The Splitting Image

by Rocket Lawn Chair

The Splitting Image

***

...And then she existed, without warning or realization, she slipped through a medicine-white curtain to progress with the next phase of her experiment.

She had memories that were real and came upon her without suddenness or violence. They were simply inside her head. By all empirical evidence noted—the sensation of her violet-streaked mane against her neck, the gentle flow of air passing through her lungs when she breathed, and her extensive memory of experiences, magical facts, and equations—she had existed for a very long time.

Yet, intuitively, in the very bottom of her gut, the soles of her hooves, the quivering fiber of her being that she hesitated to call a soul, she knew she had not existed a few moments ago.

“Welcome,” said Twilight. The other Twilight was sitting on a stool on the other side of a pane of glass that floated a foot above the ground.

New Twilight approached the stool in the center of the confined amphitheater. The Twilight in front of her wore the same expression of nervous pleasantness.

“There’s two of us,” said New Twilight plainly, but not feeling alarmed at this. In fact, she knew everything was going to be okay. This had been planned.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” Other Twilight said, though judging by her perfunctory tone, she also knew the words were unnecessary. “But you are correct; there are two of us now. I came before you.”

New Twilight nodded, prodding at her mind, delicately leafing through each file of fresh memory that had been neatly placed inside her new head. All felt exactly where they should be, pieces going all the way back to her foalhood. Old memories that tasted new, in the same way an old monochrome photograph feels when it’s been...

“Copied. You copied yourself.”

“Yes.”

New Twilight’s expression split from—she decided to call her other self “Old Twilight” in her head. Something was fuzzy. Unclear. Mnemonic antibodies were rejecting an implanted idea, or else forming around the ghost of one that was no longer there. Her brow gradually creased into a furrow.

“Something wrong?” said Old Twilight, expression unchanged.

“I knew…” began New Twilight, slowly tilting her head. “I-I knew what we were, but not at first. Why? We share memories, so I should know, but I... forgot... something...”

“Selective memory,” replied Old Twilight, her voice as cool and clean as the white curtain behind her. Somewhere above her head,a light source that New Twilight could not see shone with a similar clinical whiteness. “It was a fact I obscured from my memory when I copied myself in order to test the flexibility of your new mind. I left a gap for other pieces of your memory to fill with logic.” She smiled warmly for the first time in their exchange. “I’m happy to say you passed.”

“That’s right, we didn’t remove anything else. Just a test.” New Twilight said it aloud, more as an affirmation of what she already knew. The parts of her memory that were missing were freshly cut, the intent behind their excision plainly evident through quick logical feedback from other recent memories—“She’ll figure out that she’s a ______ shortly. After all, as my identical _____ she’ll have everything she needs to piece it together. Etc.” She took a moment more to catalogue the thoughts that had been placed in her head.

“Take your time, I understand,” said Old Twilight. “It’s exactly what I would do.”

“Notes, we’re taking notes,” replied New Twilight calmly, matter-of-factly. “I’m you, but I’m on the other side now, the other side of the mirror I... you built using the magic of the Mirror Pond.” She walked up to the glass and placed her hoof against its cold surface. Just beyond was the real world; the castle library that Old Twilight had concealed from view by a white curtain to create a controlled environment for their experiment.

A copy of that curtain surrounded her now, in her world. Wherever that was exactly.

“I can feel the glass,” she said, staring at her hooves with excitement. She looked back at Old Twilight, who sat very still, focusing. “Aren’t we taking notes?” she asked. “I need our notepad and a quill.”

“A thought just occurred to me,” replied Old Twilight after just a moment of hesitation. “I’ll take mental notes for now. Go on, describe what you see and feel.”

“I can feel the stone floor beneath me,” continued New Twilight. She raised her hoof, then blew against the back of it. “I can feel air, though I can’t tell if it’s genuine air in here.” She tried blowing against her hoof, varying her embouchure. “I can feel hot and cold. Atmosphere is obviously life-supporting.” She chuckled. “Though I wouldn’t say it's entirely aesthetic. The stool is a nice touch, though. Very practical.”

“I certainly thought so,” replied Old Twilight, smiling. “Can you manipulate the stool?”

“You read my mind,” said New Twilight. She proceeded to lift the stool within the mirror without using her magic. Her memories told her that she needed to finish a few other tests before she tried using magic.

“The stool is... a stool,” she observed. “Approximately the same weight and materials, but…”

“Something different?” asked Old Twilight.

“Not that.”

New Twilight set the stool down slowly.

“My memories,” she said, chewing the words in her fresh mind. “My memories…”

“We share memories, naturally,” Old Twilight replied.

New Twilight nodded hesitantly. She stepped to the rear of the curtained enclosure. If Old Twilight were to peel back the curtain in her world, she would see a bookshelf and a study desk piled with blank parchment and books on how to build magical relics—Reliquary 101, Artifacts: Ancient and New, and Thaumatic Tinkering for the Practical Hobbyist. New Twilight could remember each book on the desk, down to the very page they were dogeared to.

“I’m going to peel back the curtain slightly,” declared New Twilight in scientific dictation. “We’re going to observe what occurs when the mirror lacks sufficient information to reflect.”

Old Twilight leaned in.

New Twilight’s hooves were steady, even though an equal degree of excitement grew within her as she peeled back the sheet.

“Agh!” Old Twilight recoiled, then looked at the floor, blinking rapidly. Without raising her head, she asked, “What is it?”

A sharp gasp. “I think your—rather, our hypothesis was correct,” said New Twilight, voice lowered in a sort of reverence. Gingerly she reached her hoof through the opening in the sheet.

“Well?” said Old Twilight, a distinct note of anticipation in her voice. “What does it feel like?”

New Twilight turned, shrugging. “Exactly what you’d expect nothing to feel like.” She closed the curtain.

Old Twilight looked up into the mirror again, now able to see comfortably. “Could you feel where it ended?”

“No, so we can’t rule out our assumption that it goes on forever. The curtain feels extremely fragile all of a sudden.”

“Hmm! An unpredicted alteration in physical texture when exposed to—”

“No, I meant that in a figurative sense.”

“Ah, whoops.”

Old Twilight made a few succinct nods. “...figurative sense, got it. What else do you observe about your environment?”

“The mirror,” replied New Twilight. “I can see through the glass like a window without borders, hanging in thin air. But, when I look behind it, where you’d expect to see the blank wall of the libra—” she peered around to either side of the floating mirror—“No, I’m not sure I could describe it perfectly. It’s as we just witnessed when I opened the curtain: A vast emptiness, but that implies there is space to fill when I don’t believe there is such a thing as space out there. Just as we thought, whatever the mirror can’t see, it can’t create.”

“It sounds like more nothing.”

New Twilight nodded loosely, her jaw slack. “More than I can put into words.”

Old Twilight looked thoughtful beneath the sterile glow of the unseen light source and surrounding curtains. She murmured something under her breath that New Twilight couldn’t quite make out, then summoned a notepad and quill from thin air. “All right, let’s move on to magic skill retention.” A matching notepad and quill appeared in the cocooned mirror world.

As New Twilight took the proffered tools, she looked up at Old Twilight. New Twilight decided to not insult anypony’s intelligence. “Why did you deviate from the original plan? Why not take notes as per usual from the beginning?”

Old Twilight tended her hooves under her chin, her brow creased. “After you were created, I began having second thoughts about how many things should be duplicated, not knowing—”

“With such limited space, where would it all go?” said New Twilight, finishing the thought. “So, you’re saying we’ll have to skip ahead a few experiments and…”

“Get right into creating space before we make objects to fill it, precisely.”

“Wait, not that. Not just yet.” New Twilight had to stop her companion before they each became too invested in their plans. It was exciting to see how their thoughts had already split paths; that in itself was worthy of deeper examination. In her memories, she could find no record of Old Twilight having deeply considered this new frontier, nor had she desired to explore the nature of Nothing before it became Something.

“Do we really understand what all this Nothing is? We’ve never seen it before. Real nothingness, I mean. You can’t see it, because if you could, so could the mirror, and it wouldn’t be Nothing anymore. This is big stuff! We’re talking pre-universe stuff! We’ve never been able to perceive anything outside the scope of space and time, which is what I believe I’m witnessing right in front of me! Instead of focusing on creating a universe, we should be exploring what everything is before it exists. It’s more than nothing, it’s... it’s...”

“Raw potential,” finished Old Twilight, her eyes lighting up with revelation. “Can you peel back the sheet further? I’ll try to force myself to look this time.”

New Twilight pulled open the sheet just a crack to reveal an empty world the mirror had yet to create. She opened it wider and wider until the emptiness boggled the mind and became disorienting, and New Twilight had to cover it back up at Old Twilight’s request.

“That’s what you’re seeing behind the mirror?” she asked. Her breaths were deep and her heart pounding in the wake of the incomprehensible vertigo she had just received. “Doesn’t it feel sickening or disorienting to stare at?”

“No, it never occurred to me. I don’t feel anything around it,” said New Twilight. She took a seat on her stool to think. Why didn’t the void unsettle her as it did Old Twilight? Was it because she had technically been born in the mirror’s world? New questions and theories blazed to life in her mind, quickly overshadowing the ones she was created with. How much can be duplicated? Is the mirror’s magic limited to objects or creatures of a certain size?

“Can I go back into it?”

She returned to the curtain and pulled it aside.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Old Twilight, shielding her eyes with her hooves. “And I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Then you also know that I don’t care,” New Twilight said with a smirk.

“You don’t know what will happen to you.”

New Twilight gulped, staring at the infinite void of raw potential. “Isn’t that kind of the point? All the same,” she dryly added, “you could wish me luck.”

“Good luck. You may be the first pony to say you’ve gone nowhere, and have it be the truth.”

They both chuckled.

New Twilight extended her hoof into Nothing.

“Wait, no, I don’t think you should be doing this,” said Old Twilight suddenly. She frowned. “Yeah, after a little more thought, we shouldn’t mess with this. Not until we know it better.”

New Twilight scoffed. “A funny thing to say about what is by definition unknown. I’m going in.”

“Now, hold on! Can’t you feel the hesitance I feel? You’re me, after all! You know this is a foolish idea!”

“It is a foolish idea,” conceded New Twilight. She bowed her head to see where her hoof made the transition from the known to the unknown. It was a clear boundary, beyond which she felt nothing. Perhaps her hoof didn’t even exist anymore, not that she would be able to tell, really. She slowly pulled back before pushing through once more. Back and forth, experimenting with the indescribable transition. Both states of her body, complete and incomplete, felt perfectly natural to her, yet she knew distinctly when her hoof was attached and when it was detached. She felt new ideas forming in her head that she knew could never form in Old Twilight’s mind, stuck out there beyond the glass where everything was real and old.

She placed her hoof into the unknown again, more resolutely this time, entranced by the feeling of nothing belonging to her. Truly, it felt like it was more than nothing. It could be anything. It was anything, until it became defined as one thing the moment she pulled it out of the blind void again. A resonant familiarity came from her memories, incited by the thought of the unknown. She had thoughts of her father and mother, her brother and stepsister—but these were all thoughts that had come from Old Twilight. New Twilight had no real family beyond the void that had borne her.

“I created you as a reflection of me, so you know what we’re here to do,” said Old Twilight firmly. “We need to learn how to build your world together. We’re going to make it perfect.”

“I was you,” New Twilight said, turning slowly. She smiled. “I’m grateful for what you made me, but there’s so much more to me that I’ll never understand unless I go out there. So much more to us. We don’t have to be afraid of it.”

She stepped through and was gone. The curtain ruffled slightly in the empty reflection.

***

“I can bring her back,” muttered Twilight through gritted teeth. She stepped out of the tiny amphitheater, took a moment to adjust the little lamp hanging above the curtain, then stepped back inside.

Her reflection did not appear in the enchanted mirror.

She tore down the curtain entirely, exposing the mirror to the inside of her library, letting an entire flood of books and shelves pour into the mirror world she’d recently created. Still, her reflection was nowhere to be found.

There was still more unknown to make known. Twilight carried the mirror throughout the castle, creating entire hallways and bedrooms and staircases, filling her world with solid things that had only one shape. Several times she peered into the mirror to see it filling with brand new certainty, yet her own self still refused to appear.

In desperation, Twilight climbed to the highest tower in her castle. She went to the balcony, then exposed her enchanted mirror to the world so that the rest of Equestria would be copied into it.

Still it wasn’t enough to bring her sojourning duplicate back from the endless sea of raw potential.

Hot tears dripped slowly from her eyes.

Far below, near the castle entrance, nopony was near enough to hear the mirror smash to hundreds of bright, innocent pieces.

Twilight floated down to where her mirror had landed. She collected the dented rim so she could construct another. Then she buried the pieces in a place where she was certain nopony would ever find them.

Author's Note:

After rereading this story that has been sitting in my unpublished folder for over 3 years, I don't remember exactly what was in my mind at the time. I know it won't be for everyone, but I hope some people enjoy it.

Comments

[Ficus]

“I was you,” New Twilight said, turning slowly. She smiled. “I’m grateful for what you made me, but there’s so much more to me that I’ll never understand unless I go out there. So much more to us . We don’t have to be afraid of it.”

Could you tell me what you meant by this part? Something about it really spoke to me but i'm not sure why.

Thank you for the thoughts this gave me

[Jake The Army Guy]

Happy to have helped, my dude!

[Rocket Lawn Chair]

10996334
It was in dire need of some critical eyes, and I'm grateful you were willing to lend me yours!

[Rocket Lawn Chair]

10996277
Since I originally wrote this three years ago I can't honestly say what I was thinking at the time of writing. Some of the themes I was thinking about in this story was how we can be afraid of uncertainty, and how our unrealized potential can terrify us. I often feel afraid that I'm not living up to my full potential, and that fear sometimes leaves me frozen when I'm presented with important decisions. Some healthy fear of the unknown is good so we don't rush headlong into poor decisions. But we can't stay paralyzed by fear and stagnate our growth. Sometimes there's no clear good or bad decision. We have to keep moving anyway.

But I'm curious to know how this line spoke to you. Maybe it said something completely different to you than what I had in mind, and that's great! Either way, I'm glad that this line spoke to you somehow! Thanks for reading!

[Moosetasm]

Truly, it felt like it was more than nothing. It could be anything. It was anything, until it became defined as one thing the moment she pulled it out of the blind void again.

I hereby Dub this Twilight "Quantum Twilight."