Heroes Never Die

by Shimmerist Ari

2-5

“You know the common refrain,” said Ragnarok. “Becoming a pony won’t solve your problems, right? You can just change for the better without ponification, right? Humans can all just… decide to be good from now on.

“To that I say… okay. Do it. Who’s stopping you? Who has ever been stopping you? I’m sure as hell not!

“Just do it! Just end homelessness and poverty. Just stop being depressed. Just get rid of your WMDs. Just stop committing crimes and waging wars. Just stop not wanting your life to be better solve all the problems in your life by yourselves. It’s really that easy! That’s what they’re trying to tell you.

“And you know what? I'm even rooting for you guys. But let’s be honest for a second… that’s not going to happen is it? If you could ‘just’ do that you would have already done it. This is the same pull yourself up by your bootstraps, it's your fault you're poor, shit they've been pulling for years. It’s not as easy as they want you to believe.

“In reality, if you want things to change, if you want any of those things I just mentioned what you want is real, serious change on a systematic level. And guess what? This bastard and his Shimmerist friends are the only ones offering that to you.

“And hey, I’m not against any of you trying. But if you fail as has been the case for the past ten thousand years… we’ll I’ll always be here. The door is open now and they can’t close it no matter how badly they want you to think it's closed forever."

---

Ari deleted her Twitter account and never regretted it. Best move of her life.

It wasn’t like it was doing anypony any good. She’d already given out all of her tips and tricks. By now, ponies knew all the basics. Hell, they were already improving on it. It seemed like new accessibility devices and apps were popping up every day. It was great.

As far as keeping up with her pony pals, Whisper 3 proved infinitely superior to that. She wasn’t canceled on Whisper 3 for one.

That place had to be about 95% pony and that was if you counted stage 1 and 2 partials as human because those made up the majority of the remaining 5%. Humans could only get in now through recommendations. You had to have a pony vouche that you were one of the good ones.

But even just being a stage 1 partial massively increased your chances of getting in. One single strand of blue hair was all it took to make you far more sympathetic to ponies. Mostly because all the stage 1 partials who were neutral to hostile had already been pushed into rehumanizing.

Ari could tell why they were so hesitant to let humans in by the boatload. Whisper 3 was… nice. Like in a way you couldn’t possibly assume social media ever was.

Twitter was so damn toxic, only getting more toxic recently. Ari hated it even before she got canceled. Yet no one had any alternative to it because it was a natural monopoly.

Humans loved drama and had all kinds of algorithms ready to exploit their fears, hates, and worst tendencies. None of that malicious min-maxing was present on Whisper 3. It was more about providing utility than maximizing clicks at all costs. And it was geared towards the more social minds of ponies.

Community was the name of the game here. What pony community you were part of was displayed right beneath your name. Everything about it was geared towards building and connecting communities, uniting, and making friends.

There never seemed to be drama trending up top. At least, not for long. Instead, it was all projects and community events. That was another big feature. Ponies

Ponies always help.

And frankly, everypony just seemed to be… nicer? Ari certainly never got the same mean spirited comments here.

Ponies are kind.

Yeah, she heard those lines all the time. Nopony believed every last pony was kind of course. But they spoke those ideals like little mantras, those were clichés you heard all the time. Ari was struggling to not repeat them to the humans at work.

Still… seeing all this cooperation, friendship, optimism, and enthusiasm! Ari finally felt more alive again. She wanted more ponies in her life. She wanted to help too!

Of course, being in the middle of nowhere, Ari couldn’t exactly volunteer to help with most of their projects. The SSP’s page for political volunteers caught her eye, but she hesitated. That was the one place she might actually be able to do something.

But… well signing up to be an agent of the Social Shimmerist Party would mean admitting to herself that she was a Shimmerist.

And…

Ari stood up and shook her head before stepping outside.

---

At long last, Ari worked up the strength to clean up all the trash in front of her house.

She actually did something!

And then?

She started taking a little walk. It’d been months since she’d gone for a walk. Outside felt weird. Not because of the lingering military presence or the homeless camps. The air felt fresh. Like today was the first real day of spring.

There were a lot of people out today. For a minute Ari thought it might be the weather but no… there was yet another protest. Those were background radiation at this point.

It wasn’t a riot day. The police would call this a riot later on the news, but it was a protest, not an attempt to steal food and TVs like in the early days. It was the kind of thing Ari would have loved to join just a few years ago.

Ari asked around what was going on as a whole bunch of people were gathered around one spot. A wall of unarmed civilians had formed to meet a wall of police officers in riot gear and decommissioned military equipment.

All over the last bench in Nassau County.

The state had been installing hostile architecture lately. It was like this arms race between cities to make your town as uninviting to the homeless as possible in hopes they’d go somewhere else.

They started out small. Get rid of all the water fountains. Close all the public bathrooms. Remove public trash bins and efforts to clean up the streets (the reason trash was everywhere, Ari eventually learned). Put ‘armrests’ in the middle of benches so you couldn’t lie down on them.

The problem of course… was that these people had nowhere to go. They’d head to the next town over who’d escalate things worse only to be forced to come back here in an endless cycle. So the arms race just continued endlessly…

The town started putting in ‘pavement sprinklers’. These sprinklers were set to ‘accidentally’ douse the sidewalks with water every couple of hours to discourage anyone from stopping there. They also made walking harder for everyone.

The benches at the parks, train stations, and bus stations were being removed entirely, and replaced with ‘leaning benches’. Those were little more than the back side of the bench, something you couldn’t sit down on but could lean against. They claimed this would be great for disabled people… somehow.

And they’d been installing bladed grates over the sewer vents recently. They didn’t want homeless people lying on top of them to keep from freezing to death in the winter. Ari had to pass those dangerous eyesores all the time now, the gratings raised at different heights to make sitting on one impossible.

More and more spikes and fences began cropping up all over the place. The waste from the lack of bathrooms and garbage cans kept worsening. You had to travel in cars if you wanted your trip to be at all tolerable.

Ari increasingly felt as if she were living in Mordor each day. If the mayor could blanket the town in eternal darkness and ash he probably would at this point.

This was how they treated the downtrodden out here.

Still, Ari couldn’t say anything as reductive as ‘humans are trash’. There was a massive crowd of humans here to protest the installation of the bladed grates and the removal of the last bench in town. It was only a small number of wealthy people in gated neighborhoods who actually wanted these changes.

The problem, as Ari learned in 2020, was that those people were the only ones whose opinions counted. You could protest as much as you wanted. You could riot, even. Burn down half the town! But it wouldn’t change anything.

All this protest was pointless. There was nothing Ari could do about it.

But… was that true?

Spring Breeze’s community had eliminated homelessness, hunger, and poverty in their area. So had Ragnarok’s. So had the ponies of Lazy Pines and Riverview and…

So clearly ponies could do it. But among the ponies, only the Shimmerists wanted to bring this to the rest of the world. Only they were truly willing to take a stand against… this.

Ari watched the police take out their pepper spray and fire it into the line of protestors, breaking it up. At last, they were able to dismantle the bench.

“Are the Shimmerists the good guys?”

---

Ari logged back on to Whisper 3.

She bit onto the unsharpened end of a pencil, moving it up and down in her mouth as she looked at the SSP’s volunteer page.

Ponies always help.

Would they even be able to do anything with a lone human in the middle of nowhere?

“Ponies,” said Ari. “Always help.”

She’d at least offer. Ari filled out the volunteer form. Whatever happened next would be up to some SSP coordinator.

Comments

[singing steel]

Can we agree that in any universe antihomeless architecture is bad