• Published 24th Dec 2020
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Anemoia - Starscribe



Bit is the first of her kind, a crystal machine shaped like a pony. For lifetimes she served, until her master was long dead. Instead of fall dormant like the other machines, she snapped. Suddenly, she could choose. She did.

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Chapter 4: Moonstone

Bit's repair was more complicated than just flipping a switch and turning the power back on. Had it been so easy, she had no doubt that Zircon would've cleaned itself up.

The biggest difficulty Bit faced in those early days was that somepony had tried to fix the plant, someone that had no clue how it worked. She found cables severed, machinery crushed, and vital systems configured incorrectly. Some that were otherwise working fine had been stripped for parts, leaving mechanisms standing barren.

Bit kept herself a running list of what was wrong, on what started as a single notepad but quickly ballooned out of control.

At least there was no fluctuation of light to dark and light again to distract her from her work. It didn't matter how long the task required, so long as she could accomplish it. The tower would be getting dirty in her absence—but it would be far easier to keep it clean once the power was back on. If she kept traveling back every time something went wrong, she would never succeed.

Eventually she had hundreds of pages of notes, perfect illustrations of each broken part all the way down to the smallest component. In a way, it was no different from cleaning her tower: thousands of panes connected to larger windows, and eventually whole rooms. Only when each was finished would the tower be ready for Crimson to return.

Once confident in her analysis, Bit sliced her notebooks into pages, reordering each from greatest problem to smallest. She didn't need to hold the whole picture in her head anymore, now that she was confident in her initial assessment. Then it was a simple matter of making each individual repair.

She got through her first few hundred pages in an eyeblink. She flipped switches the right way, used spare parts she had found, and stripped away redundancies to leave a single functional system behind.

But then supplies began to run thin—the plant hadn't just been abandoned, but actively ransacked. Like her tower, it was supposed to have a vast supply of redundancy.

"The Zircon is the beating heart of our world,” Crimson said long ago, leading her as close as any pony could stand to that massive pillar of clear crystal. “It's the only reason Equestria hasn't beaten us. It's our survival and our freedom and our independence. Nothing in all the world is more important than protecting it."

As usual, Bit hadn't understood him. She dodged around the fence, onto metal grates that glowed faintly red with radiated heat. She felt the warmth through crystal hooves as dimly as she felt cold, and so she could cross all the way over to it. She didn't touch it, though—the one thing she never dared. "I don't see what's so special!" she shouted back. "Just looks like a rock to me!"

He gestured for her to return—ponies were staring at them, more with every moment. Well, mostly they stared at him. They avoided looking at Bit as much as they could, as though she was hurt somehow. She'd never understood it. "It isn't a rock," Crimson said, as soon as she was back on solid ground. "The Zircon is a construct of our ancient ancestors. We don't even understand why they built it, or what they could achieve with it. But none of that matters—without it, we freeze."

"Because of the windigos," Bit supplied helpfully. "The land beyond the city is too cold. Ponies worse than me would freeze."

"Not worse." He patted her gently on the shoulder, then jerked his hoof back, hissing. "Just less thermally conductive. I can't make more of us like you until I can understand your flaws."

"Have I made a mistake?" She turned to him, looking up at those wise, violet eyes. "If I have failed you somehow, I will do everything I can to learn why. I'll fix it, I'll be better!"

He patted her again, more gently this time. "No, Bit. It was never anything you did wrong. It's more fundamental than that, outside your control. Until I fix it, you will never understand. Once I do, you won't need to ask."

She could not travel to his portrait anymore to consult for advice, so Bit climbed the steps outside to speak to his projection instead. She watched it change as the year wore on, gradually getting older, taller, leaner. For a single day, another pony appeared beside him—then she was gone again, and he transformed fully into her Wizard. The last few days of the year showed the master wizard fully wrapped in his robes, with a mighty scepter of zircon levitating in his magic and a craftspony's hammer in his belt.

Then the year turned over, and he returned to a colt, looking bored in the projection between two living parents instead of one.

This child was still him, somehow—another version, imperfectly realized. She did not know it, so she stopped consulting after that. The work took far too much time.

Sometimes she had to spend many hours on a single page, breaking down the nested requirements. The largest of these represented reconnecting the thermocouple with the Zircon Spire, which had been sliced cleanly through at the junction. She couldn't just stick metal between them and call it good—the manual had been clear about performance requirements, or else the bond would fail as soon as it was made.

It meant her first return to the tower, which had indeed continued steadily gathering dust. After resisting a minor personal crisis and hiding her brooms and brushes away so she wouldn't see them, Bit found one of the workshop's machines, the same one that spun perfect lattices of zircon for thaumic bonds.

She had never touched the machine, except to occasionally leave a glass of tea for the apprentice working it. But Bit dug up the manual, then spent another age searching for charged crystals among the tower's storage. They still had some, if she was willing to travel deep enough into the catacombs. Anything too high or too easy to loot had already been stolen.

Of course she could've done far more with the tower if the power was still on, but that was exactly the problem. The reason that her Wizard hadn't yet returned. But she could fix that, and once she did...

Then Crimson would come back, and everything in her world would make sense again. Then Bit could go back to just cleaning the tower, and leave her master to concern himself with the parts of the world she didn't understand.

She completed the thermocouple, after only a few minor failures. Bit took no rest—she didn't sleep, didn't stop to recover in the other ways that ponies needed. She was not one of them, so not subject to their weaknesses. She worked through her checklist one page at a time, until eventually she had moved every single page from her “open” pile to the “finished” pile.

She gathered up the whole list again, started from the beginning, and reviewed. She had to get to the bottom of all her pages, to be sure that nothing had changed, or maybe her understanding of the machines described had grown as she took them apart and put them back together. In a few cases, there were minor corrections to be made.

She would not start until her task was done, exactly as it should be.

Just like that, it was. She ran out of pages the second time, and at last it was time to work. She clambered up the stone steps to the control room, which was now entirely cleared of makeshift accommodations and the tools of looters long-gone. She stood before a control panel, which would mechanically connect the central thermocouple with the Zircon Spire.

"What are you looking at, Master?" Bit asked, peeking her nervous way into the unicorn's private workspace. It wasn't the first time she had intruded there, though it was the first time in quite a long while.

The unicorn stooped over the largest of his design-screens, a surface that showed images in three-dimensions when looked at from a certain angle. He moved his hooves through that space, or sometimes levitated tools to draw for him. But today, he only stared.

The image depicted there was Bit herself, or at least a tiny version of her. It broke her down into systems and slices, each one thaumically explained the same as any other machine. The master's hornwriting glowed in that space, denser than any of the books on his shelf. But there were tears in his eyes. "The most beautiful and impossible thing that ponies ever created," he said.

Once again the master proved that for all his wisdom, he was not infallible. Bit was neither beautiful nor impossible. "You're confused again," she said. "The medic says you need to spend more time in the lower tower. Your quarters are too cold in winter for your joints."

"It's true." He looked up, finally seeming to see her. He wiped at his eyes with a cloth, then rose to shaking hooves. He did that now, though she still wasn't entirely certain why. Faulty joints, like the medic thought? "If I go downstairs, I won't be able to study. The answers I'm looking for are here, not there."

"You should tell me what you're looking for," Bit told the control room. "I will search tirelessly until I place it in your hooves."

"Okay, sweetie." He patted her on the shoulder, though the gesture seemed to be leaning on her for support as much as expressing some pony emotion. "A pony who lived in a crystal tower once set out on a long journey. He knew the trip would be long, so he packed every spell he could think of. Everywhere he traveled he fought for survival, driving off packs of furious Equestrians and resisting the bitter cold with every hoofstep.

“Eventually he had walked around all the world, and he found a tower. It was dark and empty, undisturbed since his departure. He climbed its many steps, though he was so worn and beaten from his trip that he barely made it to the top. Finally he crested the last step, and found what he was looking for."

Bit waited, ears perked expectantly for the rest of the riddle. But none came. Crimson hobbled past her, out the open door. He began his long trek down the tower's many stairs. "I don't understand," she called after him. "Why didn't he find what he was looking for in the tower? You said that was where he started."

"It was," Crimson said.

"And nopony else had visited..." Bit continued. "There must be an error in your recollection. Are you sure there weren't additional characters?"

Crimson stopped, looking back at her with an expression of deadly confidence. "When you know not just what he found, by why he found it—tell me." He lowered his voice, whispering to himself as he walked. It was something Crimson did more and more, as his body grew strange. "I'm not sure I can find it for you, Bit. All these years searching, and I haven't made a single mistake. Maybe the king was right."

Bit looked back at her reflection in the control-room glass, cleaned to a sparkling shine. Through it, dim in the space beyond, was a zircon plant, the one that powered her tower.

Bit still didn't know what Crimson meant, but she knew one thing. The king was wrong, just like he'd been wrong about everything. She could practically see him there, wrapped in regal robes and glowering up at her.

"Your experiment is a waste of time, son. The more of your years you squander, the more you fail to see the only world that ever mattered. Find a quiet closet somewhere to lock it away, and return to your duties."

Bit pressed both hooves against the lever and shoved with all her might, crushing the king's face beneath the knob. His complaints fell silent, and in their place, the power plant roared to life.

Author's Note:

And that's where daily chapters end. The point is always to catch up to where Patreon was when the cover got made. Sorry things will slow down a little from here on--but otherwise, I could only write one story at once. Still, I hope you'll come along for the rest of the ride.