Anemoia

by Starscribe

Chapter 3: Morganite

To bring the power back to her home, to bring Crimson back, Bit needed to discover why the electricity in Zircon had failed.

Ostensibly this was not something she had been trained to do, but she hadn't been trained to make brushes and mops either. She still spent plenty of time—days or months or years—considering and second-guessing herself while focused on her other responsibilities.

But whenever the tower was clean, her mind returned to her task. The electricity was gone, and if Zircon were going to clean itself up, it already would have. Further delay only brought further disrepair outside her windows.

Now that she had a reason to watch, Bit studied activity below with an intensity that she had never felt before. Not a single new crystal building rose under her eyes. Plenty already seemed abandoned, and a few more took on that caste as she watched. Ponies moved about in small groups, scavenging. The largest and grandest structure, Zircon Palace, was dark and empty.

What is the king doing? Shouldn't he be cleaning this?

But the king did not appear, and the lights did not return. So Bit herself was forced to become the solution.

The tower had resources, even if its library would be inaccessible without power. There were old texts, buried in the expansive vaults under the tower where ice and snow and even air could not reach them. Bit dug them out, sorted and cleaned, then she studied.

There were materials here from the days before the tower, before her Wizard, before Zircon had grown to its current strength and power. There were instructions for how the electrical systems worked, no more complex in their way than the ones she used for mixing cleaners.

Bit studied them, learned everything they contained. She learned of the Zircon Spire, which penetrated impossibly deep into the stone, so deep that the rock was glowing red. In stretching upward like a spire, it forced the flow of heat from below to above, generating the power for their city.

This was the mystery of how the center could still be warm, while the electricity had stopped working. The heat engine had been crafted to last ten thousand years, and so it worked. But if nothing was attached to draw away that energy, the flow would slow, the city would cool, but only slightly.

Each of the other zircons were really radiative coolers, attached to underground power plants. So she'd been right that the city's darkness and the abandoned districts of the city were connected, just for the wrong reasons.

After that, all Bit had to do was discover which of the power plants supplied the Wizard’s tower, and go repair it.

The first part was simple. The maps were all there, right beside the diagrams of each identical plant. Her tower was powered by Capital Waystation Symphony, the plant that had once serviced the palace and many other civic buildings. There was just one problem with this:

She would have to leave the tower. Maps and records and study were simple enough. She could even justify the time spent as really in service to her responsibilities. But if she left the tower—not just walking to the dumping site behind it, but truly left it—there would be nopony left.

Would the Wizard see her departure as a dereliction of her duties, and abandon the place for good?

No, Bit eventually decided. Crimson was wise, far wiser than she was. If she could understand it, he would. She just had to make sure of that fact before she left.

Bit clambered up to his chambers, standing before the portrait of himself and the mare without a horn. "I have to ask your permission for something," Bit said, lowering her head respectfully to the portrait. "Master, there's somewhere I have to go. The power in Zircon has failed. But I know where to make repairs. I'm going to go down and clean the city. Please forgive my indiscretion... if I could get the power working from inside the tower, I would."

The portrait said nothing. Bit found herself walking up the nearby stairs, past a gate that had been entirely iced over. She'd broken through it now, and could walk onto the balcony without restraint.

Crimson stared intently through his large telescope, occasionally jotting down notes on a levitating pad of paper. Bit held a tray closer to him, its contents steaming in the frigid air.

"Ah. Refreshment." Crimson looked up, pulling down the many layers of fabric that wrapped his face. He levitated the glass over, sipping thoughtfully at it.

"This isn't what I asked for... what have you done, Bit?"

"Apologies!" Bit shouted to the rusting telescope tripod. "But you haven't come inside, and it's so late. I thought you might need something to help you warm up."

Crimson took another sip from the glass, before pulling the layers of cloth tight about his face again. "Of course, Bit. I'm not upset, just amazed. You've just done something I wanted without being asked. Don't ever apologize for doing good."

Bit nudged the empty spot beside the telescope. Crimson wasn't here, and his old telescope would never work again. "You're right, Master," she said. "I won't apologize. I'll get the tower back on, even if you weren't here to ask. You'll see all the lights and come back, won't you?"

Crimson didn't respond, of course. But Bit was used to that by now. She left the roof behind, and gathered up her tools.

Bit slowed as she reached the base of the tower, hesitating in the mirrored hallway that was its main entrance. But if she used the lower entrances, she would have to navigate the city's catacombs and sewers, and she had already seen those were in poor repair.

She stopped beside the glass, looking back at her reflection. Bit was made of two types of crystal, a gray-colored base with thousands of etched circuit lines just under the surface, and a secondary set of green for her mane and tail. Those lines all connected, ultimately, to her horn. But that was less an organ and more an accessory, since of course no machine had magic of its own.

With all the tools she thought might be useful to repair a power substation, her back was heavily burdened with cloth, and the old metal clanked up against her body with every step. Bit was tougher than glass, but still she would have to be careful.

She had cracked a few times, long ago, and always been able to go to the Wizard for help to repair her. If she broke now, he might decide not to come. What would she do then?

No more second-guessing, Bit. The station is just outside.

Bit removed the heavy iron key from the ring around her belt, then leaned forward to unlock the front door. It clicked, and she rested one hoof on the security wheel, rotating it around until the door's many locks and mechanisms released.

The wheel resisted her, ice cracking and gears squealing in protest at the movement. But she turned anyway, slowly and relentlessly. Eventually ice showered to the ground like a wall of fractured crystal shards, and Bit stepped out into the frigid air.

Bit could not freeze, or else the ordinary conditions of the tower would have killed her long ago. But she could still feel the cold, and stepping outside gave her reason to appreciate the shelter of her tower. Wind carried little bits of snow with every gust, brushing up against her face and wedging into every opening and pore.

She stepped forward cautious, trying each patch of black ground before she trusted it to hold up her weight. Her hooves slipped and scrambled over the ground as soon as she moved them too quickly—crystal and ice did not mix.

If I have to come back here, maybe I can find some boots an apprentice left behind.

There was nothing outside the tower she hadn’t seen from above, but the change in perspective was nevertheless enough to make her hesitate. The tower had once been protected with a wall all the way around, and stood at the center of a compound of smaller buildings. But those had been wood instead of crystal, and none had survived the years. Most weren't withered away so much as trapped in dirty piles, half-collapsed under their own weight.

The towers had all collapsed, along with parts of the wall, though the damage to the gate was most dramatic. The pink crystal was shattered into chunks smaller than her legs, and frozen over with a layer of ice and snow. Bit slowed as she clambered over it, staring down at sections melted with strange magic, and others shattered by cannon fire.

Thousands of pony voices screamed together, chanting words she understood, but did not comprehend. Bit glanced down from a high window, and saw a mob stretching back into the city, thousands strong. Their torches filled the air with black smoke.

"I need you to get underground, Bit," Crimson said. "Go and do not question. You will stay there until you can't hear them anymore."

She stepped through the broken gate, and into the royal plaza. Even in the feeble sunlight, the plaza was a place of beauty, or it should've been. The ponies of Zircon had favored stained glass to tell their stories, in towering sculptures that would catch the light of different seasons differently, and change the narrative it told.

Mostly Bit passed piles of broken crystal, arranged around the square all oriented east-to-west. But there was one, suspended so high on stainless stilts that it had escaped destruction by the mob.

The visage of the royal family glowed up at her from the pavement, from a time that even Bit could not remember. But she recognized the red coat of Crimson on the king's right side, wearing the robes of the tower and carrying a brass scepter over his shoulder.

He seemed to smile at Bit, a smile filtered through nameless years. She touched one hoof against his mane on the floor below, whispering quietly. "I'll get the tower back, Master. You'll see."

She continued onward to the center of the promenade, where the floor changed to slats of metal over a gaping hole in the earth. She had to clamber over a low fence, meant to keep ponies away from the heat that should have radiated out from within.

There was no heat anymore, just metal bars covered with more dirty ice. Air drifted up past her through the openings in that metal, still flowing through the city's superstructure despite innumerable years. A good sign: this vent was so vast, Bit wasn't sure she ever could have cleaned it.

The maps also told her where she could find the plant's service entrance, and sure enough the door was where she expected it to be. Whoever had made all those maps was clearly a pony to be respected, they understood the importance of accuracy.

She stepped down into the gloom, descending the many steps into darkness. Of course the plant should've been well-lit, but she anticipated this failure. Bit fidgeted around in her tools, settling a lamp onto her forehead, and switching it on. The magic within was still good, despite the many intervening years. Thaumic crystal always did better than naked circuitry with time and cold to wear them down.

She passed other things in the halls, things that shouldn't be there. Ramshackle tents and makeshift accommodations pressed for space against the metal, collapsed and looted. She saw no flickers of movement within. There were frozen lumps of fur sometimes visible inside, but no ponies. She would not find any workers to reprimand for their poor stewardship.

Bit passed rooms packed with ancient spells and equipment, through ice and spiderweb and shadow, until she finally found the heart of the plant, where this smaller zircon rose up from deeper darkness below.

She dodged under and between cables and conduits, taking stock of everything she saw.

It was no wonder this waystation had fallen into such disrepair, no wonder the city was dark and cold.

Bit had work to do.

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

But that was less an organ and more an accessory, since of course no machine had magic of its own.

I'm sure that will never come up again.

Hmm. I can only imagine how the surviving scavengers, if any, will react to the plant activating again. To say nothing of what they'll think of the mare responsible for repairing it.

[KMCA]

10599077
Personally it'd depend on if I found her before or after she got it working. If after I'd be wanting to see what else I could convince her to fix to either sell or make my life easier.

[minibox]

She can't possibly understand what is going on. At least not yet. Still, it'll probably be safer to remain hidden from the populace for now.

[Venerable Ro]

Well it seems Crimson was a good sort, to his own creations at least.

And it seems our sweeperpony is branching out into electrical engineering!

[Redrover17602]

10599213
Ah, I thought all Crimson was Bit practically hallucinating her fears and justifications.

[mirmuz]

The moments where Bit's past and present are interwoven are a nice touch.
Slightly confusing and requiring a little figuring out. It's appropriate.

[Goodluckfox]

Is Bit only able to see live ponies? Dead ponies or remains don’t register for her?

[Condray]

10599396
More likely only able to comprehend live ponies. It's very possible she's never seen a dead thing nor even been introduced to the concept of death.
Once she knows about corpses or even bones I'm sure she'll have a new crisis once she combines that knowledge with the (probably cleaned up and thrown out) bones from Crimson's room

[Rawislon03]

10599396
I don’t think she has any concept of death, while she can certainly see what might be corpses in the tents she doesn’t register them as being dead ponies.

[djthomp]

Civilization must be cleaned, and Bit is just the robot? to do it.

[tsaukpaetra]

The dead must be recycled!

[FOXTrot2]

She passed other things in the halls, things that shouldn't be there. Ramshackle tents and makeshift accommodations pressed for space against the metal, collapsed and looted. She saw no flickers of movement within. There were frozen lumps of fur sometimes visible inside, but no ponies. She would not find any workers to reprimand for their poor stewardship.

Forzen lumps of fur. Unfortunately, post-mortem removes your status as a pony