.
Eight hundred and ninety percent output.
One thousand, two hundred percent output.

A shrill alarm blared and warning lights lit up, the automated computer recognising the danger placed upon the lab by the now rapidly overheating machine. The mare turned around, and saw the pendulum start moving again.

“Oh no.”

She sprang back into her chair, eyes darting.
The numbers kept climbing.
The alarm screamed its warning across the entire complex, warning everypony.
But nobody came, for on this day, the mare was alone.

Sweat streamed down the mare's forehead as the pendulum began to swing faster and faster, and the white walls of the testing chamber began to char as the temperatures rose to almost a thousand degrees.

“No, no, no, no…”
Four thousand percent output.
Nine thousand, five hundred percent output.

The pendulum melts.

Coffee Pot barely had time to react before the machine exploded.