the Logical Solution

by Mica

epilogue: her cutie mark didn't even glow

“This—” Sunny Starscout tapped the glass of the museum display case. “Is the device which split Equestria and led to the genocide of countless innocent lives.”

[1] Canterlogic Prenatal Technologies Device. c. 150s A.T. (after-Twilight). Metal, silicon transistors, and plastic.

“And these here…”—she pointed to the posters in the next case—"…are the marketing tactics that Canterlogic used to trick earth ponies into believing unicorns and pegasi were a threat to them.”

Sunny stood before a crowd of half-asleep elementary school kids. A mix of earth ponies, pegasi, and unicorns—the first class to be fully integrated at Maretime Bay Elementary. “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Now Equestria is together again, the Canterlogic Device will be remembered as the most destructive instrument of pony genocide in recorded history.”

A young earth pony colt with a long, well-kept mane and long eyelashes, standing among a cluster of fillies in the front, raised his hoof.

“Yes, Cherish? Yes, you, Cherish Brighthaven.”

“My great-grandma worked on the Canterlogic Device. In the R-n-D part, I think. She’s really smart so they named our neighborhood library after her. But then after you became an alicorn and Equestria got united again, they took down her name and put your name instead. And Grandma was sad. Why did you take away her name?”

Sunny let out a sigh of moderate frustration. “Because…your great-grandmother worked for a company, and on a device, that caused the death of countless innocent babies—disproportionately non-earth ponies. Like all your friends over there, there, and there. Dead.”

“I told her that. But she said that all she did was what the company told her to do. And that it was just society that got bad, and the company provided what society wanted.”

“Well, I think you and your great-grandma are mistaken. Just like all of you kids and grownups. You’ve got it all wrong. Canterlogic wasn’t just responding to ‘what the society wanted’. I cannot disagree more. Canterlogic created the demand. They launched an insidious propaganda campaign, lobbying government agencies to enforce mandatory abortions and sterilizations. They suppressed the truth that nopony had any magic, lying to the public that they carried dangerous infectious diseases, to force us to hate pegasi and unicorns. What we think of as ‘society’ was a carefully orchestrated indoctrination by a corporate empire. And everypony fell victim. Even the ponies at Canterlogic itself. Like your great-grandma did. She followed. Without stopping to question, like we are today by visiting this museum.”

The fourth grader bit his quivering lip. Sunny realized she had raised her voice in the quiet museum, and covered her mouth many seconds too late.

“If my great-grandma didn’t question, does that make her bad?”

Sunny recovered her “teacher” voice. “Everypony makes choices out of fear, one time or another. Myself included. We all make mistakes. Whether you think that pony deserves a second chance, that’s for you to decide.”

“But is she bad or not?”

One of the fillies standing by young Cherish turned to him. “Did she go to jail for murder?”

“No. She didn’t go to jail at all. She still gets Winter Wishday cards from the mayor.”

“Then I don’t think she’s bad.”

The young colt cleared his throat. “My great-grandma’s in a nursing home now. She can barely walk or hear me, but we can play checkers together. Even if she was bad in the past, I don’t think she could ever be bad again.”

“Miss Sunny, is smoothie break gonna be soon? And where’s your alicorn form?”

“Yeah you promised us you’d make us each our own custom smoothie. With heart sprinkles on top. And then you’d alicorn up for us.”

“Yeah I thought I was gonna see alicorn Sunny.”

“This is boring…” The kids began to clamor. One kid pulled up a cell phone photo of alicorn Sunny to entertain his classmates.

Sunny raised her hoof to speak. “Like I told you kids…I can’t turn into an alicorn whenever I want, it just appears at the right moment. But that’s a great lesson you kids should learn. Sometimes you can’t make great things happen at will. Sometimes great things have to come to us. Those are called miracles.

“You are all miracles conceived from Harmony. You. You. And you. Everyone of you. Earth ponies, unicorns, and pegasi. To think that two-thirds of the miracles in this room would have been dead just one generation ago. Because of this machine. Killed.”

That last word echoed on the glass display cases.

“Do you know what it’s like to die?” Sunny continued. “Let alone be killed, smothered in your own blood? I saw my father die when I was 19. And even when he died of natural causes. It was NOT pretty.”

The young colt couldn’t hide it anymore. He was in tears.

“And as long as pre-natal genetic screening can be used for such evil… the only place it should ever belong is here. Unplugged, and in a museum.”

Sunny paused to recollect herself—she became more impassioned than she thought she would be—then calmly ushered the children to the next exhibit—more old propaganda posters drawn by Canterlogic depicting evil, pointy-horned beasts they called “typical Bridlewood unicorns”.

Sunny just stood in front of the glass. She didn’t give her prepared speech about how Canterlogic would take advantage of earth ponies’ forced isolation to print false posters claiming unicorns were evil. It seemed that would have been an anticlimax. The kids were also completely quiet after Sunny’s last speech about miracles—perhaps they were too naïve to understand her. By the fifteen-minute-mark, the conversation recovered to small talk among the kids about what’s for lunch and trends on PonyGram.

Sunny caught a glimpse of her reflection in the display case glass. Even after giving that impassioned, inspirational speech to the young foals—

—her cutie mark didn’t even glow.

Author's Note:

Please direct typos to PM. Thank you.

Comments

[Jinxed]

>This story contains discussion of eugenics which readers may find highly disturbing based
UNICORN SUPREMACY!
CRUSH ALL FILTHY MUDPONIES AND PEGARATS UNDER THE PURE BRILLIANCE OF MAGIC!

[Magician-Horse]

Heart breaking story, I've actually thought about how the pony races would've separated so fast too, with their shared history erased. There's no real answer that would create their ethno states without ethnic cleansing.

[Ciphers]

The propaganda in the first paragraph:

Once upon a time, there lived a young pony named Bloom. Bloom was the good earth pony kid, just like you fillies and colts. She loves the outdoors, playing ball with her friends, and dreams of taking over her family’s apple orchard one day.

Bloom has two friends: Belle and Scoot. Here they are, standing next to Bloom. Belle is in the theater troupe at Bloom’s school. Scoot is in the same skateboarding club as Bloom. The three have known each other since they were little.

One day, Bloom was sitting under an apple tree, enjoying her favorite Zap Apple Jam on toast.

When all of a sudden, bzzzap! Belle fries Bloom’s brain and she passes out. Then, while she’s knocked out, swoop, and like a greedy seagull, Scoot steals Bloom’s prized family apple jam recipe and flies away.

Bloom wakes up an hour later, luckily unhurt, but her apple jam—and her “friends” Scoot and Belle—are gone! Nowhere to be seen!

You might be shocked to hear this, fillies and colts. How could this have happened? Belle doesn’t have a horn. Scoot doesn’t have wings. They’re earth ponies too, right? How could they have betrayed Bloom like that?

Well, it turns out Belle and Scoot were never Bloom’s friends to begin with.

You see, Bloom was smart enough to already suspect something strange about Belle and Scoot. She was clever enough to save the saliva from one of Belle’s old napkins and Scoot’s straw, and sent them to me and my good friends working at Canterlogic. See, here at Canterlogic, we have come up with a very special device that can tell what species of pony you are, based on your DNA. Do you know what DNA is? It’s like a blueprint inside of our bodies that tell us how tall we are, what color we are, what pony species we are, and so much more! DNA is in all parts of our body—our eyes, our mane, our skin, our organs. No matter how many body parts you change, your DNA tells the truth.

And the truth is?

Belle and Scoot aren’t even earth ponies. They are both what we call an Amputees

Why they use the cmc for their propaganda again?
The ponies must be too dumb for fact check or Twilight Gov too dumb to fix.
Being the sister of the legendary Element of H, they must be famous. Evenmore, they also a teachers as School of friendship too. Record and picture about the friendship and races all over the place. It is impossible to lie about this, and our Twilight still ruling so she always can correct this missinformation.
And too bad that we can’t see what happened to Twilight, she only mentioned once. And other Alicorns like Celestia, Luna too

[Ciphers]

11829068
>UNICORN SUPREMACY!
>Have Earth pony Waifu as a profile
Checkmate, Supremacist

[Jinxed]

11829207
I'm just a very confused supremacist, that's all.
Plus Pinkie is probably hiding a small horn underneath her mane.

[Axolotl222]

Aw, your first dark fic. *Sniff* They grow up so fast…

11829169
If in real life people bothered to fact check blatant misinformation we would have solved racism by now.

[The Blue EM2]

11829169
This sort of rewriting of the past happens all the time, especially in dictatorships.

[Xandos]

Congratulation, this is one of the most disturbing stories I've ever read... Which was, I'm sure, the whole point.

I think I've read stories with rapes, murders, even GENOCIDES, that aren't half as disturbing.

I feel dirty. This is a good story, but it definitely makes me feel unclean

[zimmerwald1915]

11829270
. . . This story includes all of those things.

[whitedorumon]

11829068

>Casually ignoring that one of the most magically powerful beings in the series ascended into being an Alicorn from the state of being a mere "Pegarat"

[Jinxed]

11829277
>He fell for the alicorn propaganda
Alicorns aren't real, they're an ingenious tool made up by very smart unicorns to control the populace.

[whitedorumon]

11829292

Oh Great.

A Flat Equestriearther

[Jinxed]

11829293
Oh no I'm much more gigabrain than that.
What if I told you that Equestria was in fact heliocentric and not geocentric?

[zimmerwald1915]

Please stop feeding the troll. Alternatively, OP, please feel free to block them.

[Mica]

11829234
Nah I've been round the block. Hello darkness my old friend

[Mica]

11829125
These information gaps are one reason why I think it would have been better if G4 was considered a "children's tale" or legend in the G5 universe, and the goal of G5 was instead for Sunny to discover that magic does indeed exist in her "real world".

[RangerOfRhudaur]

Wow, this was fantastic. I hate it. Love the skill with which it was written, but it sends chills down my spine. The corruption of the relationship between parent and child, the perversity of Canterlogic claiming that their actions are for the good of the people, the graveyards they filled with those whose only crime was Nature rolling the dice a certain way, the banal, euphemistic way Canterlogic referred to all this... By any chance, is Canterlogic's logo an eagle? Because "I see an eagle rising."

Incredible work, Mica. Please never do it again, I don't know if my heart could take it.

[Xandos]

11829276
technically not a genocide, as the tribes are still alive... or at least, not a COMPLETE genocide. or maybe a localized genocide?

Also technically no rapes here. only false accusations of such.

still, you get my point. this is a really disturbing story, and I mean it as a compliment.

[The Blue EM2]

11829380
The United Nations defines genocide as any of the following acts:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2

The actions CanterLogic Tech takes in this story fulfill all of the above criteria. The title of the story is (probably) a reference to the Final Solution.

[Xandos]

11829534
ok, fair. I've recently read a story where a species actually ended up extinct, so I had that in mind and mixed up genocide with "killed to extinction"

[Ranun]

I'm giving this a like because it's well written.
It's dystopian horror, you've captured that impossibly well,
I want to cry.

[The Blue EM2]

11829569
No worries.

[Prettypony]

This story makes me want to throw up. You did an excellent, horrific job.

[Write Flyer]

This fic has genuinely disturbed me. You did a fantastic, horrifying job

[ARandomLonelyDude]

the most horrifying things are the ones that are man(or pony in this case) made and comprehensible

[Mica]

11829664
11829785
Please take care of yourselves

[MasterThief]

Well... that's certainly one way to get three races to hate each other, and quickly. (And yeah, human beings did the same thing to each other not that very long ago. No links this time, just take my word for it.)

I'm not sure why this hits so different. Maybe it's because I read too much history. Maybe it's because my OC's backstory is as the son of a unicorn mother and pegasus father, Maybe it's just the old-school opposition to eugenics on moral/religious grounds. But this was heartbreaking and well-told... and I hope you understand if I only want to read this once!

[Mica]

11830841
Thank you for giving it a chance

[MasterThief]

11830902

Always!

[Nebbie]

This felt like a bit of a slog (10k words is generally a bit too much for a chapter), but it was pretty excellently done. It captures very well how modern power structures coerce people to support the official narrative, and suppress those who rock the boat, all while looking prim and proper to those on the sidelines.
My main gripe with it is that I think even with ponies' rather liberal views, I can't see them easily supporting mass abortions and deportations so openly; it would've made more sense if things were more secretive, and relied more on forced sterilizations (which historically were rather common in the 20th century, due to the ease of disguising the sterilization as medically necessary surgery, particularly to young girls who wouldn't yet be much invested in the idea of having kids) or gene editing (likely possible with some magic, and if not, could provide a good cover story for what CanterLogic is doing).

[Stahlseele]

I half expected the CEO to be a half breed herself.

[Mica]

11830970
I’ve seen clopfics with longer chapters

Thank you for your detailed comments. And while you may be right that ponies would be reluctant to support mass ethnic cleansing, it seems to me the only way that the sudden separation of the pony races from G4 to G5 makes sense. Mass sterilizations, even done secretly, would have likely led to extinction of all ponies, given how common transracial births would be. And to be fair, the G5 universe does seem to have a smaller population than G4 (though this is probably just an oversight on the writers’ part). This is a public comment forum so I don’t really want go into more gruesome detail, but if you want we can take this to PM if you have more questions.

In a sense this story is also a criticism of G5 failing to address the sudden division of pony races, given that everyone’s genes were mixed (e.g. the Cake family). Something really dramatic must have happened when Twilight fell.

There is no magic in G5 but regarding gene editing, I had thought about a society that relied on IVF (with “natural pregnancies” forbidden), and I think that would have been a compelling story too.

[Cabbel]

This is very well written and absolutely terrifying.