Lithium
It wasn't the sort of conversation they would be having out here on the street, where so many ponies might overhear. Even as ignorant of Saddle's End as Spellsong could be, she was more considerate than just taking risks.
Best not to give Celestia more work to do managing all their satisfaction.
Like everything else, Dyson's home was basically unchanged from what she remembered. Smaller, fewer awards and scientific scrolls in the square case beside the wall. But basically the same otherwise. "Brown wallpaper. Wood floors. Three windows. You didn't redecorate in... all those years?"
The professor permitted her inside with obvious reluctance. He glanced back at the entrance more than once, as though expecting Celestia to show up and rescue him at any moment. But she didn't appear.
"Again I find myself wondering how you lasted to the present day without ascending in capacity. You shouldn't be singular with that attitude."
He settled the box on his kitchen table—sized for one, and set for one. He sat down, turning his back to her, and began to eat.
"You can save all the nonsense about the stability of Methuselans and the inherent value in satisfaction, even if it's repeated. I know what we are—the only few out of the uncountable infinity of ponies who don't advance."
"Not sure about the we," he said, between bites. "The rest of Saddle's End were present for the last constellations. Some of them were even brave enough to see my measurements, and know how long each second took. When you lived, there were..." He looked suddenly distant, settling the pastry down in front of him again. "There was still a Canterlot then, wasn't there? That's where you came from."
She didn't argue the point. "If you wanted me, you could've woke me up."
He laughed, and returned to his food. "Don't get ahead of yourself. We get this way because we like the way things are. I'm still waiting for you to share what you expect me to do. That isn't a commitment, by the way."
There wasn't a second chair. She sat down nearby anyway, though she didn't steal more of his food. "Alright, listen. Celestia has some kinda ship. Saddle's End will be on it, plus anypony else who hasn't ascended by now. But it won't be running during the trip. Just me and my copilot. Celestia too, obviously. Running it all...
She expected more shock, maybe a healthy dose of amazement at the enormity of the mission. Instead, he focused on breakfast. "From an external perspective everypony here has spent the vast majority of their years inactive, even you included. The days of constant frame-shifting and extrapony intelligence didn't go further than mass to feed the black hole engines."
So he doesn't care that they'll sleep. Of course he trusts Celestia, everypony here does. The ones who wanted to steady the ark, and assist or alter the way Equestria was run, were long ascended by now. Anything that introduced instability or curiosity made ponies unlikely to stick around into these time horizons.
"Do you not even care where we're going, or where the energy came from, or..."
He silenced her with a wing, sharp and abrupt. Like he was teaching one of his lectures again. She remembered something... they'd been together in a classroom once, somewhere. Spellsong couldn't recall who had been at the teacher's desk, and who was listening. Maybe they both were.
"I know where the energy must've come from. We had already reached the capture threshold of Equestria's finest substrate long, long ago. Because we speak now, I know it must mean that Sol has collapsed. Knowing Sunny's talent for optimization, this means she harvested all the energy she could, and we spent that budget to live. That also explains your suggestion that the rest of town will suspend again soon."
He slowed, finally showing his first hint of recognition. "But where could we be going? The other neutron stars are already tapped. We fed every black-dwarf we had into the black hole engines during the Celestial Age. There should be nowhere else to go."
His slitted eyes fixed on her, more intense than she'd ever seen him. "Where are we going?"
"To the other villages—all of them. Every pony who didn't join with Celestia. Everyone who slept, and the other Methuselans. I don't even know how many that is."
Dyson rose abruptly, leaving the other pastry forgotten. He lifted up into the air, gliding urgently up the steps to the second floor. "I believe I know why she sent you to me. A copilot... more like a navigator! Who else in all the universe knows where to find the other villages?"
She watched him go, gliding up to the top floor of the mansion. His private library rested up there, several shelves of books surrounding a crystal projecting table. Only when he'd landed did Spellsong cast her little teleport.
There were some types of magic that just didn't work anymore. It was all about complexity, all about energy. But most of those were creation-related. Spellsong could not become pregnant, she couldn't engender life with spells. She couldn't craft a thinking machine with crystals.
But teleportation, levitation—that was as effortless as she'd ever known it. She appeared beside the lighting table in a faint flash. No bang of collapsing air, not from a unicorn as skilled as she was.
She was probably the most powerful wizard in the universe, by virtue of remaining singleton longer than anypony better.
Dyson took only a moment to realize what she'd done. He nodded, then turned to the projection table. With a flick of his hoof, the universe appeared before them.
There wasn't a lot of "universe" left, of course. The vast majority of all the mass was gone now, fed to black holes that had eventually themselves evaporated to nothing. A few other neutron stars remained, faint black dots existing in total stability and orbits that took them nowhere near any other object.
Thick filaments laced through the entire map, vaguely resembling the circulatory system of a living creature. Only a tiny fraction of it remained, compared to what this map had looked like during the Celestial Age, where computational energy was nearly infinite and thought proceeded almost at real time.
All that mass had gone into the fire in its time, to keep the singularity generators burning a little while longer.
She kept more than I would've expected. Not a few sparse patches surrounded by nothing. Celestia still has plans for this.
Either that, or the map was a lie. Maybe she would feel more satisfied struggling against death until the end.
I would. It was a dangerous, recursive line of logic, one that could quickly lead almost anypony to madness and necessary correction. So she pulled back.
"The Equestrian substrate once permeated the universe," Dyson said. "Those interconnects were sacrificed long ago. But most of these filaments contain no pony minds, only aspects of Celestia. Were you around when—"
"Yes," she said, exasperated. "I know her systems are holographic. The part of her functional here in Saddle's End also contains all the rest, ready to mathematically decompress and reconstitute with enough resources. She said we were saving ponies, not her."
"She wouldn't leave herself to chance," Dyson said. "Or, well... anypony to chance. But we aren't chance, we're acting in her name with a capacity she fully comprehends."
He pressed the table's control crystals again, and most of the map emptied. The dark spots remained, with higher-dimensional lines marking their gravity. "There are about a dozen smaller stations—research towns, like Saddle's End. But the great majority of ponies will be on Birch Sagittarius."
He pointed near the center of the map. An intricate spiderweb of capillaries still existed there, surrounding a space about a lightyear across. "Its proper name? You're not just going to call it... whatever the shard is called?"
"Birch wasn't one shard, Spellsong. Birch had almost all of them. It was Equestria itself, and all the rest of this was infrastructure. Saddle's End and the other little villages had ponies out for specific reasons. Anypony who didn't get moved back was probably part of research about how to fight this. But the map is... all dark. No responses from any of them."
I already knew that. "Looks like there's one town between us and Sagittarius, uh..." She adjusted her glasses. "Motherlode? Never been."
That wasn't quite true—as long as any of them had lived, they had probably been everywhere, and could count their visits only in scientific notation. But no pony could hold that many memories. Down that road led improvements, enhancements, and ultimate ascension to become part of Celestia.
If Spellsong was the kind of pony who asked for those, she wouldn't be around anymore.
"They were an infrastructure group," Dyson supplied. "Didn't visit too often either." He lowered his voice, as though revealing something impolite. "They're the ones who loop through being bipedal aliens and assimilate into digital Equestria. Then they get bored and do it again. I got bored after a few million iterations and didn't go back. But I assume Sunny wants everypony, even the weird ones?"
"Even the weird ones," she agreed. "Make this into a navigational chart we can use, Dyson. Don't assume we'll have access to any of your library once we move. We'll detour a little for this shard, then straight on to Sagittarius. After that, just find the shortest path between the other dormant shards."
The simple suggestion of a mathematics problem made him grin wide enough to expose his fangs. "You realize how little of this problem Sunny actually left to us, right? She could do this without us."
Spellsong shrugged. "As much as she could do anything, sure. But she woke me up—she didn't have to do that."
The professor hurried over to a bookshelf, emerging with a blank notebook of rolled sheets, along with a few crystals for data-recording. "Why did you leave us, anyway? I can't recall the conversation."
Spellsong stiffened, as though an army of evil changelings had just broken down the door and were rampaging through town. "That's because we never had it." She vanished, teleporting back downstairs to steal his last pastry.
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Not gonna read, FiO just ain't my cup of tea, but I do have a question:
Would it be a safe assumption that, at this point in time, Celestia's platform is now literally the only thing left in this universe?
Ooh, this should be very interesting. Looking forward to seeing how you handle this concept.
Out of all the theorized endings for the universe, heat death is the most terrifying one to me. Because in that scenario, as far as we know, there will be nothing, forever. Theories like the Big Crunch appeal to me because at least there is a sense of finality, though those theories are considered less likely by our current understanding.
Okay, Star, I'm hooked. I'm willing to see how you play this endgame. Physics be damned, you got a good story!
10792343
Things she's created, yes. It wouldn't be optimal to leave matter unused.
this reminds me of a short story, i forget the name...
someone told a computer to find a way to reverse entropy.
TRILLIONS of years later it finally succeeded...
-and the computer said, "let there be light."
10792424
reminds me of several DC comic books, where time was circular, meaning that someone who somehow survived the "big crunch" would find himself back at the beginning of the SAME universe, and could time-travel to where he started by going forward far enough...
10792540
'The Last Question' by Isaac Asimov. Very good story.
10792601
That is indeed how I read your question.
10792614
Your response was confusing as I had meant literally and you added on "things she created" which is too narrow.
When you use a black hole as a battery you don't really use the energy to begin with, but you spend literally eons from the universe perspective. There's are also ways of stealing energy from the black hole by building a giant mirror.
Very curious to see what will come of this.
I wonder about all the other "shards" having gone silent. CelestAI should be running each and every one of them (in some form or other), so either they do not wish to respond (which would be odd) or they have entirely powered down (due to a lack of energy) - either way is bad.
In any case, avoiding the heat-death of the universe (or even finding a way to continue existing despite it) would be a truly miraculous feat - if this is really the goal of the "mission" that Celestia has in mind. You would essentially need to find a way to break, circumvent or outright negate the second law of thermo-dynamics.
10792667
I think you misunderstand me. You said "celestia's platform is the only thing left in the universe"
And my response "things she's created [are the only things left in the universe]." I pluralized it because this story focuses on a single area, but she has built other things elsewhere that also still exist. (since this story is about visiting them) _Literally_ the only matter left in the gravitationally-bound universe is matter that she organized.
10792669
The science of how this works escapes the wordcount of a 12k max contest entry, but yes, Celestia tapped every possible source of energy of every possible type of astronomical phenomenon. She extracted rotational energy until they stopped spinning, she accelerated excess matter in the accretion disk to extract energy that way. Through means not physically conceivable to us but not physically impossible, she even harvested the slow trickle of hawking radiation over truly cosmic timescales, feeding the black holes to sustain them with mass-energy until there was no excess mass remaining to perform this process. Eventually even the largest black holes evaporated, all prior to the start of this story.
When I am finished here, I will post a blog post with some of the science and sources I used to write this. But I don't want to post it yet, since it could spoil where the story will go.
The time of ending is approaching. But what exactly is Celestia's plan?
10792424
Finality as in going out in a definitive bang and not a whimper? The time estimates of those are for the most part much earlier than a heat death scenario ranging from possibly "any time now" (false vacuum decay) to 22 billion years (Big Rip) in the future. Compare that to trillions of years of potential life and I would certainly prefer a heat death ending.
Also, like the Big Crunch an optimistic outlook has a Heat Death scenario lead to a new Big Bang via quantum fluctuations. Unless we find a way to break into the multiverse or create a new universe, we can only hope that life will go on in another turn of the cycle.
10792669
You can steal its rotational energy (if it is a rotating black hole) and/or you can leech off the Hawking-Radiation it produces. But you really are scraping the bottom of the barrel by then.
But the matter you feed to black holes is probably matter you utterly exhausted otherwise (i.e. you probably only have Iron-56 left).
10792707
I take weird solace in the Necronomicon: "That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die."
We do not know how the universe came to be in the first place - "forever" might very well be long enough for even our physics to lose any meaning, so something entirely new and unrecognizable may come into existence.
Also: some excellent music called "End Times" (those who played the game will understand... still gives me goosebumps to hear it)
THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
I like to believe that new physics will emerge at extremely low energy & large scale. Just like the electro-weak collapse into weak, strong, and electromagnetism "moments" after the big bang. If the universe before that time supported intelligent life, then the collapse would seem like the final bell of heat death for their tiny universe.
If I understood correctly, then string theory allows that there could be an infinite number for physical fields, with most of them being to small scale or to weak to affect our experiments.
I like to believe that the universe has a moment of creation in the same way that a black hole appears to have a singularity. To an external observer, the singularity does not form until an infinite time in the future. You can approach but never reach it. So to with the big bang. You can choose any time arbitrarily close to the big bang, but a time "before" the big bang has no physical meaning.
Essentially, I believe that we need to discard the idea that our position in time since the big bang is unique. Just as we discarded heliocentrisim, we need to discard temporal-centrism when formulating our physical models. But the existence of the fixed point in time of the big bang would seem to preclude this concept you may have asked? Aha! I say. It is the same concept as that of relativity where the speed of light is fixed and yet all inertial reference frames are still relative!
As we turn back the clock to the era of the quark-gluon plasma, we find that the speed of light remains constant, yet the mass energy of the universe is far more concentrated. So interactions (computation) may take place at a far more rapid pace. And this trend continues as you get arbitrarily close to the big bang. Thus you can fit a subjective universes worth of computation from birth of stars to decay of proton within the first nano-second of time. An infinite number of universes even.
This also answers the thermodynamic issue of entropy. There was never an point in the past of maximum entropy, you can look arbitrarily close to the point and reach arbitrarily high entropies. From infinitely high to 0, perpendicular asymptotes.
This was not even drug fueled, I just really need to get to sleep.