• Published 27th Apr 2016
  • 1,795 Views, 79 Comments

The Curse of Cryonics - Mine_Menace



Cryonics, or long-term freezing of one's body, was a mistake. Now I've got to contend with a post-human Earth, where the dominant species seems to be mutant horses that call themselves ponies. But there's got to be a bright side to everything...

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Magical Mystery Stour

The return to the castle and the rest of the day had been largely uneventful. Katherine hadn't said another word, and Firefall had dropped me off at my room with some lunch before leaving with Katherine. After I'd finished lunch, I had gone through my bags to jog my still-lacking memory on what I had brought.

I didn't even try to turn on my laptop or any electronics at first--there weren't any electric outlets anywhere anyway--so I settled on alternating between rereading Catch-22 and just laying back on my bed and letting my mind wander.

I did these things for almost all of the rest of my day, interrupted only by the need to relieve myself, dinner, shower, and eventually, bed. I still wasn't overly tired, however, and though I got more sleep than the previous night, I still found myself waking up at what I presumed to be early in the morning.

Again, I tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn't for whatever reason. I eventually just gave up, stood up, and dragged one of my bags into the bathroom so I could try to find something in the light.

"No...no...no..." I muttered to myself as I took things out and set them aside on the floor. "No, no...hmm..."

I grabbed my laptop and weighed it in my hand. I hadn't even tried to turn it on since I had come out of cryosleep because of the lack of electricity, but I shrugged to myself. "It doesn't work, I'm betting," I said as I nevertheless opened it and hit the power button.

And the laptop turned on. The laptop actually turned on. "What the fuck?" I muttered as it loaded. "Why...?"

Within a few seconds, the login screen popped up. I paused and logged in, and within a minute my home screen showed up. Everything was as I remembered, except there was (unsurprisingly) no Wi-Fi signal, but the battery icon seemed to show that the laptop was being charged right that instant. Even though it wasn't plugged in to anything.

"Jesus," I said, raising an eyebrow and testing out some of the applications. All the ones that didn't require Internet access worked as well as they had before, and I was able to get into all my files easily.

"Well then..." I said under my breath. "This happened..."

I couldn't help but wonder if the apparent ambient magic was somehow electric, though I couldn't draw any real conclusions since I had no idea how magic worked.

A thought entered my head and I searched through my bag for other electronics. As I'd thought, they worked--my digital watch, my smartphone, even my little Game Boy Advance, which seemed to perpetually have the charging light on.

I'll worry about it in the morning, I mentally decided. So I settled on reading again until morning; I was having a hard time trusting magic still, even if it could power my electronics.

I stacked a small pile of books on the floor, stood, and dragged my bag back into the main room. When I returned, I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I paused. Then I stared.

Prior to cryosleep, I'd had my hair cut into a buzzcut because of possible safety issues. It was already growing back a bit, though, and what was more, it was significantly grayer than usual. It was especially concerning because first of all, I was twenty years old biologically, secondly, my hair was naturally black, and thirdly, my parents hadn't started getting gray hair until their mid-thirties, so this wasn't consistent with genetics.

"What the hell?" I muttered, running my hand through it. It felt no different than usual; it was just getting gray. "First the laptop and stuff, now this...?"

I leaned in and examined my hair from every angle I could, and while some black hair remained, there was no doubt that my hair had already gotten about a third of the way toward total grayness. "It could be magic," I said to myself as I squinted at it, "or maybe it's some weird side effect of the cryonics..."

I stepped back to consider it. If it was just a side effect of the cryonics, then maybe somehow I was aging faster, but that was unlikely as I had no wrinkles or other signs of aging beyond the gray hair and what was normal. If it was just gray hair, then I was fine with it; I didn't care what my hair looked like. If it was magic, on the other hand...what else was it going to do to me?

Either way, there was nothing I could do right now; it was the middle of the night and the bedroom door was locked. No way to contact anyone, even Katherine.

"Fuck it," I said, and I laid down on the floor, reading again.


I'd completely lost track of time by the time the door opened again and Firefall entered, seeing me in the exact same position as I was in the previous day. "Again?" he said with a hint of mirth in his voice.

"Again," I said simply, committing the page number I was on to memory and closing the book.

"Were you not able to sleep again?"

"Pretty much," I said, standing. "Hey, as a matter of fact...I just realized this last night." I pointed to my head. "Why is my hair getting gray?"

Firefall looked up at me. "I can't see very well from down here. Can you lower yourself down?"

I sat down, and he peered at my head. "It looks a bit grayer than it was yesterday, that's for certain," he said. "Why, what's the problem?"

"The problem?" I said incredulously. "The problem is that my hair's naturally black. I've never seen it get gray like this. If I'm genetically like my parents, which I definitely am, then my hair shouldn't start graying until I'm in my thirties."

"Oh; I assumed the gray color was natural."

"I wasn't born with gray hair," I reiterated. "No one that I know of is born with gray hair. I don't even think Holden Caulfield was born with gray hair."

"Plenty of ponies are born with gray hair," Firefall said. "Who's Holden Caulfield, though, a friend of yours?"

I snorted. "No, he's a character in a book I was forced to read for school back in the day. Anyway, humans are different from ponies. We usually have hair that's black, blond, brown, or red in rarer cases before it starts turning gray and white. My hair wasn't supposed to get gray for fifteen-ish more years at least."

Firefall frowned. "Odd..."

"Maybe it's the magic everywhere?" I suggested.

"Magic doesn't do that," he said immediately.

"I'm not magical," I pointed out.

"Good point...since you're such an anomaly, though--along with Katherine--I don't know what exactly is going on," he admitted.

I shrugged. "Eh. I'll bet the only thing to do is just wait and see, right?"

Firefall smiled wanly. "I suppose so; plus, we have something we've got to do today."

I stood up again. "Oh really?"

Firefall moved back into the main bedroom, head turned toward me as he did so. "Yes; Princess Celestia has suggested that you and Katherine...learn our alphabet so you can read and write our language."

"Oh, so where is Kath--" I said as I followed him, but then I noticed Katherine leaning against the wall by the main door, looking toward her feet and saying nothing. "Oh. Never mind."

She looked up, spotted me, and stepped over to me. "Hello, Patrick."

"...Hello," I said, surprised by her directness.

"I just want to apologize for my reaction yesterday when you revived me. I was surprised and stressed, but...I've met Princess Celestia, and we've figured things out."

"It's okay," I said, "I didn't exactly help things. It's kind of my fault too." I stuck out a hand and she shook it.

Katherine looked past me. "Firefall? We were going to be learning your alphabet?"

"Yes," he replied as I turned around. "You're going to need to read and write, as I said, and once you do, you can learn about Equestria more in depth through books so somepony doesn't have to tell you."

I whistled. I'd had to take Spanish in high school, and I wasn't exactly good at it. Then again, I didn't have to learn how to speak anything here. I already knew that.

"Are you...qualified?" Katherine asked.

Firefall grinned uneasily and he rubbed the back of his head. "Well, Princess Celestia believes so. I'm in my final year at her school, I've learned plenty about language, and when she asked me to help you, I believed I was ready. Besides, you're not children, which should make this go more easily since you'll pay attention better."

I shrugged. "Well, I guess it's something to do--something useful. Where do we start?"

"Well, first of all, we can sit down," said Firefall, sitting down. Once Katherine and I sat so we formed a triangle with some space in the center, he nodded. "Okay, good. Well, I think what we can start out with is if one of you--" he levitated a stack of paper and some pencils from...somewhere... "writes down your alphabet so I can have some kind of reference."

"Where'd you get that?" I asked, pointing to the paper and pencils.

Firefall said nothing but set the paper and pencils down in the space between the three of us. "Who will do it?"

Katherine and I glanced at each other briefly, and I mentally noted that her short hair already had flecks of gray. Deciding not to comment, I turned back, said, "I'll do it," and grabbed a pencil and a scrap of paper.

I could almost taste the awkwardness around me as I copied down the English alphabet's uppercase letters, trying my best to be neat considering my less-than-stellar average quality with handwriting. In a minute, I finished and showed it to Firefall.

The unicorn stared at it for a second. "Okay...you know, I think this will be easier than I thought it would be," he said as he grabbed another sheet of paper and the pencil in his magic and began to write.

"What makes you say that?" asked Katherine.

"First of all, your alphabet has...twenty-six letters, while ours has twenty-eight, so you don't have to learn a lot more letters than you might find comfortable. And secondly..."

He trailed off as he finished and slid the paper over to us. As we looked it over, I noticed that the letters seemed to not be so different. Most of them were extremely weird corruptions of the Latin alphabet I was used to, and the few that weren't seemed to stem more from East Asian characters, simplified as they were.

"Well. Okay then," I said, staring at the Equestrian alphabet. "I was hoping it wouldn't be so complicated...at least, this doesn't look too complicated..."

"It's not," Firefall assured. "It's phonetic, so if you can say the words, you shouldn't have a lot of trouble writing them. I doubt reading them will be too difficult, but then, Equestrian is my first language."

"Well, if it's phonetic, it already makes more sense than the English alphabet does," I observed, trying to commit the letters to memory. "The English alphabet is pretty much a clusterfuck."

"I don't think it's all bad," Katherine said, glancing up at me.

"Well, if nothing else, C, Q, and X don't need to exist," I debated. "K and S can cover each pronunciation of C, K and W together cover Q, and K and S together cover X."

"I suppose that is true," Katherine acknowledged, "but it's easier to write than something like Japanese."

"Well, I can't argue with that."

"All right then," Firefall said, and he pointed to the first letter. "Well, like I said, there shouldn't be too much trouble. This one is a vowel called..."


This is annoying and confusing was what was chiefly on my mind as I sat on my bed, a book in my hands and a sheet of paper beside me.

The paper had been written on by me; after I'd heard the sounds each Equestrian letter made, I wrote the paper connecting their sounds to those of the English alphabet. The book was one for small children--or foals as they were apparently called--and it was supposed to help teach me the Equestrian alphabet.

It wasn't exactly great that the book was called The Colt Who Cried Timberwolf, was a picture book, and was exactly the same as the human story The Boy Who Cried Wolf, only substituting the humans with hornless, wingless ponies--which I learned were called Earth ponies.

I stared at the pages and, mind wandering, ran my hand through my hair. I hope it'll be okay, I thought, before trying to decipher the page. Timberwolf...timberwolf...the...colt...cree--no, cried...oot---out...

I felt like a preschooler.

I looked up; Katherine was sitting on the floor in the corner, trying to decipher her own book, while Firefall had gone to get us breakfast. I hesitated, then set the book down, stepped into the bathroom, and locked the door. I jiggled the doorknob to test the lock and then turned to the mirror.

"Okay," I muttered to myself, eyes on my reflection's hair. "Let's see what's up..."

Examining the hair up close again reaffirmed what I'd thought: that it was natural. The roots of the gray hairs were also gray, so it didn't look like it had been dyed. Even a few of the black hairs' roots looked gray.

"What is wrong with me...ow!"

I winced and my hand flew to my forehead as I felt a headache begin to manifest. "Oh, great. Yeah, this is just great."

For a brief second, I considered punching the mirror, but instead I settled on turning the faucet on to cold and splashing my face with the water. Once I was done with that, I stepped back into the main room just in time to see Firefall come in, levitating two trays.

"I've brought your breakfast," he announced, levitating one tray to me and the other to Katherine.

"Thanks," I said shortly, grabbing it out of the air and sitting down on the bed. I winced as my headache flared up, and muttered, "Oh god, my head..."

"Are you okay?" came Firefall's voice.

Am I okay. Am. I. Okay...

Something broke.

"No! Your magic is changing me!" I burst out, glaring up at him. "Your fucking magic is turning my hair gray, it's somehow powering my electronics, and I bet it's messing with my head too and keeping the sleep away! Just what the hell is this, anyway?"

"Not so loud, please," muttered Katherine from across the room.

"And I'll bet it's the cause of my headache--I mean our headaches, 'cause Katherine has one now too!" I continued. "Hey, Katherine! Hate to break it to you, but your hair's gonna turn gray and you might have weird thoughts because magic hates us now!"

"W-what?" Katherine groaned. "Patrick, please...tell me later..."

An expression of concern crossed Firefall's face. "Um...magic...Katherine, do you mind if I bring you back to your room?"

Katherine slowly stood. "Good idea," she said, rubbing her forehead. "Bye..."

Before they left, Firefall briefly looked at me. "I'll try and fix this as soon as possible, Patrick," he said in a low tone of voice, trying not to disturb my headache, "but for right now, I'll let you alone so you can sleep in peace--you should probably try that to rid yourself of your headache."

I looked down at my tray and took a few huge gulps from my glass of water, shaking my head to bring myself back to sanity. "Thanks," I said quietly. "Sorry for blowing up at you, too."

"Apology accepted," he said. "I'll see you later."

And I was left sitting alone on a bed with an uneaten breakfast, a steadily increasing headache, and books for foals.

Thanks for that, life. I really needed this crap.

And then my stomach gave a sudden lurch.

Author's Note:

For those wondering, I based my idea for the Equestrian alphabet off of Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet, which you can read about here and here.

Until next time...