8 - Algorithm
Morning light filtered in and lit the dining room. Twilight Sparkle stared into space; that just so happened to run into the wall on the far side of the room. Her hooves rested on the lacquered wooden table that took up the center of the room. Several plates containing soy eggs and hay bacon and, in one case, sapphires lay placed around her, but none of them were things that she could readily recognize in her trance. Hints of a wet, steamy smell filled her nostrils and the clink of china filled her ears, but she tuned those out.
As far as Twilight knew, the only thing she could discern were the words running through her mind.
Multiverse…
Multiverse…
“Twilight…”
Twilight snapped to attention. “Huh?”
Spike, who sat nearby, looked back at her with a raised eyebrow. “Twilight? You okay? You’re spacing out a little bit.”
Twilight blinked and then shook her head. “O-oh. Sorry, Spike. I have a lot on my mind.”
Starlight Glimmer, who sat directly opposite Spike, frowned and put her fork down. “Yeah, that’s what you said yesterday, and the day before that.”
“Past few days, really,” Spike added.
“Look, I know you said you couldn’t talk about what was going on,” Starlight said as she placed both forelegs on the table and leaned forward, “but this is really eating away at you, Twilight.”
Twilight slumped in her seat. “I know. And I know you’re all worried about me.”
“You’ve been poring over a lot of history books these past few days,” Spike said. He popped a sapphire into his mouth and chewed, the crunch sounding throughout the room. “I mean, it’s not like history changed, right?”
Twilight blushed and chuckled nervously.
“Seriously, Twilight,” Starlight said, banging her hooves on the table. “I think you and I had enough of that.”
Twilight scratched the back of her head. “I know, I know. History hasn’t changed. I can see that.”
Starlight sighed. “Well, then, what do you have planned for today?”
“Well,” Twilight said as she jabbed her fork into her soy eggs, “I don’t think I’ll be studying history.”
Spike threw his claws up. “Finally.”
“But there are some other things that I need to do,” Twilight continued. “Actually, I wanted to finish brushing up on my history first before I got to this other thing.”
Spike, who had been preparing to chomp down on another sapphire, practically hurled it back into his bowl and crossed his arms with a snort.
Starlight shrugged. “Like what?”
“Top secret,” Twilight replied.
“...Top secret?” Starlight asked.
Twilight sprang up in her seat and blurted, “Yup! Top Secret!” She chuckled nervously.
Both Starlight and Spike looked at her with incredulous frowns. They exchanged glances and their frowns deepened. They shook their heads and stared her down in disbelief.
* * *
Twilight locked the door behind her and turned toward the center of the room. The crystalline walls, constructed in three-dimensional mosaics, reflected her in their many iridescent faces. Shelves upon shelves of potion tomes and dissertations on matrix theory circled her like the rings around a bullseye.
In one corner of the room stood a magic mirror. Several idle compressors and pumps sat in a structure which housed the mirror. A brown, hardcover book bearing Celestia’s cutie mark lay nestled inside a niche at the top of the machine.
Twilight lit her horn and levitated the book out of the niche and set it on a nearby table. Better safe than sorry, she thought.
She turned and examined the rest of the room. “Okay... so... I should teleport-proof the room,” she thought aloud. She lit her horn and shot a beam at the ceiling. The beam exploded into a plethora of sparks which landed on every surface in the room.
Twilight tapped her chin. Her eyes drew toward the windows. She pulled those shut with her magic and then blasted them with another spell which would seal them tight. She nodded.
“Just a...” she said, blasting the room again, “sound-proof spell, an—” she blasted the room a third time, “—anti-scrying spell... and voila! I should be totally by myself now.”
She turned to a chalkboard which sat in another corner of the room. A table right beside it hosted a teapot and a cup full of steaming jasmine tea, as well as a stack of papers and a quill and inkwell right beside that. Twilight walked toward it and levitated over a box of chalk. She undid the top, took out a piece, and flipped it in her magic.
“Let’s do this,” she said.
She wrote the word multiverse on the board. After staring at it for a bit, she underlined it and nodded.
“So,” she thought aloud, “what do I know so far?
“Crystal Faire travels alternate timelines. But... how do they actually work?
“There has to be some sort of physics behind this,” she said, scratching her chin. “There has to be. And I won’t rest until I figure it out.”
Twilight sighed. “I probably won’t be able to rest until I figure this out.”
She floated the cup of jasmine tea over and took a sip. She hummed in delight at the sweet and flowery taste, even licking her lips after replacing the cup on the table.
“Nonetheless, if she’s traveling timelines, then there must some sort of mechanism behind it.”
Twilight drew a straight line across the width of the board. “Let’s say that this is a singular timeline. Let’s say... that was the timeline that I knew. As far as I can tell, everything up until the last few years is the exact same.” She then drew a large dot near one end of the line. “And then here’s the point where we defeated King Sombra and that much is the same too. That much is in the history books already. And so is everything before that.
“So maybe I can treat this as a point of divergence,” she said as she poked the dot. “But... it’s possible that there are small details earlier than that where things are different, but there’s no way I could know about any of that so, just for now, I’ll assume that most things or all things through this point are constant.
“So then, how could this all work? If Crystal goes around saving timelines where something goes wrong... there’s a problem.”
Twilight drew several lines branching off the main line. “It could be one differentiation event here which causes a bad timeline, and another differentiation event later which causes another bad timeline.”
Her chalk floated from tangent timeline to tangent timeline. “And it’s possible to go from one over here to another over there. And, in traveling over here...” She poked the line. “Crystal could fix this bad timeline. And there are two problems with this.”
She twirled the chalk in her magical grasp. “The first is that for some time interval dt, there are infinitely many differentiation events. For another dt, there are another infinitely many differentiation events, per infinitely many timelines spawned by that first differentiation event.
“And second... and this one’s a doozy,” she said and took a long deep breath, “Crystal Faire appearing by herself should be a differentiation event by itself, right? If that’s the case, then there would be some timeline in which she appears... and another where she does not appear.”
She drew a cartoonish version of Crystal in the upper corner of the board which thick lines and exaggerated proportions, except the wings which seemed normal in comparison. She considered her drawing, added a line through one of the eyes to signify Crystal’s scar, and then nodded. She then drew a copy right next to it with a large X over it.
“If that’s the case, then everything that Crystal is doing means nothing. She doesn’t actually fix timelines; she just creates alternate versions of those bad timelines which are fixed. Those bad timelines still exist afterward.”
She tilted her head and considered what she had written down. Her eyes briefly flickered over the board and she shook her head. “I highly doubt she’d be willing to do much of anything if that were the case. So maybe I should run on the opposite assumption that she is not a differentiation event. That… would require her having an intrinsic probability of zero.”
She frowned. “It’s not an entirely one hundred percent safe assumption, but there’s stuff about it that I like.
“And,” she turned back to the board, “if that’s the case, and her traveling to those timelines is to change their course and she can do so successfully, then that would imply that the timelines themselves are mutable.” She poked a couple of timelines with her piece of chalk.
Twilight nodded and levitated the eraser and erased the first picture of Crystal Faire, leaving the second with the X over it. “I guess I could live with that. The next question would be in what capacity can she change timelines, but that… isn’t something I could possibly ascertain, so I guess I’ll just have to leave that.”
She frowned, lifted the cup off the table, and downed the rest of the jasmine tea. She wiped her muzzle dry with her foreleg and sighed. “That leaves the other problem… The infinite differentiation,” she said as she lifted the teapot and poured another cup.
“There are a couple of problems with that. The first is that she would have to have some way to look through all that. I’ll speculate on how she does that later.”
Twilight traced a circle around a point on her diagram where a timeline branched off from the main line. Her chalk floated up to the X’ed out picture of Crystal Faire, and from there she drew an arrow to the point she had just circled. “If Crystal herself is in some timeline… how does infinite differentiation come into play?”
She floated two pieces of paper over and set the two apart. She then put her quill to the first one.
She picked up a paper and wrote on it. “If there is no differentiation while she’s in a timeline… Then the infinitely many timelines would just turn into one single timeline once she decides to go there. Nevermind the fact that that would be an exception to established rules, but… while it would conserve the number of Crystal Faires traveling the multiverse, the total number of timelines would decrease.”
She shuffled some papers around and began writing on a blank piece. “But, on the other hoof, if differentiation still happens, there would be infinitely many timelines created with a Crystal Faire in them who could then travel the multiverse.”
She set the papers down on the table and then poured herself a new cup of tea with her magic. She then floated the cup over. “I don’t think I really believe either case. The number of timelines shouldn’t decrease, but the alternative gives rise to an infinitely many and always increasing number of Crystal Faires.”
She shook her hoof at the ceiling and groaned. “This non-conservation just… doesn’t sit right!”
She downed the entire cup of jasmine tea in one gulp and then fell back, splaying herself across the floor. The cup bounced across the floor and rolled to a stop against the mirror portal. She stared at the tessellated ceiling and briefly lost herself in the straight lines and the geometric shapes.
Twilight crossed her forelegs and stared at the board. “It doesn’t seem like either base assumption can be true. It… would be nice if there were some third explanation which lies in between the two.” She ran a hoof through her mane and sighed. “But that’s another thing I could spend my whole life speculating about and never get anywhere.
“There are plenty of other questions to which I could only speculate. Given that places like Canterlot High and that mirror reality are accessible from here... is that part of a single timeline? What ends up constituting a single timeline? Are there rules which dictate where and when Crystal can go to? Are there conditions? How exactly does her travel power work? Where did it come from?”
Twilight’s expression darkened and her features fell. “And what causes timelines to collapse? Why… did my timeline collapse?” she muttered under her breath.
She turned her attention back to the teapot, picked her cup off the floor, and then filled it full again. She took a drink, paused, took another drink, and then stared into what remained and saw her reflection.
She turned back to the board and erased the whole side. She tapped the chalk against the board and hummed thoughtfully as she stared at the now-blank canvas.
She wrote a quick summary of her thoughts on the left-hand side.
- King Sombra point of divergence
- Timelines are mutable
- Crystal Faire not a differentiation event
- There exists an as-of-yet unknown model
for timeline manipulation
Twilight stepped back and nodded. “Alrighty. That seems like a fair enough set of conclusions.
“So now, about actually seeing through all that.” Twilight stared into space for a few moments as she tried to grasp infinitely many timelines, and then she regressed to simply trying to understand infinity itself. “I just… can’t imagine she’s actually able to see through all of it at once. She’s a pony, for Celestia’s sake.” Twilight shrugged and twirled the chalk in her magic. “Well… if she can actually look through all of that at once, then it’s not a problem, really. I don’t know how she does it.
“But if I had to think about looking at an infinite number of timelines… I’d like to be able to narrow it down. It would be nice to filter for things that I’m looking for in a timeline. I wonder if I can come up with some examples…”
* * *
Twilight yawned and glanced upward. Sunbeams streamed through the windows on one side of the room. The west side, she figured. It had been a while since she had seen a clock as she had never placed one within the library, but between the light above and the now-empty teapot, she knew enough.
She cracked her neck and returned to the book in front of her. The open page contained several paragraphs detailing a grandfather paradox; the potential to travel back in time and prevent one’s own existence. It was not anything terribly new; she had encountered it in some of her favorite fictions before, of course. But I like how this weighs predestination paradoxes versus immutable timelines, she thought.
She flipped to the next page where the book started on the topic of ontological paradoxes. Hmm. Objects or information becoming or creating their past selves. That’s also interesting. It looks like this is related to the predestination paradox.
Twilight giggled. Time is fascinating.
A loud bang from close by made her jump what seemed like several meters from her seat. She heard a cry that could have been her own voice. She clutched at her chest, afraid that her heart would go shooting out. When it did not, she whirled around.
A cloaked figure stood in front of her chalkboard. The brown fabric lay draped across their features but the hood was down, allowing Twilight a view of the back of their head. She saw long curls, their colors a gradient of cerise and violet with a punctuating blue stripe, hanging down past their withers. From what Twilight could tell, the figure was a mare.
And all breath left her. She knew who it was, but who it was just could not be.
The figure scanned the board for a few moments, read over Twilight’s careful notes on the multiverse among other things, and then turned. Twilight immediately recognized the scar running across the mare’s right eye.
Twilight swallowed and, shakily, rose to her hooves. “…Crystal Faire?”
“We meet again, Twilight Sparkle,” Crystal Faire said with a sly smile.
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Where is the native Twilight of this world?
That's a pretty large plot hole you're just ignoring so far.
8216803
IIRC, in the chapter when Crystal Faire brought Twilight to this world, it was mentioned that the native Twilight had gone into the Everfree forest alone, and her death was implied. Since our Twilight arrived around the time native Twilight was supposed to return, none of the natives know any different.
I'm guessing that Crystal Faire chose to leave Twilight here, because it would allow her to pick up her life more or less where she left off, without displacing some other Twilight, or otherwise causing problems with the locals...
I feel that Twilight is having a relapse of Feeling Pinkie Keen; as in, she’s trying to find logic where there is no logic.
Also,
Ponies don’t have arms; they have forelegs...... Just giving you a heads up.
Anyway, keep up the good work!
8216803
It wasn't ignored. In fact, it was directly addressed. Twilight herself asked "what about this timeline's Twilight?" to which Crystal replied, "I wouldn't worry about her." Then when Starlight saw her, she commented that she thought Twilight had gone into the Everfree that day. It's implied that native Twi had met a terrible fate in the forest and our Twi is doing a Rick and Morty.
Interesting, very interesting...
Twilight trying to make sense of the multiverse...I love it!
8216996
It feels rather odd that Twilight would just ignore that the her local counterpart went missing, and completely ignore that.
Yeah, that's something I'll never get behind.
Not the stuff about all of the possibilities with time travel, but the idea that each season is a full year.
Also, it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that Crystal Faire wasn't actually a pony, but some mega-powerful creature disguising herself as a pony.
8229975
I don't buy it either but it seems like the dialogue accidentally implies it anyway. Ima rework that bit of dialogue there.
She's back, the mare behind the hood!
9300784
Close! Very close!
Uh oh. Crystal coming back can't mean good things.
Oh boy, is this universe about to be destroyed too?