The Siren

by McPoodle

Chapter 44

Sweetie Drops was a very good cook—it tied into her training as a candy-maker and was also very useful in both the spy and monster-hunting professions. So, although she only brought down a couple bowls of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, they were really good bowls of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.

“Thanks,” said Lyra. “That really hits the spot. I forgive you.”

Sweetie froze for a moment in shock. “What? Is my soup really that good?”

Lyra looked down at the bowl and laughed. “No. I forgave you as soon as I saw you break down, but I realized just now that I never said it aloud to you.”

Sweetie sniffled, her eyes suddenly misty. “You…I don’t know that I would have forgiven you that easily, if our roles were reversed.”

Lyra put an awkward hoof behind her head. “Yeah, well I forgive all my interrogators afterwards.” She suddenly got serious as she looked up at the ceiling. “I have to. If I don’t, my resentment just builds, and builds…” She turned her attention back to Sweetie Drops. “I was surrounded by a lot of angry beings. I saw what that anger did to them, and I didn’t want it to happen to me.”

“Oh,” said Sweetie, downcast in equal parts by hearing how bad her friend’s life was, as well as learning that the forgiveness was not because of… “So I’m nothing special, then.”

Lyra raised Sweetie’s head with a hoof so they could look into each other’s eyes. “You’re special, Sweetie,” she said softly. Then she saw how incredibly flustered this revelation made her friend, and she quickly resumed speaking. “So! Shall I begin?”

“Oh!” Sweetie Drops recovered her composure then settled into her cushion with a notepad and pen. “Yes,” she said eagerly.

“I was born on Longensis—beautiful place, with a purple sky against jungle-green earth. I looked”—She held up a mint-green hoof—“something like this, but much boxier. I had a name, which I can’t even pronounce in either of the forms you’ve seen me in, so I’ve come to think of myself by the name the bullies called me, Crouton. I wasn’t popular, I wasn’t pretty. I was pretty nerdy, actually.”

“Nerdy, really?” Sweetie asked in mock-shock. “I never would have guessed.”

“Ha. Ha. Anyway, my very large family loved me, and that was all I cared about. And then the Androids arrived.

“That was what they called themselves: Androids. A very generic name. The universe called them ‘Tins’. Our world…” Lyra frowned. “I’d better explain the N-verse situation first.”

Lyra held up her empty round soup bowl, turning it sideways. She would use her horn to create motes of light to illustrate her explanation. “This universe we’re currently in is very small: there’s Equus, the Sun and the Moon, and that’s it until you get to the Sidereal Sphere.” (The rim of the bowl.) “Princess Luna—and Princess Celestia during the millennium when she was covering for her—can choose to keep the stars on the Sphere fixed or can move them. That’s what ponies call stars and planets: Sidereal lights that either stay still or wander. While in my universe…no, I’m getting ahead of myself again.”

Lyra put down the bowl. “Imagine this universe, everything you’ve ever seen or known about, as a tiny little bubble.” Seeing just such a bubble floating on the edge of Sweetie’s unfinished bowl of soup, she used her magic to levitate it between them. “And just touching the edge of this universe is the edge of another universe…” She now created a translucent bubble of light a little bigger than the soup bubble and touching it. “But much, much, much bigger.” She quickly expanded the light bubble with her magic, until it started passing through the walls, continuing to expand it bigger and bigger until the part visible in the room looked like a flat wall, meaning that it was now at least a thousand times bigger. “This is the universe I come from, the N-verse.” She winced a bit in anticipation for the next part. “The ‘N’ is for ‘normal’, because we were the ones who did the naming. This universe is the E-verse, for ‘external’. There might be multiple E-verses, for all we know.

“Now different universes have different physical laws. There are a few different forms of magic in the N-verse, but none like any of the Equestrian magics. They are all very rare and very hard to use. One way that our universes differ is that we don’t have a Sidereal Sphere. Instead, all of the stars are actually suns that are very far away. And planets are worlds like Equus. In the N-verse, planets orbit stars.”

“How weird,” commented Sweetie.

“Yeah,” acknowledged Lyra. “The N-verse has billions of stars, and billions and billions of planets. Only—”

"Hold on,” Sweetie Drops said, waving a hoof, her head reeling. “That was quite a mental image to throw at me. It’s one thing to see the visual, but the actual scale…”

Lyra waited.

“Al…alright,” Sweetie said a minute later. “Go on.”

Lyra nodded, a small smile on her face. “Only a small fraction of those planets have life on them, but that’s still a whole lot of worlds. There are thousands of intelligent races of creatures that I know of. I’m sure there are countless others I’ve never heard of.

“Now the Longensians—we held ourselves superior to the other races. We had no major material wants, and we thought we knew everything that needed to be known. And our planet was far away from the major interstellar trade routes. So nobody noticed us until it was too late.”

Sweetie sat up a little straighter. “What happened?” she asked.

“The Tins happened,” Lyra replied. “They came to our world, claiming to have the solution to all forms of unhappiness. Let me be more accurate: they didn’t ‘claim’ to have the cure, as in they said it but were actually lying. They actually did have a cure; it was just so much worse than the sadness they were curing.

“Their cure was to ‘upgrade’ us Longensians into Tins: to pluck our brains out of our bodies and put them in their artificial bodies. They were being so very useful this whole time, ‘upgrading’ the economy and eliminating poverty, so nobody noticed about the other upgrades until there was nobody left capable of stopping them. One by one my relatives disappeared, until finally I was snatched up in the middle of the night and ‘upgraded’ myself.”

“And that was the form I put you back into,” Sweetie said sadly. “I’m really sorry.”

“Well, it’s the only form I’ve known for 187 out of the 203 years I’ve been alive, so I wasn’t that traumatized,” Lyra tried to say nonchalantly. “Anyway, the Upgrade. It removes all ability to feel emotions. Every member of my race that was upgraded went insane as a result, and their personalities were then wiped out and replaced with the universal Tin personality, and the Tin Universal Purpose.”

“Let me guess,” Sweetie said. “The ‘Tin Universal Purpose’ is to conquer the world…err, N-verse.”

“Pretty much,” said Lyra. “Tins believe that emotions are the main obstacle to maximum efficiency. Maximum efficiency is the purpose of Life, and therefore all life must be upgraded to achieve God’s plan.”

“That obviously didn’t happen to you,” said Sweetie.

“No,” said Lyra. “For reasons I’ve never been able to understand, I, out of all of the millions of lifeforms that have been Upgraded since the creation of the Tins, retained my emotions, my mind, and my soul.”

Lyra sighed deeply. “I spent the first year after Upgrading trying to find a way to go back to my normal body, to create some sort of clone of that body after I discovered it had been destroyed, or to get my mind into any other body I could find that didn’t involve doing something horrible to a living thing. Because the Tins were universally hated throughout the N-verse. And anyone I met would try to destroy me before I ever got the chance to explain that I wasn’t like the others.

“I spent the next fifty years after that trying to save any of my family or any Longensians at all. I tried to make them like I was: stuck in a Tin body, but with their own mind. I failed. And then I spent the remaining 136 years trying to do everything in my power to stop the relentless Tin expansion.”

Lyra slumped down. “It had been a long hard struggle, with five failures for every brief success. The Tins have captured and interrogated me so many times, trying to figure out why I am different, so they can finally ‘upgrade’ me properly. I sometimes think that they are wasting their time, that I have been so little of a nuisance to them that I’m unworthy of their attention. The rest of the interrogations came from the Tins’ enemies, with me trying in vain trying to convince them that I was actually on their side and didn’t have anything they could use against the Tins.”

Sweetie pulled Lyra into a hug.

“It hasn’t been all bad,” Lyra continued. “I’ve met many wonderful creatures and had the rare opportunities to help enemies of the Tins that were far more successful than I’ve been.”

“Was one of them Rozetri?” Sweetie asked.

Lyra reluctantly pushed herself away from Sweetie Drops. “Rozetri,” she repeated. “That was my worst failure of all.

“There is only one race hated more than the Tins, and they are the Slugs. The Slugs are some of the smartest creatures to have ever lived, but they have one horrible flaw: they hate all creatures other than themselves and have made it their mission to exterminate all non-Slug life in the N-verse. And on scores of worlds, they have succeeded. They go around the universe in these metal machines that are near-completely invulnerable.

“There was a small group of Slugs who didn’t think like the rest, who embraced diversity and enjoyed learning about the other races, the result of a Slug experiment that went horribly wrong—from the Slug perspective. These new Slugs were naturally pacifists but were forced to arm themselves to survive being wiped out by their xenophobic cousins. Rozetri was one of these Good Slugs.

“One day I stumbled upon a Bad Slug patrol and underwent an ‘interrogation’.”

Sweetie noted the use of the air quotes. “Do you mean ‘tortured’?” she asked fearfully.

“Most of my interrogations were actually torture sessions,” Lyra told her sadly. “They left me on death’s door. Afterwards, I thought I had lost them and flew my spaceship over to the secret world of the Good Slugs so Rozetri could heal me. But I had in fact led the Bad Slug armada straight to them!

“Their allies—and my allies—did everything we could to defend Kyro, but as usually happens the Bad Slugs could not be stopped, and in the end that world was sterilized. Several of the Good Slugs were able to escape, but I saw Rozetri’s ship explode—without being hit by anything.

“I investigated the spot afterwards, and I discovered the junction between our universes. And I dared to go through it, to try and save my friend.”

Lyra shook her head ruefully. “I had no idea how foolish that decision was. Princess Celestia informed me that junctions spontaneously appear and then disappear every decade or so, and at least one ship crosses over into the E-verse each time. The change in physical laws during the transition almost always destroys the ships. You may know these events as shooting stars.”

“Wait, you mean every time we’ve been ooh-ing and aww-ing over shooting stars, some alien was dying?” a horrified Sweetie asked, finishing the last of her soup and sandwiches.

“I’m afraid so,” Lyra replied. She used her magic to gather up the bowls and plates they had both been using. “But just this once there was something about the junction that allowed both of us to pass through unharmed before it closed behind me.

“Well, we might have passed unharmed, but that isn’t what happened afterwards. I found the remains of Rozetri’s ship, including the mechanical body she needed in order to live. She died in that fire.”

Sweetie got up, a determined look on her face. “Did you find her body?”

A confused Lyra got up as well. “Well, no, but considering what her body was made of, it would be unlikely that I would have found anything from that hot of a fire.”

“And where was this crash?”

“On No Pony’s Road, outside Rockville.”

“Lyra, Rozetri is a registered alien in Ponyville. And how would she even be registered if she died the moment she got to Equestria?”

“You’re right!” Lyra exclaimed. “Rozetri’s alive and living in Ponyville! I wonder how I can find her. Do you have any ideas, Sweetie?”

“Did…did you feel that?” Sweetie asked in sudden confusion.

“Feel what?”

“Like when we walk through the magic collector at the Bunker. What could—”

At that moment an immensely powerful shell of rapidly expanding magic exploded through the basement, passing through everything without appearing to do anything…until Sweetie Drops, her eyes red with rage, sprang upon Lyra and tried her very best to destroy her.

Author's Note:

The notes for this chapter can be found with Chapter 53.