After the Nightmare

by CORACK

Chapter 15

Luna watched in horror as Selene disappeared. She quickly scanned the magical energies that had enveloped the girl. It was some form of teleport spell. She let out a sigh of relief. All she had to do was activate her tracking spell, and she could teleport to Selene's location.

Concentrating on the magical beacon, she reached out, trying to find where the girl had been whisked off to. It took a moment for Luna to find her, but when Luna did, she was confused. Selene hadn't moved very far, at least horizontally, she was only about a quarter mile north of Luna's current location. Vertically however was a different story. Selene was nearly 500 miles underground, that didn't make any sense to Luna, that would place her in the planet's mantle.

Since Selene was still alive, the only explanation Luna could think of was that this complex went very deep underground. If Selene had been brought that deep and not in a controlled environment, she would be dead already. Luna quickly prepared her own teleport spell, hoping to end up fairly close. In a flash of blue light she disappeared.

Luna materialized in a small room, standing on top of a platform similar to the one Selene had been on when she disappeared. She quickly looked around but Selene was not in sight.

She checked her tracking spell again, to see how far off she was. Something was wrong, she had only moved about two miles down. She charged her horn to try again but when she reappeared she was in the exact same room. It didn't make any sense, she refused to believe that this was as close as the teleport spell could get her to Selene.

Luna had a backup plan, she knew more than one teleport spell. She had another that would clear an area around a target by teleporting any non-living matter back to the caster's location. It was smart enough to not pick up anything alive, but it would happily wreck a wall, or a floor, or solid rock for that matter. It was mostly used as a rescue spell, to reach a pony buried in an avalanche or a rock-slide or something similar. The caster just had to be prepared to throw up a shield spell to keep whatever they were emerging into from collapsing on top of them. This version of the spell would work even if Selene had found herself encased in solid rock.

Luna cast the spell and vanished, only to re-appear in the exact same room.

She looked around confused, the spell should have worked. She couldn't think of any reason it would not. She started to pace back and forth on the platform, trying to think of what could have gone wrong. She checked and Selene was still in the same location, and she confirmed that she hadn't just ended up in an identical room.

Feeling frustrated, she decided to look around. She trotted to the bottom of the platform and then her horn slammed into an invisible barrier. When her horn hit the barrier her head snapped upwards and her muzzle was pushed into the battier which apparently extended downward. She muttered a string of curses under her breath as she rubbed her muzzle. Even her horn, which was strong enough to use as a weapon, ached a bit. It felt like she had just head butted a rock wall.

She reached forward and felt the barrier, it glowed slightly from the touch and she could see that it extended all the way to the floor. She cast a low level telekinetic push out in all directions, and the barrier lit up all around her. It encased the entire platform. Someone or something had was attempting to trapped her here.

Luna cast another spell, this one to analyze the barrier. It was magical in nature and cleverly designed, initially resisting Luna's attempts to even confirm that it existed. After a good deal of poking and prodding she was finally able to get a proper reading. The barrier remained at a very low power state, making it nearly undetectable until something came in contact with it, in this case her horn. It was designed to be adaptive, when under strain it would shift power from one section of the field to reinforce another. The trick to defeating this kind of barrier was to overwhelm the ability to transfer power.

Luna's horn began to glow brightly, a white beam of energy shot forward from the tip of her and hit the edge of the field. It began to hum as she added more and more power. A second beam lanced out backwards hitting the shield at the rear of the platform. The humming increased as she added a third, fourth, fifth and sixth beam to the attack. The shield was glowing fiercely now, straining to redirect energy to all six points. Two more beams shot out from her horn, and small cracks started to form all along the shield.

Luna was beginning to sweat under the exertion, but she wasn't done yet. While maintaining the beams, she sent out a bubble of force, pushing out in all directions. It hit every section of the shield at the same time, the small cracks expanded rapidly and the shield shattered.

Luna sat down, trying to catch her breath. After a few moments of rest, she stood back up and walked off the platform. She headed over to the only door in the room, but there was no pad to open it. Annoyed with yet another obstacle in her path, she wrenched the door out of the wall flung it behind her, and marched out into the now accessible hallway.

She passed a number of doors, the rest of them open to similar, but empty rooms. She found one that was still closed and forced the door open. Inside were the remains of a number of crystal golems, resting on top of platform exactly like the one she had been trapped on. She checked and there was a shield surrounding the platform.

"These must be holding cells," she thought to herself.

She continued down the hall, just before she reached the end, two sentry turrets popped out of the ceiling and a 3rd, larger one sprang up from the floor.

"I don't have time for this!" she shouted, stamping down on the floor hard.

Before the turrets could get off a single shot, Luna fired off three of her own in rapid succession. The shields around the turrets didn't even slow the beams down. They continued, punching straight through the front armor and out the rear of each turret. Within seconds, all three turrets had been reduced to molten slag.

The door in front of her exploded outward, landing in a heap in the next room. Luna casually stepped over the wreckage and looked around. The walls were lined with displays that reminded Luna of the computer display on the Ascension As she stepped forward, one of the displays turned on.

The display faded from black to white and two eyes appeared in the center. Luna noticed that as she moved towards the display the eyes were tracking her position. She heard a strange voice on the air say something in an unknown language.

"Hello?"

The eyes blinked and the voice repeated its statement.

"I do not understand you."

The voice sounded as if it was coming from the very walls. She couldn't detect anything alive nearby so she had to assume that this was some form of alien technology.

"Greetings," a female voice said in Equestrian.

"Who is this?" Luna asked.

"Do not be alarmed, I intend you no harm," the voice replied.

"You still haven't answered my question, and where are you?" Luna said as she looked back and forth. She was growing impatient.

"I am here."

The display in front of Luna flashed brightly before returning to the image of the eyes.

"I do not understand, I assume this is some sort of computer you are talking to me though, but I am not familiar with your technology," Luna said.

"My sensors show that you have a small computer in your bag, surely you must have some familiarity."

"Oh this?" Luna floated Selene's tablet out the backpack. "it is not mine, it belongs to my friend."

"Ah, yes, the other. A different species. Did you not arrive with it?"

Luna's ears perked up.

"You know about Selene? Where is she?" Luna asked.

The eyes shifted back and forth nervously.

"She is... below. She is safe, at the moment."

"Did you not arrive with her?" The voice repeated.

"No, Selene crashed here many years ago, I've only been here for a short while."

"How did you arrive? I am not detecting any other vessels."

"I am not completely sure myself, a spell gone wrong, an accidental dimensional shift," Luna said. "I arrived in a cavern on the surface, not far from the room we originally entered this place."

"The anomaly? I detected a large thaumaturgical event in that area eight months ago but no source. Since then I have detected a number of smaller scale events, with growing frequency, but none as large as the original. I had thought it was a sensor glitch."

Luna stamped her hoof in impatience.

"Look, if you will not tell me where Selene is, at least tell me who you are," she said.

"I am Decima, I am the artificial intelligence in charge of maintaining this... world."

Luna thought back to the books she had read, there was much talk about AI, but as far as she had gotten in her readings, humanity still hadn't yet created a real one.

"Have you seen the surface?" she asked while pacing back and forth. "It doesn't look like you are doing a very good job. This planet is dying."

"I have a limited amount of power and there are more... important functions that must be maintained. As it is, your entry into this room prompted the automatic security systems to use a great deal of energy. Energy that I cannot afford to waste."

The eyes took on a suspicious look.

"How did you manage to get in here, most of my visual sensors on this level are offline, but I did detect several bursts of thaumic energy. I do not believe that bag you are carrying to be of sufficient volume to contain a thaumic generator powerful enough to bypass my defenses."

Luna's eyes shone with anger. With a quick burst of magic she brought up a shield around herself.

"It was you who attacked me?" Her horn glowed fiercely as she prepared herself for battle.

"Not exactly, they are automated defenses, I do not control them directly, they will attack whatever comes into range... how are you doing that?" Decima asked, eyes appearing puzzled.

"Doing what?"

"The thaumic force field." A second monitor turned on and it played back a video of the shield surrounding Luna. "In addition there is an excessively large build up of thaumic energy on your horn."

"Thaumic? Do you mean magic?" Luna asked.

"Perhaps, I am still developing a translation matrix to be able to properly converse with you," Decima replied.

"Well, if you mean magic, all ponies are capable of using magic to some degree."

"I'm not following, where is your thaumic generator? Did your species find some way of miniaturizing generators? Perhaps an implant of some sort?"

"I have no idea what a thaumic generator is, this magic natural ability of mine," Luna said.

"That's impossible, your an organic, organics can't generate nearly enough thaumic energy to put up a shield," the AI squinted at Luna. "Still, it has to be coming from somewhere."

"This is a waste of my time," Luna said letting out an exasperated growl "What is this place and how can I get to my friend?"

"I will answer the second question first, you can't, at least not yet. No one is supposed to have access to that level, I'm not even sure how your friend got down there. There is a security lockout that is supposed to prevent any access to that level of the base, not even I can break it."

"Did you not say you were in charge of this world? Why would you not have access to part of it?"

"Answering your previous question will answer your last," the AI let out a sigh. "This is Karzel, it is... was the home world of the Eternals. It was they who built me, thousands of years ago. 150 thousand years ago, the Eternals reached a turning point in their history. For over a millennium they had been expanding their civilization throughout their solar system. As they expanded, so did their rate of growth. A study was done and it was determined that the solar system was no longer enough to support their species, so they made the decision to expand to the stars."

"The speed of light limited the rate at which they could expand, but Karzel was inside the dense galactic core and there were many other systems that could be reached in even under a single lifetime. They built great ships and slowly pushed outward, ever expanding their empire. Eventually all systems within easy reach had been colonized, but still the empire grew. For centuries the Eternals' greatest minds tried to find a way to break the light speed barrier, but nothing worked, until the discovery of artificial thaumic generators."

"Unlike any other species on Karzel, the Eternals had special abilities which allowed them to violate the laws of physics. The source of this power was thaumic energy, magic to you. It was quite limited in its scope, the most powerful Eternals could levitate heavy objects and transmute matter, but for most part their abilities were more passive in nature. Rapid healing, longevity, minor telekinesis and minor illusions. Eternals could combine their powers to perform even greater feats, teleportation, force fields, and more, but the drain on their bodies was often fatal."

"Ponies have similar magical abilities, though most ponies do not know how to do those things, almost any unicorn could learn teleportation or shield generation if they simply took the time to learn the spell, neither one takes a significant amount of magic," Luna said.

"Interesting, your species must generate far more thaumic energy than the Eternals do, it would take hundreds of them working together to form a shield like you just did," the AI stated. "But let me continue..."

"The Eternals were sure if they could devise a way to generate thaumic energy artificially they could use it to power their ships. Eventually a breakthrough was made and the first generators came online. While large and bulky, they were able to generate the more power than a thousand Eternals working together, and this was only the beginning. The more advances that were made, the more thaumic power could be generated. Eventually they reached a point where ships, powered with thaumic drives, could instantly vast distances, making their effective speed faster than light. Powerful AIs were created whose sole purpose was to study thaumatology, build the generators and as well as discover new uses for this seemingly miracle technology."

"For another thousand years the Eternals continued to spread outward. Eventually they occupied the vast majority of the core of the galaxy, during this time they grew completely reliant on thaumic power. It was used in every aspect of life, from powering cities to growing food and for expanding new colonies."

"The empire had grown too large to manage efficiently by any normal government, so much control was turned over to a triumvirate of 3 AIs, Vohaul, Xenon and Zax. Vohaul was in charge of researching new uses of Thaumic energy. Vohaul was conducting experiments on dimensional travel. It was hoped that by bypassing this dimension, ships could exceed the speed of light. Long distance teleportation required vast amounts of power and even the fastest ships only had an effective speed of about ten times that of light."

"During one of Vohaul's tests, something went wrong. Most of what we know is pieced together from data recovered from Vohaul's backups on Thaiden Prime, the planet he did his dimensional research on. What we were able to find out is Vohaul finally succeeded, he was able to open a portal to another dimension, but something went wrong."

"After Vohaul opened the portal, there was a massive field of thaumic energy flooded through from the other side. Somehow it corrupted It was unlike any sort of field we've ever encountered before, we still don't know what generated it but we lost contact with Vohaul shortly after the portal was opened. Much later we found out that somehow the field had corrupted Vohaul's programming. We suspect that something from that other dimension was able to take over Vohaul but we've never been able to prove anything."

"What lead you to that conclusion?" Luna asked.

"After losing contact with Vohaul, an automatic scout ship was dispatched to try to find out what went wrong. That is how we found out about what had happened. The scout ship was able to recover partial logs from a backup system of Vohaul's central core, before it was destroyed by Vohaul's flagship. In those logs it also found evidence of Vohaul creating an army of constructs animated by thaumic energy. The method for animating these constructs is completely unknown to us, it doesn't seem likely that Vohaul would have stumbled upon the technique due to random corruption, instead we think that whatever is controlling him knew how to create these monsters."

"Back in the caverns above, I battled a crystalline ghoul animated by dark magic, was this one of those constructs?" Luna asked.

"Yes, there are a number of them throughout the base," the AI replied. "The base's defenses and the construct army have been waging war against each other for millennium."

"After the scout ship was destroyed Vohaul started attacking distant colonies at the edges of the empire, one by one, they fell. Vohaul was somehow able to slip in undetected, drop off armies of those constructs and slip away before any response could be mounted. Xenon took charge of the Eternal response. Xenon noticed a pattern in the attacked colonies and moved a fleet to the next colony in line. While in wait, Vohaul's fleet teleported into the system and immediately began attacking the colony below. When Xenon intervened, Vohaul struck back. There was a massive battle, but Vohaul's ships made use of thaumic weaponry unknown to us, and were able to get the upper hand. While Xenon was destroyed he did manage to get a warning out to the last of the core AIs, Zax."

"Within a year, the vast majority of the empire had been destroyed. Vohaul showed no mercy in his attacks, whole planets were wiped from existences, and trillions of Eternals perished in the mostly one sided war."

"Zax realized that the fight against Vohaul was hopeless, the bulk of the Eternals' population were so reliant on the AIs that they couldn't support themselves, never mind fight for their lives. There was only one hope to save the species. Zax restored three ancient colony ships to working order, loaded them up with passengers and sent them out into deep space to escape Vohaul's inevitable attack."

"Vohaul continued to massacre all Eternal colonies, as his fleet made its way towards the Eternal home world of Karzel. What Vohaul didn't know was that Zax had converted the entire core of Karzel into a massive thaumic generator, the most powerful ever constructed. Zax had recovered enough of Vohaul's data on dimensional gateways to start his own research. Eventually Zax found a way create a pocket dimension, basically a bubble of pseudo-reality. When Vohaul's fleet arrived over Karzel, Zax activated that generator and in a large burst of thaumic energy, the entire system and everything else in a 10 light year radius was pulled into a dimensional singularity."

"What is a dimensional singularity?" Luna asked.

"As I had mentioned, Zax discovered a way to create a bubble of pseudo-reality. This is basically an artificial dimension. The original intent was to hide the rest of the Eternals inside this dimension, but there was a flaw in the design. The bubbles are inherently unstable and require a constant input of thaumic energy to prevent collapse. If they do collapse everything inside is destroyed. Zax purposely created a bubble around Karzel that was far too large to maintain, even with the planetary generator. Because of this, it started to slowly collapse itself."

"Once the collapse begins, the amount of thaumic energy needed to escape back into the real universe rises drastically, Zax called it an dimensional singularity it is nearly impossible to escape. Everything inside this dimension will be destroyed when it finally collapses on itself."

"How much longer before this bubble collapses entirely?"

"I cannot say. The rate has accelerated recently, that acceleration coincides with your arrival, but I am not sure why it has happened. Perhaps another few years, a decade at the most."

Luna stared in silence at the image on the screen. Even if she was able to rescue Selene, reality itself was collapsing around them. Still, she wasn't sure that escape was completely impossible, from the conversation it appeared that these Eternals did not have much experience with dimensional travel. It may be that she could find a way out of this pocket dimension before it collapsed. She needed more information and more importantly, she needed to get to Selene.

Comments

[Canary In The Coal Mine]

Finally, some answers. They do raise a few additional questions... The biggest being: won't Luna figuring out how to escape also potentially release the doomed constructs to wreck havok on her home Universe too? Same with Selene, as humanity has no defense at all against magic.

Also, what of the remaining AI? Will they take it with them? If the goal is to collapse the singularity, what 'other functions' is the AI referring to? Don't they want it to collapse? Is the AI she is speaking to the enemy?

[3phantoms]

Vohaul? From Space Quest?

[KvAT]

Not to shit on the author's writing capabilities, but surely there's a better way to present the lore than huge walls of straight exposition?