The Memory Machine
It was October when Flim and Flam returned to Ponyville.
They arrived, as always, in a carnival jalopy, a mish-mash wagon of awkward wheels and patchwork parts, no two fitting together quite the right way, its cloth sides a dozen different colors stolen from an unguarded circus pavilion. Steam cylinders let out a constant wet hiss as they came to a stop in the town square, an off-key piano belting out a broken carillon to catch the ears of everypony present.
When the crowd had assembled, as it always did for Flim and Flam, the two brothers appeared on a folding stage. They danced out, and Flim announced, “Greetings Ponyville! We’ve come again to answers your prayers!”
“To fill the holes in your dreary lives!” Flam responded.
“To solve all the problems you forgot you had!”
“To fill your hearts with ever-lasting cheer!”
The brothers jumped down from the stage. They staggered a bit, and here ponies noticed how rough their coats were. That their manes, normally slick, appeared unkempt. Dark circles surrounded their eyes, and they both limped as they pushed through the crowd, away from the slowly fading notes of the mechanical pianola winding to a rusty stop in the wagon.
Flim stopped at the edge of the square. He turned, while Flam kept walking, and for just a moment Starlight Glimmer, who had meandered into the square to see what all the commotion was, noticed something even more odd. Lurking in the creases of Flim’s face, in the set of his lips and the hollows of his eyes, she saw regret. No, that couldn’t be. From these two? Starlight shook her head.
Flim lifted a hoof, about to turn around. But something seized him, and with a wild air he shouted back at the crowd.
“And this time it’s free!” He belted out. He sagged, as though the words had been the only thing holding his spine straight, and then he stumbled around and chased after his brother, who hadn’t looked back.
And that is how Ponyville acquired its wonderful Memory Machine.
* * *
The wagon’s engine died after a few hours. Out of fuel, somepony said. Starlight didn’t notice. The machine in the wagon was what held her fascination.
“At first glance, it appears to be nothing more than a simple crucible,” she said. Beside her, a floating notepad and quill dutifully transcribed her every word. Steps away, at the entrance, a bevy of pony heads peered in, curious to hear the local sorceress at work.
“The main body is a large stone bowl, perhaps three feet across and just as deep,” she continued. “The walls are almost as thick as my hoof. In the bottom of the bowl there appears to be puddles of melted dross. The interior is scorched black and I can smell the products of oxidation. Some sort of smelting device, perhaps?”
She peered underneath. There was a furnace there, as expected, but there were no ashes or residue of fire in the box. It was cold as stone. She frowned.
“There is no apparent energy source. And yet… I can feel the magic in it.” She closed her eyes. The world seemed to tilt ever so slightly, as though she stood on a slope leading toward the crucible. The angle grew steeper and steeper, and eventually her knees buckled, and she tipped forward to rest against the lip of the bowl. Her eyes opened, and the world resumed its flat aspect. The wobble in her legs faded.
She put a hoof in the bowl. Nothing. She snorted and looked around the wagon, found an old wooden tankard that had seen better days, and tossed it in.
The crucible filled with light. A searing heat curled the hairs on Starlight’s muzzle, and she flinched away. When she could see again, the bowl was empty. Only a smear of ashes remained.
But… She remembered the tankard, now. She’d stolen it years ago, but a petty bit of pilfering, an easy grab from that tavern outside Las Pegasus. She’d been drinking with her brother Flam when they finished the last of their beers and decided it was time to go. Flam asked the waitress for their check, and by the time she returned they were gone. The tankard fit neatly in her knapsack and then they were in the crowd, too far away for the waitress to bother chasing.
That was years ago. The tankard had been through a lot since then; near misses with monsters, temporary confiscation by an angry mob, filled more than once with rotgut poison that should’ve dissolved its simple walnut finish. But somehow it had persisted, just as she and Flam had, lasting for years in their mish-mash carnival wagon, an unseen and unheralded little part of their lives. She remembered drinking from it a thousand times, and every drink tasted just a bit sweeter from the knowledge that this cup belonged to him and nopony else.
And now the tankard was gone. Just ashes. Starlight gasped in a breath, blinked, and stumbled away. She stared at the crucible, her thoughts spinning around memories that hadn’t existed until moments ago.
“Ooh…” she whispered. She stood and walked across the cramped interior toward the crucible, and stared in wonder at the slowly settling ashes inside.
“How marvelous.” She picked up another object at random with her magic – a set of worn binoculars, with one of its lenses cracked – and tossed it into the machine
And she remembered it.
* * *
“It’s nothing I’ve seen before,” Twilight Sparkle said. “Did they say where they got it?”
“No,” Starlight said. “Just that it was free. And their usual spiel about how it would solve every problem.”
They’d moved the machine out of the wagon and into the town hall. Starlight had wondered, at first, if that was the best choice – leaving powerful magical devices in public where anypony could access them was a fraught option – but Flim and Flam had been clear. This was the town’s machine. Neither she nor Twilight had any right to lock it up in the castle’s basement laboratory and play with it themselves.
Besides, it was just a curiosity. They’d worked out the particulars after only a few experiments. Toss any item into the machine and it would burn to ashes in an instant. And the pony who put it in the machine would remember everything about it, as though it had belonged to them for years. It quite literally turned objects into memories.
Twilight frowned. “Flim and Flam don’t do free. Or, if they say something’s free, there’s a catch. Some kind of hook for them to get you later.”
They both stared at the crucible. A little filly ran up to it, tossed in a broken nacre comb, and gasped as the fire inside illuminated her face. Her eyes widened with sudden understanding, and she ran back to her mother, babbling in a high-pitched voice. Starlight caught something about an old zebra who lived by the sea.
“So, what’s the catch, then?” Starlight asked.
“I don’t know.” Another frown. “I don’t like it, though. Those two don’t have much sense beyond what it takes to con ponies out of their bits. If they’re giving something away for free, it’s because they don’t want it.”
“Why wouldn’t you want this, though?” Starlight asked. “It’s such a wonderful tool. You can learn almost anything with it.”
“Then why were they so eager to get rid of it?”
“Well.” Starlight tilted her head and considered the crucible again. She had a mental list of items she wanted to toss into it, and as the day wore on, the list grew longer. It would last forever, she suspected; the world was filled with memories. “We’d have to ask them.”
* * *
Flim and Flam never returned to Ponyville. But that was fine. Starlight didn’t dislike the brothers as much as some of her friends, but she couldn’t say she missed them.
The town hall was empty at night. Technically it was closed and the door locked, but that was hardly an obstacle for a pony like her. She teleported into the hall, conjured up an illusion of darkness and quiet to mantle herself, and beheld the crucible again.
“Who made you?” she mumbled. The rough stone bore no chisel’s marks. No sign of any craftsmare. It might as well have emerged from the earth, already perfectly formed. She’d never heard any mention of such a device, and something so wonderful would surely have caught the attention of scholars. They would have turned over the world to acquire such a machine. Ponies would sing legends about it, if they’d known it existed.
So, perhaps it hadn’t. Perhaps it had lain waiting, buried in the earth, for somepony to find. Perhaps, in their wanderings, Flim and Flam had stumbled across it in some distant land. And not knowing how great it was, they brought it here.
To her. Where it belonged. How wonderful of them.
She began feeding items into the fire. One of Twilight’s old quills. A rusted hasp stolen from Applejack’s barn. An abandoned birds nest from Fluttershy’s cottage. She closed her eyes after each feeding, and let the memories fill her. Joy, and sadness, and loss, and happiness. A second-place rodeo ribbons; a melancholy mix of pride and resentment. A signed Wonderbolt’s poster; giddy excitement. A bejeweled satin fascinator; accomplishment.
These were not her memories, Starlight knew. But it was a distant awareness, a knocking on a door far down the hall. Nothing that mattered. More, more, more important was the life it gave her. A life not filled with regret. A life not built on the suffering she had caused. A life filled with proud, little accomplishments, the kind ponies deserved but she’d never had. A harmony built from myriad disparate pieces, fit together like a broken jigsaw in her mind. A pile of borrowed reminiscence, slowly burying her failures.
Long Starlight spent that night with the Memory Machine. Outside, the dawn came, and ponies wondered why the Town Hall remained dark, and why the scent of smoke drifted out.
Starlight was not done. She still had fuel to burn.
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It's clear why the brothers couldn't stand the thing. Experiencing their victims lives shoved the reality of those victims' personhood in their muzzles. It's not impossible to steal from living, feeling people rather than faceless mooks, but it's nowhere near as easy.
As for Starlight... yeah, getting to taste a life not defined by regret and loss and rage is a terrible temptation for her. I just hope someone drags her away before she burns her friends' lives away for just one more taste. Or fills her head with so many stolen memories that there's no room left for her.
Wonderfully unsettling little tale. Thank you for it.
Hmmm...something about this seems off. Okay so I get Starlight burying her guilt and stuff with memories of happier times, but artifacts like this are never without a cost. Where do the memories come from? I suspect that the memories do not come from the objects being burned, but from the individual who had the memory in the first place,
so when she acquired the memory of getting a signed Wonderbolts poster, Rainbow Dash would have forgotten. Or perhaps like in the first Harry Potter book, there was the mirror of Erised, and Dumbledore warned Harry about losing one's self to memories, the danger of forgetting to eat, sleep, hope, dream eventually causing one to go mad or even wasting away entirely.
How on EARTH does this get featured the DAY it's released?!
Congratulations!
An endorsement!
Also a wonderful story. :D
Ah, another excellent story featuring a curse veiled in blessings by Gardez. Yay.
HowWhy does this not have the dark tag?Meh
I have a feeling that it will never get enough fuel. But I’d still like to see a sequel where it does and then affects all of ponyville in a bad way
10083002
Yeah.
I don't like how the items were destroyed, but I'll thumb it up.
If she REALLY wants to find out where it came from, she could break off a piece of stone or metal from the machine itself and throw it in.
10083005
It doesn't have to be that dark of a cost. Simply having an item burned is already enough a cost. The item can no longer help you remember, can no longer be used, can no longer influence anything.
You could use this to solve crimes and mysteries, right up until you have to tell the judge you burned the evidence.
I also recalled that this device also tells you the feelings of the objects' previous owners. (Starts tossing in Hearts and Hooves day cards.) "He loves me, he loves me not..."
I wouldn't be surprised if this gets featured.
There is a roman coin in my library I so want to burn right now.
It was minted during the Flavian dynasty and was found by my great granduncle in an antiques market in China. Imagine what it must have seen in its time.
10083574
OH SHIT BOI GUESS WHAT!?
10083669
Yes ...?
10083574
I would be very surprised if a new Cold in Gardez story does not get featured, lol.
10083005
The mirror probably doesn't actually do anything other than show your greatest desire. The issue is that some people are so desperate for what they see in it, so destitute as to not even try for it, they'd rather gaze at what they wish could be.
10083770
True enough. Frankly, I probably would fall into that second category, I have a tendency to bury my head in the sand as it were.
I could see so many uses for this thing, in the hands of someone who will never use it for personal reasons.
I have a feeling that it was built as a weapon. You get somebody like Starlight, or really anybody could end up like her, and you end up having the town dismantling itself to quench its newfound addiction to memories...
And then when they run out of nonliving things...
After the first pony is thrown in, they will be throwing in their own mothers, sisters, best friends, neighbors, previously loved pets...
And whos to say that their own selves are off limits? After they run out of other ponies, they might start throwing pieces of themselves in, or just jumping in whole.
So yeah, I could most certainely see this as having been designed as a weapon.
Watch out, it's only a matter of time before Starlight steals Celestia's peytral (barding?) and experiences an Alicorn's lifetime worth of memories!
I definitely see two huge downsides to this artifact:
1. The more you use it, the less of you that is left, as your own memories become a smaller and smaller portion of your thoughts compared to those from other ponies' lives.
2. The act of gaining memories is destructive, so inevitably you end up destroying everything within reach in a mad search for more and more memories.
Extended use would leave nothing behind but a broken, scatterbrained mare with a serious identity crisis and a lot of missing furniture.
10084203 #1 isn't a problem when (like ME, obviously) your mind is already crowded with hundreds of competing voi-... what? Oh! Sorry! THOUSANDS of competing voices!
And then Starlight threw Cozy Glow in... and there was a total blank.
10083005
At least part of the cost is acquiring the items. Starlight already stole the hasp from Applejack, even if it was broken. And where did she get the signed Wonderbolts poster?
Not to mention that once an item is consumed, it is gone. It can't be retrieved and used again (presumably, even with magic). While it could have held memories for many ponies who saw it before, and acquired more as time went on, now that will never happen - and only one pony will get the benefit of the knowledge.
On top of that, knowledge-seekers such as Starlight and Twilight would be particularly seduced by it. The ability to know everything about an item, instantly... not having to conduct painstaking research that might only reveal microscopic snippets - guesses at best. I could see Twilight tossing in quite a few items she would later regret destroying. Childhood treasures, personal items, books, artifacts...
10084535
You bring up several very good points. Someone ought to write to the Princesses and have it locked up in one of the vaults if not entirely destroyed.
With this, the dead are gone, but every memory carried on. No secret lost.
What a terrible, wonderful, addictive, repulsive thing.
10083005 10083002 Worse, there's nothing in the story that indicates the memories are REAL. Think about it for a second. Toss something in, it burns to ashes, and you remember everything about it in a way that you're positive is correct. What if the device only creates the memories from the destroyed item, and far worse, the way you expect the memory to exist.
Food for thought.
"Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain."
-- J.K. Rowling
10085060
That is a chilling prospect that you are essentially hallucinating memories.
@Cold in Gardez, I think I can safely speak for most everyone here, I realize that this was only meant to be a short one-shot piece, but this deserves a sequel even if it was merely a paragraph or two in a blog post, but why were Flim and Flam so eager to get rid of it? Is Starlight and the other girls/inhabitants of Ponyville at large safe?
My mind goes to dark places sometimes, and has thoughts like: What happens if a pony throws a bone in there? Or a skeleton? Or a corpse?
It's not so much what it is, but it's potential to feed the everlasting desire to know things.
10085582
"It makes sense to know the exact criminal history of this convicted murderer so we may bring peace to their victims (and hopefully close a lot of case files). Into the crucible with you!"
...oh, hey, turns out they were actually innocent. Of anything. Including the thing they were convicted of. Er...
"Oh yes, they definitely committed dozens of horrible crimes! Their death was completely justified! Bring out the next one!"
Drowning out unpleasant memories with many happy ones in this manner may certainly provide relief, but what are we if not the sum totality of our deeds and experiences? Drown out your memories, sure -- but won't you also drown out yourself? Who will walk back out of the town hall, once Starlight has finished filling her mind with other people's lives?
I gotta be honest this really got it's hooks in me. I know it was a speed write but I really hope this becomes a thing the idea is amazing!
10086033
Yeah, it's the logical extension. Does she love me? Uh, I guess she does. Whoops.
The title and picture made me think of Horizon's old story, but this one is very different.
Highly relatable.
Would rather live in happy old memories than dwell in the present.
I have lots of things to burn.
10086150
That is so deep. Like seriously, this is something you'd expect to hear from a philosophy major.
It's also prime material for a sequel. I can just imagine Starlight walking out and trying to take off, but then she's like "wait, where are my wings? Oh, that's right, I have a horn. Wait- I have a horn?! Oh yeah, I do. But where are my wings?! No wait, I don't have wings. Or do I?"
10084203
This is prime material for a sequel. Imagine Starlight being like "y'know, I always wanted to be a Wonderbolt when I was a filly" then somepony tells her "but you're a unicorn" and she illogically shoots back with "yeah, but I was a pegasus when I was a filly"
Her mind would be so chaotic that Discord might as well retire there.