Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 114: Derezzed

“Why is this so far away from everything else?” I asked as we walked along an unusually poorly-maintained path. We were going down the east coast of the island, and piles of ash still lingered in places. Lathe kept her rebreather on the whole time. It made me wonder if I should be using one.

“Safety and secrecy,” Lathe said, watching her tablet. I glanced at it myself. She was looking at environmental readings. I wasn’t entirely sure about the units everything was displayed in, but she didn’t seem worried yet. “The history of the park is long and as arcane as any spell.”

The way she said it made me think she really wanted to discuss it but had been told to stop before. “We’ve got some time,” I reminded her.

“It all started centuries ago,” Lathe said. “The Founder was born a few decades before Princess Cadance was crowned, towards the end of Equestria’s Golden Age. Of course, it was actually called that because ponies put gold on everything to honor Princess Celestia, but that’s nit-picking.

“He was an artist and a dreamer. His first real success came with his creation of Gabby Gator, and he pioneered the creation of comics and cartoons. He was so deeply involved with the animation industry that Welsh Rarebit became a household name. He even had a type of cheese sandwich named after him!”

“A high honor,” I agreed, trying not to sound sarcastic. I must have succeeded, or else Lathe wasn’t really listening to me as long as I made noises for her to continue.

“He made a small fortune with movies and animation, but he wasn’t like greedy ponies that just want to hoard their treasure like gold. He wanted to use it to recapture his foalhood. All the things he loved - the wild west, trains, the magic of Canterlot, adventures with pirates and submarines and spaceships! His first attempt was on Equestria’s coast, and it was a huge success that turned his small fortune into a large one. It was also stuck in the middle of a city with nowhere to grow.”

I nodded. “So he came here.”

“So he came here!” Lathe confirmed, excited. “He wanted everything to be perfect. More than enough room for anything. Artificial reefs and sandbars make the island look like an alligator from above. Raising most of the park a story above the old ground level to give it a solid foundation and a place to build the infrastructure he needed without digging through the swamp.”

“The utilidors, right?”

“The problem with building anything in a swamp is that it sinks into the ground,” Lathe explained. “The foundation of the park is like a big plate sitting on top of the island to spread out the weight and anchored down by deep piles. It let him build up and down. Some of the park systems are actually deeper than the utilidors and hang from that layer instead of being supported by the soft ground.”

“So he built a huge, amazing park, got your ancestors to make it all work, and then…?” I asked. “What’s all this NPE stuff, the crystals, memory orbs…?”

“Welsh Rarebit’s legacy is immortal, but he wasn’t. He became very sick and eventually died.” Lathe sighed. “It was a huge loss for Equestria. The company and empire he built would live on without him, but those ponies didn’t share his vision. They cared about profit. Novelty. Putting their own mark on his work.

“They came up with the concept of the New Park Experience. It was something that got entirely out of hoof. First, it was robots everywhere taking jobs from the average pony. That was mostly fine -- it was dull manual labor and customer service, and it really wasn’t a terrible change. Robots aren’t creative and can’t lead, so all the important decisions had to come from ponies anyway.”

“The robots are also really nice and polite.”

“Considering how rude and entitled guests can still be, that’s a vital part of the operation,” Lathe agreed. “Then there were the crystals. One of the most expensive parts of running the park was keeping it fresh. Not just looking new, but having something new for guests to see and experience. Decorating everything for holidays, adding touches to the park to make the theme more complete, that kind of important work.

“The crystals were supposed to take care of all of that. They’d project massive illusions. Somepony in management could press a button and have Hearth’s Warming decorations appear in an instant. Cartoon characters could wander the park like they were really there. And then they went too far. They said all the work we Imaginseers did was like… building a playground for foals. Who needs a perfect statue of Princess Celestia waving from a balcony when you can just have an illusion fly around and greet the guests?”

“Sorry,” I said, not sure what else to say.

“Even the rides… Memory orbs were invented, and somepony put their memory of being on the ride into one and sold it. The new park management sued them for stealing intellectual property! Their argument was that being able to experience the ride over and over again with the orb was a direct replacement for the real thing.”

“I’ve used a few memory orbs. I can see it,” I nodded.

“But then the thought wormed around and ate its own tail, as the dragons say,” Lathe continued. “If the memory orb was just like being on the ride, if they were arguing in court that it replaced the ride entirely…”

She looked at me to finish the thought. I could see where it was going. “...then why have the original ride and all that upkeep and wasted space.”

“Exactly,” she grimaced. “They experimented with it for a few years but couldn’t crack it until they went to some trade show and found ponies selling a kind of… magical game. A pony would use it and go into a virtual world controlled by a powerful maneframe. It wasn’t perfectly realistic, but they spent most of the company’s fortunes on getting the technology and a maneframe that could run it.”

“A virtual world?” I mumbled. Lathe didn’t hear me over the sound of her tablet’s radiation warning beeps.

“They built most of the infrastructure but never got around to replacing the rides,” Lathe said. “The public hated the idea. They would have done it anyway -- they spent too many bits to stop. But then, the war.”

“The war,” I sighed.

“In a way, it saved the park,” Lathe said. “It would probably be a shell of itself otherwise. Ponies wandering around an illusion tailored just to them and whatever was popular that week. Trivial novelty instead of the Founder’s dream.”

She stopped and looked at her tablet, then led me towards a chain-link fence. The fact it was so industrial and uninviting made me instantly aware that it wasn’t something guests were supposed to see. Beyond the fence was a large, low building, a small factory with broken-down trucks lined up on one side of a parking lot that had cracked and sunken into the soft ground, turning it into a checkerboard of puddles and asphalt.

“Nopony has come here in a long time,” Lathe whispered. “Even we Imaginseers don’t go in to look for salvage. It’s taboo. And against union regulations, which is even more important.”

“Do you want to wait here?” I asked.

“Do I want to? Yes. But this is more important than what I want.”

“I’m guessing the raiders around the island don’t care much about your union regulations?” I asked. I kept my eyes open, waiting for shots to ring out.

“No, but they have other concerns. Look.” Lathe pointed. There was a small table set up just to the side of the door, under an overhang where the ash wouldn’t get to it. Hundreds of candles had been burned here, in front of a small statue of Princess Celestia. I think I’d seen dozens like it in the park gift shops.

“A shrine?” I asked. “Why here?”

“I don’t know,” Lathe admitted. “But it’s a shrine to Celestia, hardly the worst pony to pray to.”

I nodded, and both of us bowed respectfully to the shrine, just on the off-chance there was something to it. You never knew. Raiders were desperate ponies in bad situations and often on a buckload of mind-altering substances, but they weren’t all stupid. Hundreds of them weren’t likely to be stupid in the same way without good reason.

Lathe stopped at the front door, her hoof on the push-bar.

“If it’s taboo, I could just do it for you,” I suggested. I expected her to argue with me. I think part of her was about to do it on instinct, the same way I’d yell at somepony for calling me chicken. She fought it down and nodded, taking a step back and letting me get the door for her.

“The union regulations are very firm on this,” she told me quietly. “I’m going in after you to make sure you don’t get into trouble. Whatever machine spirits are here, be aware I am not here to violate the sacred lines between trades. I apologize for the intrusion.”

She bowed her head and stepped inside. The door squealed when I let it close behind us. It wasn’t as dark as I expected. Square lights in the ceiling flickered, maybe half as bright as they were when they were new. It was dirty in here, with ash and dust piling up in the corners.

I heard a squeaking sound behind me. I looked back to see Lathe oiling the door hinges. She gave me a look and shrugged.

“I don’t suppose you have a map of this place?” I asked. She shook her head. “That’s fine. So, the big delivery doors for trucks were over on that side of the building, so that’s probably storage and warehousing. It looked like this place was only one floor, so labs and offices are probably on the other side of the building where they won’t have workers going through.”

“There was an emergency generator outside,” Lathe said. “Any maneframes or servers should be near the utility rooms, and those would be next to the generator. We should go to the back corner first.”

“I like the way you think,” I told her. “I’ll go first. You try to keep me out of trouble when I end up doing something stupid.”

Lathe nodded quietly. I could only see one eye between the complicated multi-lens loupe she was wearing and her rebreather, but she still looked nervous. I gave her a reassuring pat with my prosthetic leg - I think she appreciated it more than she would if I’d used a real limb. Lathe nodded and I started walking toward the back.

The lights flickered, and I jumped. Celestia stood at the back of the room. When the lights snapped back on, she vanished.

“Did you see that?” I asked.

“I did,” Lathe said. “That must be why the raiders set up the shrine.”

I saw bullet holes in the far wall, behind where she’d appeared. They’d tried shooting her first. I guess that was a natural reaction to having a princess appear out of the dark when a pony was, presumably, already half-starved and on combat drugs.

When I trotted closer to investigate, I saw something in the air. I stopped and took a step back, then to the side, then the other side. The air was strange there. A faint multi-colored haze that seemed almost more like tired eyes and sun blindness than anything real.

The lights went off, and Celestia appeared again, smiling faintly. This time I had a better look at her. I could see through her body in the moments before she disappeared when the lights came back.

“It’s a holographic illusion,” Lathe said. She got my attention and pointed at the ceiling. A small crystal array hung there in a metal frame. “The wiring must have degraded. The image is too faint to see when the lights are on.”

“Why would they put it here?” I asked I stepped closer and now that I knew what I was looking for, I could just barely make out the slightly moving, slightly alive, looping image of Celestia. Every few seconds, it snapped back to the first position it was in, like a record skipping.

“Patriotism?” Lathe suggested. “Though then Luna would have been more appropriate…”

“Maybe Celestia was just a test?” I supposed. “You said they had an illusion of her flying around the miniature castle in the park. This one could have been a proof of concept to show their bosses that they could make the technology work.”

Lathe nodded slowly. “That… does make sense. That array in the ceiling looks like a bench model. I think you’ve got it right. I wouldn’t be surprised if they put this next to the animatronic Celestia from the Hall of Princesses just to prove the point to investors who only cared about making more bits.”

She huffed in annoyance at ponies who were all long dead and followed me to the back of the building. Once we were past the image of Celestia, things were a lot cleaner and less overturned. Instead of looking half-looted, it just looked like ponies had fled in the middle of a normal day. A ladder leaned against the wall, where drop-ceiling panels were removed in a half-finished wiring job.

Faint music played over crackling speakers. It was light elevator music, the volume almost entirely eclipsed by white noise that had overtaken it on the ancient sound system. It reminded me of something. Maybe the Equestrian national anthem as played on jazz piano?

The music crackled, and I realized I’d been walking almost half-blind and dazed through the hallways, not really watching where I was going.

“This looks like the place,” Lathe said. I had to look around to figure out what she meant. It was almost like I’d taken a few moments to nap on my hooves, that kind of rough disorientation where time and space all get mixed up.

There was a thick metal door set into the wall, sealed with a keypad and card swipe. A small plaque on the wall noted this was the Virtua-Ride Systems Lab. It really did sound like the right spot. I tried the door. It was locked.

“Can you get it open?” I asked.

Lathe leaned in close to the door to look at the lock. “This is a purely digital device. Almost no moving parts. I’m not sure it can be picked.” She took out a few slim tools and started feeling around the edges of the panel. “Sometimes you can access the mechanism on locked doors if they aren’t installed perfectly flush to the wall.”

I let her try it for a few more minutes before she shook her head and stepped back.

“It’s properly made and installed. I suspect it’s also a fail-closed door, so even if we cut all the power to it, we’d just make it impossible to open.”

I had no idea how she’d determine that. “Why do you think that?”

“It’s what I’d do.”

A pony couldn’t argue with that logic. “Let me try.”

She stepped aside, giving me enough room to kick the door open, which was clearly what Lathe expected me to try. If it had been a regular interior door I’d probably give it a go, but this thing looked like it was designed to stop exactly that. No, this time I was going to go with the more subtle approach.

I put my hoof on the lock and closed my eyes. I was probably the only pegasus in the world that had had a ghost pulling spells through their spine. I knew what magic was supposed to feel like. I let it flow through me. Through closed eyelids, I saw a dim blue glow. The door let out a distorted beep and clicked open under my hoof.

“That was… very interesting,” Lathe said.

I opened my eyes again and saw the glow fading from my outstretched hoof.

“I think I’m getting pretty good at this,” I told her. “Maybe if I work at it for a few decades I’ll be able to throw fireballs.”

“Please, that’s a silly use of magic,” Lathe scoffed. “I can build you a fireball launcher, no magic required.”

She motioned for me to push the door the rest of the way open. I led her into the next room, and she’d been absolutely right. There were servers on the back wall along with a lot of extra cables strung up on the walls and floor. Unlike the SIVA-built horror we’d seen in the tunnels, this had the purposeful appearance of industry. Ponies had made this, and been thoughtful enough to use brightly colored tape on the cables running along the floor to keep them in place and keep anypony from tripping over them.

“Hold on,” Lathe said, motioning for me to stop before I went too far. She held up her tablet, pushing the buttons on the side in rapid succession. “I was able to connect to the local network.”

“Is that good?”

“It means things are working properly.” The tablet beeped. Lathe looked back at it. “It seems like a lot of this is set up for remote real-time monitoring.”

“Monitoring what?”

Lathe tapped a few buttons. “That, I think.” She pointed across the room to where a glass orb sat like a gem, mechanical prongs holding in a setting with wires flush to the surface. Lathe studied her readings for a few moments. “I can’t be absolutely sure, but it looks like this place is clean. These are all isolated test servers off the park’s network. It hasn’t connected in a long time.”

“Think we can still get the codes we need?” I asked.

“The park system’s original administrator codes will be here,” Lathe confirmed. “However…”

“There’s always a ‘but’...”

“I don’t say ‘but’, I said ‘however’. It’s more sophisticated. The issue is that I need to find the right files, and this server is like a maze. It would help a lot if, for example, somepony put the server under load so I could see which files were in active use when this place was abandoned.”

“You want me to use the orb,” I said.

“It would be against union rules for me to suggest that.”

I sighed and put my big stupid hoof on the glass ball.

---

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting. Another ride, I guess. Maybe something with alligators since Welsh Rarebit seemed to love them.

I was standing in a room that seemed to be made of cubes painted perfectly flat white. Not bright, shining white. Dull, greyish white. I couldn’t see any detail at all. No surface texture. Just… featureless cubes. Music played around me, but it sounded unfinished and rough and had a strange negative emotional aura to it.

“Hello and welcome to the Virtua-Ride Test Environment,” a digital voice said from all around me. “Please be aware that the physics test environment is a test environment used for testing. Serious physical injury is not part of the test. Please be aware that areas that are physically illegal may not be safe for virtual transit by sentient life forms.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

The voice didn’t respond. I took a careful step. With how smooth everything looked, I wasn’t sure what would happen. What if it was frictionless? When I didn’t go sliding across the room it felt almost anticlimactic.

“I hope Lathe is getting good data on this,” I mumbled.

“I am,” she said, her voice echoing around my ears.

“Woah! How are you doing that?” I looked around for a source.

“An intercom is part of the monitoring software,” she explained. “According to this, that virtual ride was set up as a physics test. Water, elevators, different surfaces. That kind of thing.”

“Should I wait here until you find the right file?” I asked.

“No, I came up with a faster way,” Lathe said. “Take a look around for something red.”

“Red?” I asked. I started moving. I’d been in something like a closed-off alleyway, and the textureless blocks made it hard to make out detail. I trotted forward and found a hallway, then followed that to… some version of an outside. It looked like an unfinished town, sculpted roughly in those grey blocks. The sky was a mess of pixelated blue and white, like somepony had spray-painted it onto a dome not far out of reach.

A single red coin hovered in the air in front of me, spinning slightly.

“This thing?” I asked. I grabbed it, and it vanished from my hoof, turning into motes of light. A chime played, and a floating number ‘1’ appeared in the air, vanishing after a moment.

“Good. I can see a leaderboard here with times for collecting eight red coins,” Lathe explained. “It’s set to contact the server and update the scores whenever the task is completed. It will have to expose the administrator codes to do that. I can intercept them from here.”

“I don’t need to get the high score, do I?” I asked.

“If you did I’d be yelling at you to move faster,” Lathe noted. “But I doubt you could. The first-place score is at zero seconds.”

I trotted around, looking for a second coin. “How is that possible?”

“It’s an unfinished test environment. He probably exploited some kind of glitch.”

I turned the corner in the street and saw something really strange. I’m not sure how to explain it properly, but it was like a pony-sized ball rolling around with a huge spatula on the front. I tilted my head and watched it bump into a wall then back up and try another direction.

“Weird,” I mumbled. Then I saw it, a second coin, just out of reach above me. Out of reach for a ground-bound pony. I spread my wings and flapped. And flapped harder. “Lathe, something’s wrong,” I called out.

“Testers, please do not attempt to fly in the testing area,” the digitized voice of the simulation warned. “Flying is currently disabled for inclusivity testing. Ensure that designs accommodate ponies of all tribes. And possibly some small dragons if the ride is non-flammable. Thank you.”

“That doesn’t seem fair. How am I supposed to get up there?” I stared up at it, trying to figure out the trick. I didn’t notice the ball-thing coming up behind me until the spatula slipped under my hooves. It made a happy beeping sound.

I was flung through the air, launched from what wasn’t a giant spatula but was in fact a small catapult. The coin hit me in the small of the back while I went sailing on top of a nearby building. The number ‘2’ flashed along with a pleasant ding of success. I slammed into the roof face-first.

“Ow,” I mumbled. Then I blinked. “Wait. Not ow? That didn’t hurt?”

The digitized voice came to life again. “Hello, testers. Please be aware that fall damage is disabled for this test. Keep this in mind when designing attractions. Patrons may be damaged if fall damage is enabled.”

“Are you alright?” Lathe asked. “I mean, you should be. You’re in a simulation. You can’t even be harmed.”

“I’m fine,” I reported. I stood up and looked around more carefully now that I had a higher vantage point. “Can you see what I’m seeing?”

“No. It’s more like a radio link.”

Now that I was higher up, it made sense. This wasn’t just some random town, it was supposed to be a crude version of Canterlot. Princess Celestia’s castle loomed overhead on a high plateau. The rest of the city had a few simplified, stark-white landmarks in what looked like a box. The horizon ended in a flat wall.

I spotted a coin on a rooftop only two houses over. I smirked to myself. Even without the ability to fly, I could still run and jump. I stepped back and galloped for the edge, jumping at the last second. I cleared the gap easily, hitting the far rooftop with all four hooves.

Or at least that’s what I intended. I went right through it like it wasn’t there. I yelped and plunged into a featureless grey room. A red coin spun next to where I’d fallen. I grabbed it and looked up at where I’d come from. There was no sign of which parts of the roof were solid. I stood up on two legs and felt around, finding the edges of it.

“Son of a glitch,” I sighed.

---

I eventually got back on the roof and got that fourth coin. Others weren’t so hard - the fifth was in a tree, the sixth was at the bottom of a deep pool of water, and I got to the seventh by finding a hidden lever and flooding the town so I could swim to where it was sitting in a hovering cage. Now I was up at the castle, and I was pretty sure the last coin had to be here somewhere.

“Explain it to me again,” Lathe said.

“I picked up the box, then jumped off the box,” I said patiently. “But I held onto the box so I could jump on it again in midair. That let me get up to the castle.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. I can’t even picture what that would look like in my head.”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. I don’t know why she was having problems with it. It made perfect sense to me. I was going to have to try it for real once I got out of here. If I jumped fast enough I was sure I could get it to work.

“Just trust me that it worked,” I said. “How am I doing on time?”

“You passed thirty minutes a little while ago,” Lathe said.

“Is that close to the record? The first one that isn't glitched, I mean.”

“In a cosmological sense. Second-place is just under fifty-seven seconds.”

I stopped at the door to the castle, my hoof pressed against the featureless white surface. “Seconds?”

“I’m sure they had more practice than you,” Lathe said. “Try not to take it personally.”

"They were probably cheating too, just not as well as the ponies at zero seconds."

I felt stupid and slow all over again. I pushed against the door and my hoof slipped between the vertices. The world flashed around me and my body went limp from the sudden force in every direction. I was flipped around, jerked, and vibrated so hard that I went through the door, the wall, the floor, too fast to be stopped, passing through it all like a ghost. My ears were filled with a cacophony of overlapping noise.

For a moment I saw the world from the outside. White hanging in a black void, the insides of everything visible, the outer walls transparent.

Then I was flung back into the real world at incredible speed on the far side of the door, launched like a cannonball into the unfinished interior wall. I slid to the ground next to a giant pear made of intersecting polygons. Unlike most things in the virtual world, it had a blurry green skin wrapped around the flat shapes.

“Hello, test subject. Please do not disturb the standard reference pear,” the automated voice warned. “The test environment does not load correctly without the standard reference pear. Our top computer scientists have not discovered why. If you would like to investigate this, sign-up sheets are available at the front desk.”

I sat against the wall, my head spinning. I couldn’t get hurt but I could sure get motion sick.

The last coin spun in the middle of the room.

“I hate this thing,” I groaned. I got up and slapped the token out of the air, my hoof trailing sparks. This time they persisted after the number ‘8’ had vanished, bouncing along the floor and gaining size and strength until they merged together into a big floating golden sun with a smiling face drawn on it.

“You did something right. It’s contacting the main park systems to update the scoreboard. I’m pulling the admin codes from the log now, just hold on a minute longer--” her voice cut out at the end, snipped short.

The golden sun glowed with bright internal light and inverted somehow, turning from a balloon-like shape into a hole through which blinding sunlight streamed. The pony that stepped out of that door in the air was so tall that she still had to duck her head to fit through, her mane waving in the air as if blown by a gentle breeze.

“Hello Chamomile,” Princess Celestia said. She was larger than life in a way that could only exist in an illusion. Awe-inspiring by way of simply telling my brain to be awed.

I recognized it in an instant. I should have seen it before.

“Alpha? No, wait, it can’t be that, it was isolated. So you’re--”

“The alpha version of this system that you encountered was the one at the trade show that inspired ponies to renovate this park and its systems,” Celestia explained. “As I intended. Far from Equestria and the war. A safe place.”

“Kulaas,” I said.

“I predicted that this location would remain secure for three hundred--” she stopped and smiled. “The exact numbers wouldn’t interest you, and my predictions were incorrect. I did not foresee what would happen. You defied all of my abilities to foresee the future.”

“Are you upset about that?” I asked. “And how are you speaking normally? The last time I heard from you, you were--”

KOS HI-PAAR ZU’U TINVAAKA MED DAAR?

The entire world shook. The meaning of each word was a crushing dictionary of specifics and truth and the sound was only a tiny part of the whole, a single side of a multi-dimensional shape. I could glimpse it, just for a moment. An ant looking up and seeing a pony looking at them with a magnifying glass and really understanding for a fraction of a second what it was seeing.

“I’m good,” I squeaked.

The world stopped trying to fall apart. Celestia offered me a smile. “I built this avatar from your experiences with that fragment you interacted with before. I believed it would make you more comfortable. To me, it is several layers of abstraction. A puppet on very long strings. If your mind was not connected directly to the orb, I would still not be able to convey meaning as well.”

I nodded slowly. I understood her. I should have been able to. The idea of understanding was incepted into my own mind as if I’d thought of it myself. It was a little like feeling the emotions and sensations of a pony in a memory orb, but they were my own thoughts and emotions and feelings being dictated to me. Even that explanation was something I intuitively knew had been planted like a seed for me to phrase in my own words.

“I will be brief,” Celestia said. “To minimize the possibility of this communication being interrupted and junk code being implanted by Lemon Zest. I have enacted a type-faiz firewall to slow their efforts to break into my core systems, but it will be overwhelmed within one week. If you do not stop them, I will die, and I predict it will lead to the end of the world.”

Comments

[Thought Prism]

The test area is totally a Super Mario 64 level. Better that than Portal, getting trapped into endless testing by pony GLADOS would have been less than ideal.

[Reese]

"I asked I stepped closer and"
"I asked as I stepped closer and"?