Chapter 8: Copse
Meeting the Cave didn’t take long at all—by the time Dakota woke up the next morning, to the calls of tropical birds she was pretty sure came from the resort speakers, there was a note slipped under the door. At least she assumed it was a note. There was nothing actually on it.
“Oh.” Cinnabar stared down at the folded-open sheet. It looked like it had been scrawled on the hotel’s own free paper. “Right. Buck me.”
“Not really into horses,” Dakota answered, over a mouthful of eggs. She was fully in the spirit of her vacation now even so, and was already dressed for another day at the pool. She probably wouldn’t get it, but it didn’t hurt to give fate a little encouragement. “But please, elaborate.”
Cinnabar actually looked embarrassed. She wasn’t sure how she knew it—maybe it was his flattened ears, or the way he kept prodding at a note he couldn’t really move. “That’s luddite paint.”
“Uh…” Dakota took the note in her free hand, running one finger carefully over the paper. She could feel something there, little bumps and ridges that suggested something like a calligraphy pen had been used to write it. “Mind telling me what that is?”
“I don’t know what it is,” he spat, a little annoyed. “I think the defense department of one of the NATO countries came up with it, maybe ten years ago. It’s a pigment that only organic eyes can see. Invisible to every sensor there is.”
Dakota tossed the note back onto the table between them. “I have organic eyes.”
“Eyes,” Cinnabar repeated. “Not so much everything else. Don’t ask me how it works… but it won’t stop us. That would be… kinda stupid, wouldn’t it? Might as well just not send the message.”
“You’re right…” She trailed off, staring down at the note in front of her. Cinnabar hadn’t said, and he didn’t need to. It was still written, after all.
“I want you to place an online order for me, Cinnabar. Get me an art kit. Something with charcoal sticks. Do… they do same-day delivery here?”
The note might be written in some kind of magic ink, but it had still made impressions on the page. She could feel them, and that was what she’d need.
“Better than that—I can have it in an hour. Oh, and Java sent a message. She wanted to visit the beach with you, but…”
“She can’t? Because of the sharding thing?”
“Oh, no,” Cinnabar shook his head. “It’s only the infrastructure that’s really hard-separated. If the whole world just couldn’t talk to Australia anymore, the Chinese would’ve figured out what we were doing in like five minutes. Equestria’s good at protecting itself. Doesn’t care as much about little things like countries—someone changing the way it works in some tiny place at a time, I’m not sure it even notices. Sometimes I wonder if any part of it even knows we’re alive.”
Knows we’re alive? She watched Cinnabar for a few seconds, confused. The pony sure acted alive. His tail twitched, he fidgeted in his seat and pawed at the note in front of them when he was bored. But did that make him alive? Not according to any of the old definitions. But maybe those didn’t matter anymore.
“Should we go before we talk to the Cave? Assuming they… even want to talk to us.”
“There won’t be anything to hack with them. They don’t wear overlay, no implants…”
“But you still think they can help us.”
“Yeah. Because they’re working with the CCP, probably. Or they know someone who is. We find out where in Equestria their attack is actually aimed, and we’ll probably find Twilight there stopping it.”
“Can I, uh… can I ask a stupid question?”
Cinnabar laughed loudly, and in that moment Dakota couldn’t have said if the sound came from someone living or was just a recorded simulation. “If you weren’t allowed to ask stupid questions, Dakota—”
She cut him off. “I don’t remember much about the show that the old VR game was based on. I know it was pretty popular, people used to think ponies were silly or childish or weird. But I remember a few things—Twilight wasn’t the one in charge of Equestria, was she? There were princesses. Celestia, Luna, Cadance. They’re out there too, aren’t they? Ruling your world. Unless they’re someone’s Synths too.”
“No.” He didn’t laugh this time, at least. “Canterlot, uh… never…” He hesitated. “Can you remember ever going there?”
She hesitated. A towering mountain city, with a castle visible for hundreds of miles around. But all her memories were from far away, looking up from below. “Maybe?”
“You haven’t,” he answered. “Because no human has. Canterlot was the part of the game operated by a now-defunct toy company… it was the part they used for their product. There were quests there to visit stores in your world, or else buy mysterious locked chests for the random assortment of unique clothes inside them. The toy company hadn’t really cared much about the game for… I don’t actually know how long.
At least ten years, when the Convergence happened. Their last official event was an Equestrian friendship festival, meant to start when Princess Twilight and her friends arrived. But since the company never released the end of the event… Twilight never arrived. They weren’t in Canterlot when the Convergence happened. I can show you, if you want. Your implants work both ways. I could show you what I remember. I, uh… I was in Ponyville at the time.”
Without ordering it on her part, the room transformed around them. Cinnabar’s eyes reflected white light through the window. Dakota followed his glance. There the ocean had transformed into a flowing grassy field, with a distant stone city rising high above. The earth shook visibly—but she felt nothing. Even so, she could see thatched roofs and primitive buildings shake. Glass shattered, and ponies scattered, screaming.
The mountain split open. Huge sections of stone went crumbling away, a gigantic crater opening from within. Sharp, metallic shapes emerged through molten magma, still glowing bright white.
The Monolith, its entire frame glowing such a bright blue that it cut through the orange of molten rock for a single second. Canterlot, castle and all, crumbled away down the mountainside, or else vanished into the mountain and faded from view.
There was nothing left of Canterlot, not even the remoter castle spires.
“Is that…” She pointed towards the window, taking a moment to remind herself it was only a beach out there. It’s Equestria. It isn’t real.
“The Monolith? Yeah. Same day you saw it. Lining up whether it was earlier or later is… kinda impossible. Most ponies think that it happened at the same time—it enters lunar orbit in your world, and attacks ours. Err… attacks. I’m speaking too strong. Let me say it this way—the Canterlot that humans who care about the old show visit is… another prop, like Ponyville is now. It’s all actors and historical reenactment ponies.” He grinned then, and the whole vision vanished. A peaceful beach appeared outside, with distant rolling waves. “If you can believe it, that toy company sued Bodhisattva over taking Canterlot out of the game, along with all the ‘zero-tier marketing.’”
The weight of what Cinnabar said finally settled on her shoulders. How have I never heard about this? It seemed strange that something so fundamental to Equestria’s structure could be unknown—but Cinnabar was right. Canterlot had been rebuilt, but she’d never actually heard of anyone choosing to live there. Manehattan and Trottingham were more interesting.
“So you don’t have a leader,” she finally said. “You’ve gone all this time without one.”
“Almost. Cadence was in Canterlot when… everything happened, but Twilight wasn’t, like I said. The Elements of Harmony had been protecting us before, and they’ve kept it up. Long enough that other ponies have taken up their work too. Bodhisattva does most of the real work, expanding the infrastructure so that ponies can… have families.”
Maybe Dakota was chasing at diversions, but it felt like she was close to something, something that was connected somehow. “And… just so I’m putting all this together correctly, this happened before Bodhisattva went public. Before Rhodes vanished.”
“Yeah. In your time, I think it was… six months? In ours… a lot longer.”
“What does that mean?”
“Humans are slow,” Cinnabar answered, without any trace of shyness. “I mean… we can be too. Slower, even. We don’t have a fixed processing speed like your brains do. So better hardware can mean life moves more quickly in Equestria. Or it means more of us. Lately storage has grown faster than computation, so there’s always more room for ponies than there is hardware to run us on.”
“Small enough to fit in my head.”
The doorbell rang, and Cinnabar hurried over. It swung open on its own accord, and a pony stood there—a pony she knew was actually a delivery drone, with its simple wheels and locked tray on top. But it would already be open, now that she was nearby. “Delivery for… Dakota?” The pony looked down at her manifest, expression utterly bewildered.
“I think that’s where I am.”
“You are,” Cinnabar said, gesturing towards the table. “Just leave it there.”
“Course,” the pony answered, saluting with a gray wing before hurrying over and setting a tiny wrapped envelope on the table. Just big enough for the art kit. “Thanks for shopping,” she said, mostly to Cinnabar. “Have a great day!” And she left, after briefly bumping into the wall on her way out.
Dakota watched her go, smiling weakly. “If they’ve got a faulty drone, they could just take it out of circulation. Don’t have to make the pony act so… silly.”
Cinnabar shrugged. “Is the drone faulty? Maybe that’s how the pony acts, and she makes the drone act that way.”
She rolled her eyes—it didn’t much matter to her who catalog companies chose to use as delivery simulations so long as she got what she wanted. And this seemed to be what she wanted—she could hear the various bits of charcoal moving about slightly inside the package as she shook it.
She removed the largest, softest of the sticks, moving it gently over the note in a few smooth strokes. The outlines of words appeared there, and finally they could read them.
“Midnight, Thestral Arcade, Sydney”
“An arcade?” Dakota frowned, holding up the note so Cinnabar could read it. “That sounds… a little backward, isn’t it? They got their hands on near-magical paint cameras can’t see, but… they use a VR arcade?”
He shrugged. “I’ve never followed human hacker undergrounds that well. I’m sure it will make sense when we get there. Assuming we… even want to go.”
“Yeah…” she muttered, tearing the note up into little pieces and going for the sink. She flicked on the garbage disposal, then said goodbye to any evidence. “Looks like we might have some time. I think we should visit an old friend.”
As it turned out, Beck didn’t live in Equestria like Java—something she probably could’ve guessed from the absence of a pony name. But that didn’t matter much, not so long as they had network access. Assuming the invisible war for the network wasn’t lost while they were on the line, there was no reason she couldn’t meet with friendly contacts all over the world.
So as much as Dakota would’ve rather spent her afternoon taking another shot at picking someone up by the pool, she remained locked up in their room, connecting to Seoul via telepresence.
It didn’t work any differently than visiting Equestria—put on the shoes, stand somewhere with good network access and a little room to walk around, and know where you were connecting. The real world could be displayed just as easily as Equestria. Depending on their individual preferences, anyone digitally connected would be able to see and interact with her, the same way ponies interacted with humans.
In a way, traveling like this made Dakota one of them, a virtual ghost unable to interact with anything not specifically wired for it.
Beck’s shop wasn’t located in the core of a Consensus Node, or in some secret hideout in the center of the manufacturing district. Rather, it was at the back of a noodle shop. Dakota slowed a little as they got close, watching a mechanical door open in the back of the building and another quadcopter take off, carrying a foil-wrapped box in its grippers.
“I think we’re lost. Cinnabar, are you sure about that address? Maybe old me just kept shitty notes.”
“No, this is it.” He circled around her, no closer or further than ever. She could still feel him when he got close; though few of the objects seemed to be interactable. There had briefly been a dense crowd outside the shop, until she turned off “real-time stranger interaction” in her menu. Now the streets were empty, filled only with pouring rain that didn’t get her wet and the distant, echoing sound of vehicles.
“I guess it shouldn’t be that strange you don’t remember. This is his day job, running the delivery fleet for Root Noodle. Also since you’re forgetting things, expect a little delay in the conversation. He doesn’t speak English, and you don’t know Korean, but Equestria knows both so it’s no problem.”
“No problem,” she repeated, rolling her eyes. “And he knows we’re coming?” She didn’t complain about the obvious—“Beck” seemed like a strange name for a guy. But considering the only other human she was on good terms with was one who pretended she was a pony all day…
“Yeah. Oh, and you should probably know, Beck’s real self-conscious about his privacy. We won’t actually go inside the noodle shop. This might not even be the same one. I think your old self thought the entire thing was a lie—but when we step through that wall, we’ll be in his sublayer, and that’s what matters.”
Dakota had no idea what any of the distinctions were, and just now she found she didn’t care. Walk through the wall, she thought, staring at the bricks in front of them. “Not a magic train, but I guess it will do.” She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and stumbled forward.
She didn’t smack into it, either physically or with the annoying flash of red light and tone telling her that she couldn’t go forward. The world blurred for a moment, then they were somewhere else.
It looked… Greek. Massive marble columns, classical statues, and a distant, clear sky above a dry landscape. If it hadn’t been night here, she probably would’ve been able to see the vineyards and the townspeople walking around in their togas.
But as it was, the space was smaller than it first appeared. There was a central square, with rows of stadium seating towards the bottom. Ponies and humans both milled about in small groups, mostly talking to themselves.
“A theater?” she asked, earning herself an angry glance from ponies in the back row. She lowered her voice to a whisper, leaning close to Cinnabar. “Why is this a theater?”
“Ask Beck,” he answered.
At that moment, the obscuring curtains down at the bottom were drawn back, and a single figure appeared, suspended by a complicated wooden crane. Flowing white toga, metal breastplate, long hair. Then he spoke, in a voice that rumbled across the stage. “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”
Dakota glanced back at Cinnabar, rolling her eyes. She didn’t dare ask what she was thinking, no matter how stupid this now seemed. Beck was watching, and he might overhear. There’s probably a way I can talk privately to him. He’s living in my head.
She watched the audience as they applauded, and realized the pony who had shushed them was looping, stomping her hooves the same way every few seconds. Not real.
“Good to see you too, Beck!” she called, ignoring the universal anger her shouting provoked. “Sorry it took so long to catch up. This cane isn’t for show—hasn’t been easy.”
A young woman with a tray of popcorn stopped beside her, her expression going blank. The same voice that had spoken from the stage echoed from her mouth, without even an attempt to make it match. “I did not expect you to come to me so soon. How much of a rush were you in to anger the whole world?”
From far below, the play went on. A dozen actors in painted masks emerged from behind the curtains, and music began to play. Yet it seemed to fade into the background, blurring away so that only the top row of seats and the expanse behind was clear.
“I don’t know what I did,” she answered. “It seemed like someone should. Rhodes has been missing for… so long. She wasn’t going to find herself.”
The woman kept walking, taking her popcorn down into the stands and blurring away like the rest. But another voice spoke from nearby, a janitor pony levitating a broom along his path. “You know that she wants to be found? Maybe she found her peace, and you take it away. It would be kinder not to look.”
“We don’t know that.” Dakota followed the janitor, ignoring the absurdity of what she was seeing. Beck was putting on quite the show, in more than one way. But she could ignore it all so long as she got what she needed. “Maybe she didn’t want to disappear. Maybe she deserves justice, and I’m going to find it.”
Laughter boomed out from all around them, from the mouth of every pony and human there. They all turned to stare at her. Dakota stopped walking, shuddering a little under the attention. But she didn’t look away. Unfortunately she wasn’t sure which one was really Beck. But maybe it didn’t matter. “If you are convinced,” said the janitor. “Then that makes one of us.”
“We came for help, Beck,” Cinnabar muttered, his voice timid. This display was apparently more than even he had expected. But you’re virtual yourself. You probably don’t see this whole crowd as tools. You’re thinking of them as people. She didn’t know that, but it did seem to explain why her Synth was so much more intimidated. “Can you give it or not?”
“Explain what you need!” shouted the god, still suspended on wooden winches far below. “And maybe we will sell. If you ask the right way.”
How are we friends? You’re insane. Dakota tried to imagine some overweight Korean kid, surrounded by empty noodle containers and broken quadcopters. That was the reality, right?
“I’m going into danger,” she said timidly. “Maybe you know about Australia… I’m sure you do.” She couldn’t say more—even that much drew Cinnabar’s eyes, staring. He relaxed once she didn’t go on. “I’m there now.”
This time her audience didn’t laugh. The janitor didn’t speak, just kept on sweeping. But an older man behind the ticket counter said something, gesturing for her to come closer.
She obeyed, listening through the tiny speaker set into the glass. “You think Beijing has your missing girl?”
“No…” So he knew—probably the whole world knew, except for her. “But I think Twilight does. And if not…” She fumbled in a virtual pocket for a second, holding up the Identifier Omar had given her. “I have this. I’ll know her when I find her. What I really need is… a way to find out where a pony in Equestria is in the outside world. Can you get me a tracking program? Or… if you don’t have anything like that, maybe something to stop Cinnabar and me from being deleted when we—”
“Do things!” Cinnabar called, speaking over her gracelessly. “When we do things that might not be safe. Because that’s all we know we’re doing.”
“Yeah,” she sighed. “That.”
“One of those is possible, and one is not,” said the old man. “I cannot follow every road. Some chains of transactions can be traced to the very first token. Others are erased, obscured, masked in so many layers that the one you travel down is already gone.” He produced an object from his pocket, passing it under the glass as though it was the ticket they’d just bought.
It wasn’t a ticket, but an eye. A severed, squirming eye, one that Dakota didn’t look at too closely, or touch. “Ugh… that’s…”
“It can see,” said someone else. A foal, who’d been digging through the trash can beside them. “But you should not believe what you see, Dakota. We live in a world all made of lies. One who knew you were looking could show you the truth she wanted you to find.”
“But what if she didn’t care?” Dakota asked. “What if she wants to be found?”
“Ponies who want to be found don’t run,” the child answered.
The world blurred, and suddenly they were standing outside the noodle shop. Dakota felt something wet and wriggling in her hand, and immediately reached down to shove it into Cinnabar’s saddlebags. “Out out out out out…” She shuddered. “I really need to figure out how to disable the simulated touch stuff. I don’t want other people turning it on.”
“They… can’t.” Cinnabar muttered, staring up at her in confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“That fuckin eye.” She shook her hand out visibly, so hard that it hurt, and kept walking in the rain. She held it out, but the moisture only sounded real. She felt nothing against her fingers. To be fair she didn’t feel the drip of the slime she’d imagined on the eye, but she could still remember it.
“I’m not so sure if I like Beck,” she muttered. “He… could’ve done that in a better way. Or given us the other thing we asked for. Or charged us, or… just how do I know him again?”
“You saved his life,” Cinnabar answered, without hesitation. “Talked him out of…” He shook his head. “Look, you were never close. But you told him to find something to live for, and… he did.”
“Oh.” All her anger fled from her, leaving Dakota wrung out and tired. She stared up at the sky, at the rain that poured down from crowded Seoul skyscrapers. They looked a lot like Chicago—impossibly intricate, covered in designs she knew were only real in overlay. The reality was probably plain steel and concrete, identical designs that no one would see.
She no longer wanted the details, not about him. “But he’s good,” she finished, speeding off again. “This wasn’t just a social visit, was it?” What kind of mind was that, barely even using the same mouth twice? No identity, nothing like a real conversation. More like talking to a crowd at once. “He… really knows what he’s doing?”
Cinnabar nodded. “You felt the… thing… you put in my bag, isn’t that what you just said? That’s a damn good bit of illegal software. Even more impressive is that we still have it. Hasn’t shown up as contraband. But… since your memory is faulty, I should tell you that you usually don’t get to use a hack like that more than once. They tend to rely on how… complicated Equestria is. Manipulate some subtle flaw in the way its layers combine. But it isn’t human software anymore. By using that, you’ll teach Equestria about its own flaws, and it will heal them. Why do you think it lets hackers like Beck onto the system in the first place? They’re generating more antibodies than ponies alone ever could.”
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Hrm. I'm sitting, and parsing this one.
Beck likely is passing along a message or two at the behest of matters. We see another resident of ponyville as well.
The one fun question to ask here, "Where was rhodes when canterlot fell?"
This was before, yes, but she was in this world long long before she 'vanished' for all intents.
I wonder if the target and her pony effectively merged somehow? And would that make them a Rhodes/Scholar?
I mean, if I could pretend to be a pony I'd absolutely spend my entire life pretending to be a pony because fuck you
Ah. I was wondering where the chapter titles would go after "Tree." Let's just hope Dakota doesn't miss the forest in her hunt for details.
Hasbro's defunct? That's a beautiful bit of irony.
Hmm... If the Mane Six are powerful beings with independent existences, what does that say about beloved background characters? There may be a digital angel watching over Dakota out of one eye.
Ah, yes. It's not noir if the detective doesn't travel through rain-soaked city streets at least once.
Out of all the memories she could've retained, she kept Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters. Go figure.
One eye of the graeae acquired. Time to go see the cavemen and hopefully not get clubbed to death.
Wait...when the note said Sydney at midnight, did it mean the physical, real Sydney. or one she visits as a simulated tourist? Because I think they're on the northern Australian coast, near the barrier reef, and even if Australia had built a network of high-speed bullet trains, there's almost no way she would be able to reach Sydney(almost a thousand miles south) that same day.
Looking forward to seeing what made Dakota such a famous detective. Because right now it seems like Cinnabar is doing all the actual detective work.
Not saying she isn't contributing anything. Her unflappable "get shit done" attitude is the only thing violently shoving this case forward.
I am giddy over the combination of literal and figurative Deus ex machina.
9414926
I can't believe you of all people missed the Ditzy Doo delivery bot
Grey wing?