Quantum Starlight

by Rambling Writer

1 - Streamhaven Welcomes You

Streamhaven, October 9
6:44 PM — 93 minutes until the Fracture in Time

Ponyville wasn’t exactly a large town. But Streamhaven was so small, Starlight suspected there were more ponies in the college than in the rest of the town.

As Sunburst had said, it wasn’t far away. Barely an hour and a half from Ponyville by train. It was one of those small, kinda-rundown towns that was just hanging on, but felt way happier than it had any right to. There were a lot of billboards around for some company called Monarch Solutions; apparently, they had a big presence in Streamhaven, although Starlight had never heard of them before.

Streamhaven sprawled, but sprawling was really the only way it could take up any space. There weren’t a lot of buildings, and pretty much every building had a front yard, a back yard, and two side yards. They weren’t always that big, but each building having a full set of yards made the whole town look more welcoming than it would have otherwise. It wasn’t much, but it kept the town from feeling downbeat, like it should’ve.

The train hissed into Streamhaven Station almost reluctantly, like it didn’t want to stop. After all, Starlight was the only pony getting off the train, nopony was getting on, and, in fact, there was only one other pony on the platform besides Starlight herself.

“Hey, Starlight.”

That one pony was Sunburst. He looked a lot happier than she’d ever seen him before, grinning from ear to ear, and his mane was actually semi-tidy. He’d swapped out his wizard robe for a lab coat.

“Sunburst!” Starlight ran up to him and gave him a quick hug. “It’s great to see you again. What’s with the new look?”

Sunburst flicked at one of the lapels of the coat. “Oh, this? Nothing, really, I just thought, since this is a bit more science-y than magic-y, I should look a bit more science-y than magic-y.”

“If it’s more science-y, why do they need someone skilled in magical theory?”

“Long story short, shortcuts.” Sunburst glanced over his shoulder for a second. “Can’t say yet, I’m not, not authorized. Serene should be here, but I don’t know-”

Another pony slid around the walls of the station with a screech, galloped towards them, and came to a halt right in front of them. She was panting heavily and sweating, but grinning broadly. “Hey, Sunny. Sorry I’m late. Some last-second organizational stuff.”

“That’s, that’s fine,” said Sunburst. “Starlight, this is Serene. Project director.”

Serene was an earth pony, kind of unimposing all around. A little on the scrawny side, dark blue coat, short black mane and tail. She had on a ratty shirt for some band called Raven Rock. But in spite of her look, she carried herself easily. She was the pony who had enough authority to get away with wearing beat-up vintage band shirts in the middle of a world-changing science experiment. “The mare of the hour, hmm?” she asked, grinning. “Except not really. Anyway, hello, hello, hello. Any friend of Sunburst’s is a friend of mine, given what he’s done.”

Starlight and Serene shook hooves. “Really?” asked Starlight. “He’s done that much for you?”

“Lemme just put it this way,” said Serene. “If it weren’t for him, today would be a year or two away, and if he was nothing more than I expected, it’d still be a month off. I just wanted a good magical theorist, and what I got was one of the best in all of Equestria.” She clapped her hooves and rubbed them together, grinning. “Yessiree, I am quite pleased with him, yes indeed.”

“Years?” Starlight asked. “Just what are you doing?”

Sunburst pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “Well, um, I can’t give any spe-”

“Wup! Not here,” Serene said, holding up a hoof. “There’s a bar like five minutes down the road. If we’re gonna talk before we go to Promenade, we’re gonna do it there.”

“Call me crazy,” Starlight said, “but I don’t think going out for a beer run right before a world-changing experiment is a good idea.”

Serene chuckled. “Bars sell other stuff besides beer, you know. I was just thinking like a soda and a quick snack. Anyway, c’mon.” She walked away, whistling a tune that didn’t sound like anything in particular, but was quite peppy.

---

Streamhaven, October 9
6:58 PM — 79 minutes until the Fracture in Time

“Awright, den,” Serene said through her mouthful of cheesy fries, “you govva sign dis befoh we can go any fuhvuh.” She swallowed. “Standard NDA. Sorry.” She pushed a pen and paper in front of Starlight.

They were in a bar that Starlight had a sneaking suspicion made up at least twenty percent of all the bars in Streamhaven. Everypony knew Serene and a lot of them knew Sunburst. Starlight felt a bit left out. Serene had snatched up a table in the corner, and now they were munching on appetizers, slurping on soda, and talking within a silence field Starlight had set up to keep anypony from listening in.

Starlight gave the paper a quick look-over. Looked pretty standard. Don’t say this until that point, don’t mention those, keep quiet or we’ll sue your rump into oblivion, blah blah blah. Sure, she could sign it. She jotted her name on the dotted line and gave the paper back to Serene.

“Poifect,” Serene said. She took a quick chug of soda. “So you wanna know what Promenade’s about? Sunny, you wanna tell her, or should I?”

“I’ll do it,” Sunburst said. He pushed his glasses up his muzzle and grinned. “Starlight, Project Promenade is an experiment in time travel.”

“…What?”

“Time travel, Starry!” Serene said with a grin. “Mind if I call you Starry?” She kept talking before Starlight could say she minded very much. “It’s a project to develop a working time machine. And in less than an hour and a half, we’ll be scientifically sending a pony through time for the first time.”

Well. That was something. Fully-mechanical time travel.

And yet, Starlight had never been more split on an idea. On the one hoof, it was time travel. A sci-fi fan’s wet dream. The possibilities were almost limitless. They could stop disasters before they happen, cure diseases before they spread. Already, her mind was running away with ideas.

On the other hoof, though, Starlight herself had traveled through time without a machine not too long ago. Looked at next to magic, a mechanical time machine wasn’t all that impressive, and actually a bit redundant. “You, um, do know th-”

But Serene waved Starlight off. “Yeah, there’s magic spells that allow for time travel. But those all have severe limitations. Just for starters, as you keep going back, the power requirements increase exponentially. Going back more than a month would be at the limits of most unicorns. And if you’re not an alicorn, you can just forget about more than a year.”

Starlight and Sunburst glanced briefly at each other. Yeah, Starlight thought, about that…

“And you have a time limit,” Serene continued, not noticing. “Like only a few minutes. This machine doesn’t have anything like that. You go back or forward, you stay back or forward unless you go forward or back.” She flicked her hoof from side to side. “And let’s not forget the big thing: this machine doesn’t need a unicorn to work. The core’s magical, sure, but its effects are purely physical, and it’s all set up so that you don’t need magic to use it.” She grinned. “And depending on how technology advances, we might not even need the magic parts of the core if we can replicate them with pure science.”

Starlight turned the thoughts over in her head. Serene had a point. It’d taken quite a bit of time for her to figure out how link Star Swirl’s spell with the Cutie Map, and even then, it’d tested the limits of her knowledge. But if this time machine worked, then pretty much anypony could use it. And the possible uses of easily accessible time travel were, well, far-reaching, to say the least. Okay, so maybe science-powered time travel had its place in the world.

“I know that look,” Serene said with a smirk. “You’re totally agreeing with me, ain’tcha?”

“…Yeah,” said Starlight.

“Hah! Everypony does.”

Starlight stared at her drink. So mechanical time travel was a viable thing. She wasn’t physics-minded, more magic-minded, but some small part of her still kept begging to know, How? Because, well, it was time travel. From a purely technological viewpoint, it was way beyond anything she’d seen before. But they still had almost an hour to kill before they needed to get to Streamhaven University for the experiment. Why not ask them?

Sunburst and Serene looked at each other for a second. “Do, do you want the simple version?” asked Sunburst. “Or the, uh, the slightly technical version?”

Even if she wasn’t physics-minded, Starlight had picked up a thing or two from Twilight. “Let’s go with technical.” And if it was too much, she could always for the simpler one.

Sunburst opened his mouth, but Serene started talking before he could. “Keep quiet, Sunny, I’m the one who sells the stuff, I’m the one who explains it best.”

She clapped her hooves together. “Alrighty! So. We’re gonna have to jump in real deep real fast, so try to keep up, okay? Okay. So. You can’t see it, but the universe is filled with something called the Neigher-Joy field. This field produces particles called chronons, which, through an absurdly complicated mechanism we don’t fully understand yet, allow for the passage of time. By-”

“Wait,” said Starlight, “are y-”

“Whoa, hey,” said Serene darkly. “You’re throwing off my groove. Don’t throw off my groove, m’kay? Don’t ask questions. Just lemme talk.”

“…Fine.”

“Good. Anyway, thanks to the power of SCIENCE!, we can manipulate the Neigher-Joy field in such a way that chronons are produced differently than they usually are, making objects go through time differently than they usually do, making them travel through time. Those’re the basics, anyway, but I don’t have the time and you don’t have the education to go more in-depth.” She paused and leaned back in her chair. “Now you can ask questions.”

“Okay, so there’re particles that make time go,” said Starlight. “Okay, sure. But you named them chronons? Really? You do realize you sound like a bad old sci-fi novel, right? One of the ones back from when they thought caloric was still a thing?”

Serene grinned and wagged a hoof at Starlight. “But the only difference between bad old sci-fi novels and the good ones, the ones by Jules Vanner and Isaac Asicob, is that those guys were right. The numbers say we’re right, so we’re one of the good ones.” She paused. “Of course, we’re still using silly, overly descriptive terms, so we’re still an old sci-fi novel.”

“So what about paradoxes?” This had been something Starlight had been pondering and getting headaches over ever since her little timeline temper tantrum, and she still hadn’t been able to fully figure it out. “Can I go back in time and kill me before I go back in time and kill me?”

Sunburst chuckled nervously. “Um, uh, no. Long story short, paradoxes can’t happen.”

“Why not?”

Serene laughed. “You sure you want to talk about this? This is the sort of time travel crap that makes no sense and just…” She flicked a hoof away. “…fries your brain like an egg.”

“I just want to know I won’t make Equestria explode by stepping on a butterfly.”

“That’s, that’s impossible,” Sunburst said, as he adjusted his glasses. “It’s, uh, the Neigher-Joy field can’t, can’t destructively interfere with itself. Our actions, in normal time, um, they change the behavior of the Neigher-Joy field as it keeps perpetuating. But, but in pastwards time travel, it kind of…” He made some swirly motions with his hooves. “…like, loops back over on itself and self-interferes in a, uh, closed timelike curve. But paradoxes, where, uh, the interference gets destructive, it starts moving away from itself, making the interference less destructive and more constructive, so-”

The technobabble was too much. Starlight blinked and coughed. “Sorry to interrupt, but Equestrian, please?”

“Look at this way,” Serene said. “Pick a date. April 2? Okay, good date. There’s an earthquake in San Franpinto on April 2. Even with time travel, we can’t stop it. But we can evacuate the worst-hit parts. Just send somepony back to, oh, let’s just say March 2, saying, ‘There’s gonna be a San Franpinto earthquake on April 2’. So we evacuate and like no one dies. Got it?”

“Yeah,” Starlight said, cocking her head, “but I still don’t see what this has to do with being unable to change the past.”

Serene grinned. “The catch is that there never was a timeline where no time traveler came back. An ‘unchanged’ timeline, to speak. If we will eventually send somepony back, they’ve already been back. We can’t change the past, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s already been changed. You can’t look only at ‘now’, ‘cause time travel breaks causality over its knee. Effect can precede cause. Heck, the more you try to change something, the more likely it is that you’ll cause it to happen in the first place, assuming you have an effect at all. The Neighvikov Self-Consistency Principle at work!”

And yet, Starlight had seen otherwise. She’d seen the past changed. She’d done the changing herself. Did time travel via magic work differently? Why? Maybe there was something different “under the hood”, so to speak. She might figure it out if she looked into it, but considering she was barely understanding this, that didn’t seem likely. Something to ask Twilight about, apparently, once she got back from Griffonstone and the NDA ran out.

“Don’t worry too much about it,” said Serene, misreading Starlight’s silence. “Worry too much about it, try to figure it all out, and we’ll still be sitting here tomorrow, drawing diagrams with straws. Just know that paradoxes can’t happen.”

“Right, yeah,” said Sunburst. “We’ve, we’ve run the calculations numerous times, and, and paradoxes cannot happen.”

That thing with the straws, at least, seemed likely. But if Sunburst and Serene were convinced that paradoxes couldn’t happen, Starlight was prepared to take them at their word. Maybe another thing to talk with Twilight about, but still. It was a big weight off her shoulders. “Alright,” said Starlight. She sipped down some soda. “So, uh, what exactly are you doing, Sunburst? If everything’s mechanical, why do they need somepony skilled in theoretical magic?”

Sunburst blinked, pushed up his glasses, and sat up straight. “Promenade has some, ah, let’s just say some rather complex requirements. I was brought in to straighten everything out. They were on the right track, but…” He looked a bit squeamish. “Yeesh, let’s just say efficiency was not one of their strong suits.”

“And the fact that you can’t do the magic yourself doesn’t matter?” Starlight hoped that didn’t sound too blunt to Sunburst; he’d been frank about his lack of skill with magic, but the way the words came out made her cringe a little.

Sunburst, however, didn’t care. “No, no,” he said, grinning. “See, that’s the great thing about, about being a theoretical physicist, rather than an experimental one. I tell other ponies what needs, what needs to be done, and they’re the ones that do it.” He seemed to drift away, smiling serenely. “It’s like I’ve got PhD’s as interns.”

“Don’t let them hear you say that,” Serene said with a chuckle.

“Yeah,” said Sunburst, still drifting, “well…” He blinked and shook his head. “Anyway, we’re, we’re replicating some very extreme physical conditions with magic as a shortcut. Conditions that, um, normally, might just destroy the building. And the, uh, the whole campus. And, and maybe all of Streamhaven, for that matter.” He grinned sheepishly. “And I’m making sure that doesn’t happen.”

“The… the whole town,” Starlight said flatly. She snorted. “What’re you working with, black holes?”

“Who told you that?!”

Starlight jumped almost a foot in the air from her stool. Sunburst didn’t have outbursts like that, at least not when he was a colt. His eyes had grown and his pupils had shrunk, and he was taking deep, gasping breaths. It didn’t help that Serene had said the same thing at the same time and had the same look on her face with the same behavior.

“W-what?” stammered Starlight. “No one! I guessed!”

Sunburst’s breathing slowed and he blinked a few times. He and Serene exchanged glances. “No one?” He bit his lip and adjusted his glasses. “You, you’re not lying?”

“Lying? Sunburst, why would I lie?”

“…Right.” Sunburst sighed and ruffled his mane. “Sorry, it’s just… This is all very hush-hush, and if we had a security breach, it… it’d be bad.”

“Rrrrrrrrrreal bad,” muttered Serene.

“Right.” Starlight paused. “So it is black holes?”

“In, in essence, yes,” said Sunburst. “They, um, warp spacetime and the Neigher-Joy field so much that, that chronon production gets really screwed up. But if we can tweak how black holes warp spacetime, we can, we can tweak chronon production. And, and I’m basically making sure that the bending of the spacetime continuum stays in the time continuum and, and extrudes into the space continuum as little as possible.”

Starlight blinked and coughed. “Equestrian, please?”

“He’s using magic to make black holes that don’t have gravity but still muck with chronons,” said Serene. “She’s a laypony, Sunny,” she said, nudging him in the ribs. “You don’t get to use big words any more.”

Sunburst lightly punched Serene in the shoulder. She didn’t even flinch. “You call that a punch? Wuss. Anyway, Starry, got any more questions?”

“Not really. Not yet, anyway.” Her head was still pounding from the information she received and she needed some time to digest it. That way, she wouldn’t mentally puke when she actually saw it in action.

“Alrighty. Then let’s just hang until it’s time to head to Promenade.” Serene scooped some more cheesy fries into her mouth. “Should we get some more cheesy fries? I think we need some more cheesy fries.”

Comments

[HashMark111]

Solid writing and interesting premise. A like and a follow from me!

[skyway920]

some words repeat but otherwise good story

[That_Delusional_Pegasus]

Don't need to start reading to know to save this for later.

I'm saving this for later.

[Circut Breaker]

Shut up and let me talk.
I am not a temporal physicist, but I know logic. Time travel works differently in different media. The theory you just outlined is solid, but I prefer mine as it renders time travel into the past pointless and therefore means I can ignore the whole thing and make sure my brain does not melt. I hate time travel.

Say Pony A does a bad. After waiting a bit, becoming Pony B, Pony B makes a time machine to go back in time and stop Pony A. Pony B travels back in time, becoming Pony C, to stop Pony A doing the bad. In stopping Pony A, Pony B no longer has a reason to become Pony C, therefore, Pony C never shows up to stop Pony A. This is the best metaphor I have for this, shaddup.

-Circuit

P.s. I did this in character

[Shellsh0cker]

Love the characterization of Serene, and I'm very interested to see where you go with the paradox discrepancy.

[Twilight Connor]

Serene is a terrific character. She loves food! No-pony can get better than that! Especially with the cheesy fries...

[tsaukpaetra]

Mode 1 time travel is only guaranteed if you keep the planar dichronatic indices balanced (among many other things). This is why alternate realities form, because elastic displacement feedback is not always emplaced with proper restitution and the snapback that results almost always results in mode 2.