Inevitabilities

by Sharp Quill

40. A Different Game

Meg found herself in front of the mirror, at its current home in a secure vault in Canterlot. All that security had been trivially bypassed by Discord. “Does it really have to be right this second?” she spat out. “My life’s kinda in ruins right now, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Precisely why this is the perfect time.”

If only it was possible to strangle a draconequus. “I have other rather important matters to deal with.” Like getting back to her brother for his answer, less than an hour from now.

Discord walked up to the mirror. “This takes priority.”

Nor did he seem to be facetious. He gave the mirror a hard slap against its side, causing it to briefly rock back and forth. The surface changed from a reflection to a pearlescent shimmer. “After you,” he said with a wave and a bow.

Might as well get it over with. It was time for answers, and it wasn’t as if Discord was giving her a choice. She went through…

…and stepped out the other side on two legs. Canterlot High was before her, eerily silent, with no one in sight. Discord came through, his usual mismatched self—and immediately teleported to the hyperspace portal controls.

That gave her time to ponder some more about the physical reality of stuff in this realm. Enough time had passed since all the occupants were… erased… for lack of care to make itself known. But the lawn, the buildings, they showed no evidence of absence of care. Would the lights still turn on if she went inside and flicked a switch? How would electricity still be generated without anyone to operate the generators, to keep them fueled?

Could I survive here?

Sunset Shimmer did, for years after all, but it was full of life then. Too bad; it seemed a great place to escape from reality.

Discord was coming back from the school, walking as he usually did after opening the other portal. She went around to the opposite side of the statue and waited for him. She knew better than to go through first.

The draconequus finally reached her and without pausing went on through to hyperspace. Meg followed, becoming a pegasus once more, and scanned the infinite blackness that surrounded her. It was almost becoming familiar.

No one else was present.

Meg asked the obligatory question, all too afraid she already knew the answer. “So where do we go?”

The draconequus folded his arms across his chest. “This is your show, not mine.”

Meg sighed. “I suppose it is.” The answer to her question, of course, was wherever they went—no, where she went. She was calling the shots, for better or for worse. Just like the encryption key and the time of this meeting, she would also remember and pass along the meeting’s location. That location would not be here, not right next to the portal. Twilight was probably rushing over right now, and she knew from experience that the portal was not impermeable to sound.

They wouldn’t need to go far. “Move us far enough away that the portal is outside our bubble, and rotate us until we can see the realm’s hyperspatial boundary.” She could only hope those directions would make sense to the other party, whoever that might turn out to be.

Idiot. Of course it’ll make sense. It’s a fact they show up, right?

Discord led her away from the portal; Meg followed, her wings slowly flapping.

Unless this is not when and where the meeting takes place.

She mentally kicked herself. Stop overthinking it.

Discord stopped. When Meg reached him, he reached out and rotated her.

“Oh my god.”

She couldn’t believe her eyes. Right in front of her, a half-dozen feet away, was literal Future Meg. Her future self waved a hand at her. “Hello, past self.”

She turned to Discord. “I thought magic-less creatures can’t exist here,” she said, pointing a hoof at her very human future self.

“Don’t look at me.” His eyes fixed onto the impossible human. “This is beyond my abilities.” He drifted over to and around her, studying her, to Future Meg’s amusement. His eyes went wide and he backed away.

“What is it?” Present Meg asked.

His shock had morphed into disgruntlement. “I’m not touching that question with an ursa major.”

Meg frowned, locking eyes with her presumed future self. “I was promised some answers. First question: why are you not a pegasus, a magical creature?”

“I also mentioned that not all questions would be answered; that is one of them.” She threw a smile at Discord. “He knows.”

He glared at her. “I didn’t expect this. I want no part of it.” He rotated out of sight.

You can’t—

Despite his sudden departure, the bubble of normality was intact. She looked at her future self. “You’re maintaining this bubble?”

“Of course I am. I was here when you arrived, don’t forget.”

“Second question: how are you maintaining this bubble?”

A smile. “I Pinkie Promise that you will one day figure it out.” She went through the motions.

Meg looked around. No Pinkie Pie, but she wasn’t willing to rule anything out at this point.

Her gaze returned to the human her, scrutinizing her. She didn’t look any older, and she was wearing clothes she still possessed—hopefully still possessed. Assuming she was telling the truth, it couldn’t have taken terribly long to have “figured it out.” To figure out something Discord couldn’t do. Something no alicorn could currently do, not even for themselves. Would I lie to my past self? Was this even my future self?

“Technology?” she asked, not believing it for a second.

“Not answering that.”

The pegasus silently stared at the human, wondering how the hell she could prove that really was her future self.

“It can’t be done,” her future self said, as if she could read her mind. “No, I’m not reading your mind; I’m simply remembering from when I was you. Look, this is difficult for both of us. For you because you’re wondering what the hell I am, and for me because, well, doesn’t everyone wish they could visit their past self and give them a clue or two? Except that time travel doesn’t work that way, so… yeah. Let’s just get down to business, okay?”

The pegasus exhaled. Apparently knowing what she was thinking right then was probably the best proof she was going to get anyway, however much it left to be desired. “Fine. How about this: did you place that message in the Late Show green room?”

“Yes.”

Finally, an answer.

“How?” she then asked, not expecting an answer to that question.

“From hyperspace. It is possible for a material object to pass through the boundary, if it’s very carefully aligned with respect to the orientation of space-time. Just…” She mimicked the action. “…push it through.”

“Hence no magical trace.”

“Hence no magical trace.” She rocked her head side to side. “It’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the general idea. And you were wise not to ask if I wrote that message.” She smiled again. “I remember thinking it.”

Yeah. She did consider asking that, because she was still wondering if she should keep the encrypted message and have it re-printed out for future use. That was a decision she’d have to make on her own. Maybe the superposition included time loops where she did, and others where she did not. It didn’t really make a difference; the end result would be the same.

The smile melted from Future Meg’s face. “No, it doesn’t get any easier.”

Again, as if she knew what she was thinking—which she does, if she’s what she claims to be. “Aren’t you worried about paradoxes? About not saying what I’ll remember hearing?”

Future Meg laughed a bitter laugh. “You know better than that. I couldn’t create a paradox if I tried—we have tried in our mutual past. You’re just testing if I’m the real deal.”

“Can you blame me?”

“No, and I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do or say that will prove anything. Discord will confirm my identity, but don’t tell him I said that. You know how he is about future knowledge concerning himself.”

And he knew that her future counterpart could and would maintain the bubble. Duh, because she was already doing it when we arrived.

“So what’s the point of this?” Meg yelled, throwing her hooves out. “Are you just carrying out the actions you remember witnessing when you were me? Because immutable past yada yada yada?”

Future Meg went deadly serious. “No. Time loops become probable when its wave function constructively interferes with itself, increasing its amplitude. If I hadn’t gone back in time to break Tirek out of Tartarus, Twilight would never have had the means to make me—us—a pony. We encountered Lyra with a changeling in the Everfree, and that solved a problem of ours.”

“It did?” snarked Present Meg. “Having a life was a problem? It sure didn’t convince anyone I wasn’t a pegasus.”

“Look, it’s…” Future Meg threw up her hands in frustration. “There’s stuff going on you’re not aware of yet. Yes, I know your life sucks right now, but…”

“But what? Where does it end?”

Meg could swear her future self wanted to hug her. “For me, soon. I’m on my way back to the time when we got kidnapped. You don’t have to worry about that until you’re me.” She bore a grim smile. “Fortunately, I’m up to that task now. I have nothing to fear from those kidnappers. Once that’s done, it’s over.” She rolled her eyes. “Pretty sure, anyway.”

This woman was supposed to be her future self? She was so composed, seemingly on top of things. Confident. “How do I get my act together like that?” she asked in disbelief.

“It… didn’t happen overnight. Let’s leave it at that.”

“And what about Steve?”

For the briefest split-second… “That would be too much information about the future,” Future Meg replied, poker face restored.

That could have been interpreted in so many ways, but like it or not—and she did not—she had to agree: it would be too much information. “Could you, maybe, volunteer some useful information?”

A human hand waved at the void around them. “Well, here’s a helpful tip: long-distance time traveling is a lot easier here.”

But what about having to pass through the Equestria Girls’ realm? That didn’t seem all that helpful, quite honestly. The spell Twilight and her husband had come up with seemed more than adequate. “Any other helpful tips?” Meg asked, not terribly hopeful.

“Actually, yes,” she replied, smiling. “That’s how this particular time loop increases its probability of happening.”

“Okay, I’m listening.”

“First, you can tell Twilight that it’s okay for the Element Bearers to go human. Nothing bad will happen to their Elements.”

Meg tilted her head. “And how do you know that, when Twilight does not?”

“Because we used a quantum supercomputer to figure it out.”

A quantum supercomputer. It would actually be invented. “Then why did my ploy to have Twilight use such a device in the future to crack the encryption…” Her voice trailed off.

“Fail?” A smirk. “Did it?”

She grimaced. In hindsight, the reason it didn’t work was obvious. “It didn’t work because it wasn’t needed. The encryption key was part of the superposition; it didn’t matter what it actually was.”

“That’s not entirely true. We tried who knows how many millions of different keys. If one of those keys was the key in some superposition, the encryption would’ve been cracked right then, way too early. Or I’m guessing it would have been way too early, because that’s not what happened; its amplitude was evidently too low.

“But you’re still missing the point. There is a quantum supercomputer involved. It’s the time loop itself. It’s computing the amplitude of the superposition, determining what has the highest probability of becoming reality when the wave function collapses. The trick is to massage that wave function so as to compute the desired answer.”

“Just like an actual quantum computer… just with more qubits.”

“An entire multiverse full of qubits, potentially, and because there’s nothing outside that multiverse, by definition, decoherence never happens. Reality itself is the computer.”

“And if the ‘program’ fails to compute an answer, the time travel spell fails.” The possibilities seemed endless. “But how does one ‘manage’ the wave function?”

“Oh, that’s easy. Flip a quantum coin with the intention of doing one thing if it’s heads and another if it’s tails. For each question I remember myself asking, for example, I decided I would answer only if it was heads. It always came up heads when I remembered the question being answered, and always tails when it was not. But of course that would have to be the case; each possible outcome of the superposition is internally consistent, otherwise it’s a paradox with zero amplitude and thus forbidden.”

The pegasus shook her head. “Quantum mechanics doesn’t work that way. Wave functions concern themselves with subatomic particles, not macroscopic concepts like what was said vs what was remembered. Maybe you remembered incorrectly; that could account for it too.”

The human smirked. “Schrödinger’s cat, in a superposition of being alive and dead, was also composed of subatomic particles, don’t forget.” She got serious. “The devil’s in the details, true, but not as much as you’d might think. The key is to be rigorous. When you decide to flip a quantum coin, follow through. Don’t second guess the heads or tails. I’m not saying it’ll never mess up, or that it can’t be messed with, but in practice it isn’t that big of a problem.”

Meg still had her doubts, doubts that could only be dispelled with an experiment. Twilight would be more than happy to help with that, she was certain. “And what about Twilight turning herself human? How did you use this to determine it was safe for her Element?”

“We simply needed to arrange things so that if it messed up the Elements, it would cause a paradox.”

“And how would one so arrange things?”

“Sorry, but that one came up tails, so I can’t answer it. You and Twilight will figure it out.”

“But it will somehow involve another time loop.”

“Naturally.”

Present Meg sighed. It was so much to take in. “Anything else?”

“There are three more items. First, consider what would be the impact on humanity if Equestria never existed. Second, magic can alter the laws of physics. In our universe that ability is quite limited. Obviously, that ability is far greater in the Equestrian realm. Here, where magic is undifferentiated from the other fundamental forces, that ability is at its greatest.” She pointed a finger at the pony. “You need to keep that in mind.”

What good that would do when she couldn’t even exist here except as a guest of a draconequus…

Her eyes fell upon the human in front of her.

That will one day change.

“How long before I can master this place, like you do?”

“That came up tails, I’m afraid.”

Of course. “And the third item?”

“Take advantage of Discord’s randomness. His choices often form a superposition.”

That… oddly made sense. “Like the time of this meeting?”

“Perhaps. It’s always difficult to say with him.”

“Seems to me he simply waited until everything went to hell in a handbasket.”

The human shrugged. “I would think that’s because that is when the wave function’s amplitude would be the highest, or high enough.”

The pegasus studied her for a moment. “You do remember what I’m going through right now, right? This isn’t some academic exercise for me.”

Future Meg exhaled. “Yes, but… I guess you could say it’s ancient history for me. I have the advantage of knowing how it turns out.”

“Which you cannot tell me.”

“Nope.”

“Can you at least tell me about Tirek? Do I break him out of Tartarus several years ago?”

“Flip a quantum coin,” she replied with deadly seriousness. “It’ll come up heads.”

“So… yes?”

“I’ve said all I’m going to say. It’s time to leave.”

The human approached the pegasus and rotated her, bringing the portal into view.

“You can do even that?!”

“Kinda necessary to function out here.”

They both faced the portal, which grew against the infinite void as they moved towards it.

“What about our possessions? Do we go back in time to recover them? Do we need to? I know the car is missing.”

Future Meg maintained a disturbingly effective poker face. “Flip a quantum coin.”

“That wasn’t funny.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

The portal was before them. It… looked different, dim, flat.

“Discord closed it,” her future self explained, unconcerned. “Just a second.” She touched it with a finger, and it brightened, became pearlescent again. “You can go through now; I’ll close it afterwards.”

The pegasus stared at her, mouth agape.

“Yes, I can do that too. It’s actually much easier from this side.”

Did Discord know about this? He had never bothered to close it, to her knowledge, before taking them deeper into hyperspace—but neither had there been need to close it. Yet this time he closed it? With her still out there? Did he know her future self could open it, forced her to show that she could?

Future Meg patiently waited.

This was her last chance for information; she took it. “What does our cutie mark really mean?”

A wan smile. “Tails.”

So she had to figure it out for herself.

“But it has nothing to do with hula hoops,” the human added.

She couldn’t help but suspect that if it had come up heads, she would’ve been told, “I haven’t figured it out yet either.”

Clearly she had learned all she was going to learn from her future self. Without another word—how does one say goodbye to one’s self?—she went through the portal.

Twilight was waiting for her. “How did it go?”

“About as well as expected, I guess.” Meg looked around. “You’ve seen Discord?”

“He’s not…” Twilight pointed a hand at the hyperspace portal.

“Quite honestly,” she dramatically replied, “I have no idea where he is right now.” She hesitantly tapped the hyperspace portal. It was closed.

“Then how…”

Meg gave a recap of the meeting.

Twilight rubbed her chin in thought. “That’s all assuming, of course, that really was your future self. That a magic-less human can even exist there, much less do what she did, ought to be impossible. Fortunately, there are several falsifiable hypothesis we can test; that’s what matters most, regardless of whether she was who she claimed to be.”

“Any idea how to arrange for a paradox if turning human does bad things to your Element?”

“Not off the top of my head,” Twilight said. “I’ll have to think about it. That’s one of the hypotheses, of course, and an important one at that.”

And before any of them could be tested, she needed to create a flippable quantum coin. “Let’s get out of here. I’m sure Discord will turn up sooner or later.”

“He’d better,” Twilight said, clenching her fists. “I still want answers about that portal Andy used.”

“First, my brother. Back to Ponyville?”

Twilight started for the other side of the statue. “No, I’ve brought the dispenser with me. Celestia agreed to provide them accommodations in her palace, because humans are allowed in Canterlot.” She went through.

“This should be interesting,” Meg said to no one, and went through herself.

She followed Twilight to a guest suite. The plaid pill dispenser was there. Seconds later, they were in her brother’s house. A few suitcases and boxes laid about the living room. “I guess we have our answer,” Meg said.

Matt walked in carrying another box and set it down next to the others. “So where would we be staying, Sweet Apple Acres or your castle?”

Meg smirked. “Try Celestia’s castle, in Canterlot.”

“No restrictions against humans there,” Twilight added.

“But what about the Crusaders?” Susie asked, who was coming down the stairs.

“I’m sure visits can be arranged,” Twilight assured her. “But don’t forget there’s a lot to see in Canterlot. I grew up there, you know. I’ll take you to Donut Joe’s place!”

“We’ll take a rain check on that,” Linda hurriedly said. “Let’s just get going. I can’t even watch the news anymore.”

Matt got down on his knees in front of Meg. “If you haven’t heard, the FBI has reopened the investigation into the break-in at your workplace. Don’t know if it affects you, but keep it in mind.”

After Eric Tanner’s sudden appearance in the news, Meg couldn’t say she was terribly surprised. “I will,” she said. Hopefully, it was just a formality; it didn’t really change anything, after all.

Twilight had moved all the luggage and boxes closer together. “Ready to go?”

Matt held an arm around his wife and daughter. He nodded.

Magic engulfed them and the return spell was invoked.

“Wow!” Susie ran about the room.

“‘Wow’ indeed,” Linda said, her eyes sweeping the suite. “This is fit for royalty.”

“Royal guests are what you are,” Twilight declared. She telekinetically opened the front door. A mare walked in. “This is Hearth Care. She’ll look after your needs.”

“Meanwhile,” Meg said, preempting the mare, “there’s something Twilight and I need to take care of. I’ll see you later.”

Twilight looked at her questioningly as Meg headed for the door. Not getting an immediate answer, she followed Meg into the hallway. “Take care of what?” she finally asked once they were out of earshot.

“Test those hypothesis. I’m going to flip a quantum coin right now as to whether my future self should answer the questions I asked. No reason I can’t do that right now. And to do that, I need a computer with internet access. Yours depends on my home wi-fi, which is out of action, maybe stolen, and your computer is back in Ponyville anyway, so that leaves the computers in the cave. Those are tied into the Department of Energy’s internal network, so they should still work.”

“Let’s do it.”

It took a minute for them to reach a balcony, then it was into the sky. They gained altitude and passed over to the back side of the mountain. Spotting the abandoned mine, they spiraled down, Meg leading the way, until she flew past the defunct ore processing facilities and landed at the tunnel’s entrance. Twilight touched down next to her. Once they were inside, out of the sight of any unlikely pegasus flying by, Meg used her pendant to resume her human form, ready to use a keyboard.

“It’s a bit easier to teleport a smaller pony, you know.”

Meg shrugged. “Sorry?”

Twilight didn’t say anything to that, choosing to focus on the teleportation spell.

The spell was cast, and they were inside the cave that hosted the joint human-pony magic research efforts.

Three other humans were already present, in suits and ties, wandering about the place—with guns drawn. None of whom Meg recognized. “What the…”

“What are you doing here?” Twilight demanded.

“How did they get here?” Meg urgently, but quietly, added. Obviously they hadn’t been brought here by Twilight. Sunset and Moondancer weren’t around, and she couldn’t image either of them bringing this lot over.

All three turned to face them, taken by surprise at their sudden appearance. “You are Meg Coleman?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” she hesitantly said. “And who are you?” Only the presence of an alicorn next to her enabled her to deal with the guns pointed in her direction.

“FBI. You are under arrest.” He pulled out a pair of handcuffs. “Will you surrender peacefully?”

“Arrest? For what?”

“Conspiracy to kidnap individuals with ties to Senator Routledge for the purposes of influencing his agenda.”

“What?!”

Twilight marched forwards, her horn glowing. “Meg is going nowhere. How did you get here?”

The agent briefly looked at the other agents; their unease was obvious. “Please do not interfere, princess. You do not, yet, have diplomatic immunity.”

Twilight made a point of looking at their guns, all pointed at her. “Excuse me? Why not arrest me then? I’m the one who ‘kidnapped’ them.”

“There is no warrant for your arrest.”

Meg let out a low pitched laugh. “Isn’t it obvious, Twilight? Routledge and his goons know what a shitstorm that’d create, so they’re content with just taking me out—you know, for the purposes of influencing you.” She looked the agent in the eye. “No. I’m not surrendering. And if you’re smart, you won’t try to take me by force.”

Two agents moved towards her. Twilight teleported between them and Meg. “Just where do you think you are?”

“I don’t think they have a clue,” Meg said. She couldn’t make sense of it. It was if they had come here without realizing they had arrived in Equestria. How was that possible? On top of that, they didn’t seem surprised to find her here. Did they come here looking for her? But why would they expect to find her here if they didn’t know where ‘here’ was?

Meg addressed the agents: “Do you?”

“Please stand aside,” an agent instructed the alicorn, almost pleading.

The barrels of all three guns bent into right angles. “You are in Equestria. You have no authority here. You have no permission to be here. You will explain now how you got here.”

All three stared in bafflement at their now-useless weapons. “I think we better show her,” one said.

“If it wasn’t her, then who?” another asked.

The third was silent.

“It’s down that tunnel,” the first one said, pointing at where the restrooms were.

Twilight trotted in that direction. Meg quickly followed.

There, a dozen feet past the restrooms, on the tunnel wall. Twilight stopped in front of it.

“Discord,” she spat out.

Meg caught up to her and stared at it herself. It was a portal. On the other side was her workplace. It must have been up against a wall in the other universe. “This would sure make things more convenient,” she said dully. She turned to look at the agents walking their way. “Too bad I can’t go through it.”

“You didn’t create this?” an agent asked Twilight.

Meg rolled her eyes. “You had the guts to walk through a clearly magical portal without a clue where it went?”

“We… ran some sanity checks first. But there was no reason you’d create a portal to somewhere dangerous.”

“I wouldn’t, no. Discord on the other hoof…” She slowly shook her head. “Whatever. You want to search this facility? Knock yourselves out. It’s a joint operation between Equestria and the Department of Energy. Just don’t go past any closed doors. Most tunnels are not sized for humans, and you’ll easily get lost. Furthermore, there’s a bunch of nuclear waste stored here. Perfectly harmless, so long as you leave it alone.” She gave them a hard look. “Try not to damage anything or activate any spells. I’ll be informing President Serrell about this, naturally.”

Without warning, the alicorn teleported herself and Meg back to the main chamber. “Let’s get some ‘super duper random numbers’ and get out of here,” Twilight said. A privacy spell was cast, enclosing them in a translucent lavender sphere.

Disoriented, Meg got her bearings. Being teleported without warning was never fun, but it beat getting past those agents in the tunnel. “Couldn’t agree more,” she replied. Meg headed to a computer and sat down. She brought up the website with the quantum mechanically generated random numbers.

“Okay. For each question, I’ll run the stream briefly. If the first hex digit is odd, that counts as ‘heads’ or yes; and if it’s even, that’s ‘tails’ or no. First question: Do I answer when asked if it was technology maintaining the bubble?”

She clicked to start, then clicked to stop. The first hex digit was six. “No. Which is what happened.” She didn’t know how she felt about that. It was fifty-fifty anyway; too soon to tell.

“Next question: Why are you not a pegasus?” Click, then click. The letter ‘a’: the hex digit for ten. “No answer. Correct again.” That made it seventy-five/twenty-five.

“Okay, how about: Did you place that message in the green room?” Five. “An answer, correct. Next, how did you place that message?” The letter ‘f’: fifteen. “Also answered, correct.”

Reality was sinking in. “What about: What does my cutie mark mean?” The letter ‘c’, twelve. “Do I make a joke about it not being about hula hoops?” Three.

The odds of them all being correct by chance was shrinking fast.

One of the agents returned. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Twilight lowered the privacy shield. “None of your business. And don’t forget you’re in Equestria.” She re-established the shield. “We’re going to have to further isolate this facility,” she said, mostly to herself.

Or get Discord to close that portal. But did they really want that? It was too useful. How would Serrell react to the presence of this portal? She cringed. How would the media react, if they found out?

The agent didn’t go away. He could see the monitor through the bubble, for all the good it did him. It only showed a bunch of random hex digits, after all. After a failed attempt to enter the bubble, he merely watched. Meg continued to flip the quantum coin, each time preceded by a question she had asked, and each time it correctly matched whether it had been answered.

The odds had become minuscule that it was only coincidence.

Regardless of whether that had actually been her future self, or whether it had been some other being who had been coached on which questions to answer and how, there was no question that a time loop was in operation, running a program on the multiversal quantum supercomputer.

It was time to look forwards, not backwards. This was a different game, with different rules. They had to master the management of the wave function, to write that program—once they figured out what needed computing, obviously. That would seem to be up her alley, right? Maybe that’s what her cutie mark meant? It looked like a Venn diagram, after all.

A question came to her. She had been told to flip a coin to answer it. Better to get it out of the way. With dry mouth, she asked, “Do we go back in time to collect my belongings, including my car, before they could all be stolen or destroyed by that mob?”

She clicked to start the generator. She couldn’t look at where that first digit would appear. It scrolled off the top before she stopped the generator.

“It’s imperative you do what it says,” Twilight said, her voice strained. “No second guessing, or it doesn’t form a superposition.”

Did she see it before it scrolled off? Did she know what she had to do—or not do? Would she have said that if it was an odd digit?

Heart racing, she forced herself to scroll that first digit into view. It was a four.

Her head slumped into her hands. “Figures.”

Comments

[Venerable Ro]

Effective use of magic requires three things. In order of priority, they are power, understanding, and confidence. Power to enact your will, understanding to properly use that power, and confidence to bring that understanding to fruition.

Thus shall she grasp that prophesied skill. The power she has already, the understanding will come with contemplation, and the confidence is born of predestination.

[VitaminDude]

AKSHUALY in Shrödinger cat expirement it is consideret that wave-function collapses when decay is (not) detected by the detector, not when the box is opened. I know that you probably told it that way for narrative purposes, but i felt that it worth mentioning.

[Sozmioi]

This is the second story I've read where quantum mechanics was used in a way that made it relevant and quasi-plausible. The first was Schild's Ladder. But both that and this have serious problems with the second law of thermodynamics. In that case, well, uh, you can't make a computer by throwing garbage cans at each other.

Here, the only way I can see this working is if every incident of time travel is fixed in fate, a boundary condition on the wavefunction of the universe, not simply an occurrence within it. But then why would it appear to occur contingently based on the contents of the universe, and not seem like a natural phenomenon? Is intentionality the only plausible way of a time travel event occur? That would be extra weird, but I guess that would solve it. On the other hand, if it isn't a boundary condition, and merely based on contingent elements of the universe itself, then why would you expect a requirement of self-consistence?

[Streamline]

I reread the series for something like the 6th time, and this is the first time I really paid attention to the following line

First, consider what would be the impact on humanity if Equestria never existed.

I always suspected it before, but noticing that line really cemented by belief. It, combined with some of the other clues in the story, really makes me think that you are hinting that Meg is going to outright create Equestria. She is also probably responsible for making English the language used by ponies thousands of years before humans ever did.