Across the Universe

by JewishKamikaze

Questions and Answers

“What is it, Flutter? Is something wrong?”

“No, Hoov… Tonight just reminds me of a night long ago…” Fluttershy remarked, not looking down from the clouds blanketing the otherwise waning moon. She turned to look down upon his stout frame. He looked expectant. He wants to know about my past life. They all do. I guess they deserve to know everything about me if I know everything about them. “It’s late, but if we get done quickly tonight, I’ll tell you about it, okay? Then we’ll go home.”

“Sure!” He scampered off without looking back, a wide smile adorning his face as he shot through the undergrowth.

Is he ready to know? Is anyone? What will they think of me? Oh, Fluttershy! It’s not that horrible to have lived once and then have a new life all of a sudden, right? All of that was a lifetime ago, but it feels like it’s been more than that. I’ll just have to see what happens. I’ve told him that I will tell him, and I’m sticking to my word.

Thoughts pinged about her mind as she flitted a meter off the ground through sharp, pine-scented gusts. They were filled with the static of a coming storm, one she and the Elder had concocted a few nights prior. Everydragon was ready for it back at Butzbik, her home, but it just so happened that today was the day she ran out of blue berries. She never seemed to be able to escape such coincidence. A breeze whistled a smooth note through the tree limbs above and then subsided. The curly-q of her main was blown back, and the gust chilled her skin. She enjoyed the brisk weather; it was refreshing after a day underground.

She landed in order to navigate under some tricky branches she was sure were ahead. The air in between gusts was filled with the musty smell of the littered ground. Over the decay, each clawstep offered one or more of a variety of noises. Through this uneven ground, mischievous roots in the darkness provided an easy, if painful, trip for one’s face to the ground. In fact, it was so dark that a dragon could not see his claws in front of his face.

Unfazed by all of this, Fluttershy pressed on, the distant calls of the woodland creatures she knew giving her an idea as to her general location. Even the bears had yielded to her kindness after some coaxing. But when there were no calls and no light, she did not fret; she could find her way after traversing the same paths to the berry thickets innumerable times.

Soon I’ll be home again. Back to my friends. This mission was not the most pressing, but getting up early and conscripting Hoov would be a chore. After an internal dialogue finally elected to keep her word in revealing her past identity, thoughts of home and friendship kept her pushing under prickly bushes and through pokey, low-hanging branches.

Stopping to rest in a small clearing, Fluttershy recalled the breadth of her life there so far. There were so many incidents in which she had to be brave and unlock that unknown quantity of courage she had. To grow accustomed to the dragons, to meld into their society, to take risks in every conversation managing information and secrets—there were many happenings in which Fluttershy had to make it on her own. It left Fluttershy momentarily awestruck to realize how normal living had become to her. Despite this sudden surge of befuddlement, she stayed put as it was not like her to do something like hide behind a tree when alarmed suddenly.

Her mind free to meander, Fluttershy started to think those existential thoughts on who she was. She used to think that she was nothing without the ponies she cared about because without them, she incapable of doing anything. Her life amongst the dragons had taught her that she was herself out of her own volition. Her friends like Tharur and Fenchurch did not defend or aid her more than she aided or defended them; she felt natural among these dragons who looked so different and spoke so differently than her. Interestingly, she had come to realize recently that her lips were moving oddly when she spoke nowadays. Although she did not realize at the time, it had turned out that she was, in fact, speaking their language along with them, after so long speaking in her own tongue and relying on the Babel fish to convey as well as translate messages.

Fluttershy scratched at her mostly barren foreleg. She was still acclimating to her newest band: two white stripes surrounding one gold stripe, bestowed for her weather service. It was smaller but matched the one the Elder had been given eons prior.

The wind picked up again. Above, a few branches rattled and resonated with a roar. The word ‘roar’ had changed drastically for Fluttershy, too. Her mind no longer toyed with the phrases super-scary or really big and dangerous, especially not all the words all together in sentences. Here, alone in the big, dark woods among unknown entities, she felt safe and secure not for the inherent qualities of the surrounding environment, but for the inherent qualities of the small yellow-and-pink pony prancing down the forest path.

At long last, she located her destination just as it started to drizzle. It was not long until she would have to rise up out of the forest and race to the rendezvous point by wing, hopefully without losing any berries.

Fluttershy was counting by multiples of six, putting the berries in the first basket. At the seventh multiple, a hole opened up under her. It was exactly a nothingth of a second long, a nothingth of an inch wide, and quite a lot of million light years from end to end. She was sucked into it and emerged at a point back in time. Left in her place next to the basket was a steaming-hot cup of coffee too hot to drink then but too cold to take with. In another fit of improbability left by the fumes of the nothingth hole, the cup of coffee transformed into an ice-cold Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. The words the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster heard before it lost its new custodian were, “Oh no, not again.”

The words Fluttershy then heard were a computer saying, “At an improbability factor of eight million seven hundred and sixty-seven thousand one hundred and twenty-eight to one against.”

* * *

Once again in a corner, Fluttershy sat next to a light gray mare with a yellow mane and an off-kilter stare. The mare looked at Fluttershy and faded away gently as her personal improbability was too great for the surrounding environment. As the figure slowly dissolved into another stretch of space and time, the mare whispered, “See you soon, Fluttershy.” Not believing what she saw, Fluttershy looked up: a rabbit and a small man with a green hat sporting an improper fraction vaporized as well, but not before wishing her a happy unbirthday. Fluttershy was unable to believe this, either.

At her wit’s end, Fluttershy crouched low so as to not reveal herself to the inhabitants of the ship as it descended towards a massive ball of dust. Out a porthole next to her, she witnessed a bowl of petunias plummet alongside a whale, the two sharing their first and last moments in tandem. Fluttershy winced as they impacted the dusty planet, one making a larger dent than the other after naming a thing or two.

Out from a door next to Fluttershy, a few white mice darted past. Behind them they whispered, “Greetings! Don’t snitch, Fluttershy. We have business to attend to, you know.” Fluttershy complied, if for an ulterior reason than to tattle.

The situation forced upon Fluttershy did not provoke a reaction of frustration so much as a reaction of determinedness in ending the all-too familiar sensation of being without direction. Her life had taken such an unexpected turn that it no longer knew where it was going. Even so, Fluttershy was not about to give into circumstance, and she braced herself against the reality she was in with all the dauntlessness she could muster, determined to eke out an identity from the fortune the Universe had dealt.

Hearing the hatch at the far side of the ship’s bridge open and close with, “It’ll all end in tears, I know it,” Fluttershy got up and made her way to the exit. She snuck out right behind a robot whose compassion sensors were breaking trying to analyze her. Because of this, the paranoid android kept mum. Fluttershy trailed a group of lanky bipedal things, luckily obscured by the dust they kicked up in front of her.

As the convoy neared the crater formed by the impact of what were at one point nuclear missiles, the smell of freshly obliterated whale became overpowering. The mighty indentation stank of oil and blood, two reeks Fluttershy was not partial to. She hid behind the first lump of forcefully tenderized meat she encountered and peered out from one side, suppressing her gag reflex.

Three of the things went down into the crater and disappeared at the bottom. Fluttershy watched the thing in the robe and slippers dustily storm about around the edge of the crater while the robot turned itself off. Sensing no other options, Fluttershy rushed to the gaping hole at the bottom of the crater and dove down into the underground edifice therein, swooping neatly as she had practiced so many times before. Fluttershy walked down the corridor steadily, marveling at the abstruse latticework of tiles and symbols that adorned the walls.

Up ahead, the three bipeds were chatting away. All of a sudden, their part of the passageway filled with funny-colored smoke, and shortly thereafter, they were all on the ground unconscious.

* * *

Fluttershy waited around the corner of the doorway silently. She dared not enter the room, having followed the threes’ unconscious bodies as they were carried to the room by the Magratheans.She listened to the three in the room with bated breath as they woke up and marveled at gold, platinum, and fish. When the Magrathean escorts came to set the three in another room, Fluttershy shadowed them once again.

Then Fluttershy heard a male voice tell them that the mice would be seeing them. As the Magratheans left, she scurried back to the room in which the mostly hairless ones had previously marveled at rare metals. Fluttershy was in awe at what she saw:

It was her house. It was warm, had animals, smelled nice, and even had a few of the Cutie Mark Crusaders sound asleep in it. She looked upstairs. On the penultimate step to the top, she noticed a green number. It changed, subsequently leaving her in a room of postmodern murals. Some parts were nice, but others were not particularly to her taste, as Fluttershy was not the biggest proponent of contemporary art.

The room changed again, placing Fluttershy atop a promontory overlooking a valley ringed with marble-hooded mountains. This one was very familiar. The room changed again, this time filling rapidly with copies of her. Dazed by all of the sudden changes and feeling lonesome amidst the surplus of herself, Fluttershy left, following the echoes of the distorted voices along the smooth grand corridors.

At once, the sounds emanating from the room in which the people who were deposited grew nearer and nearer until she was once again hiding around the corner from it. The people sounded like they were having tea, which they were. Then, Fluttershy witnessed the one in sweaty, disheveled robes and slippers (the clothing clearly put in that state by Thursday morning mud) step off an aircar and shuffle through the doorway with an older, cleaner biped, one she had not seen before.

After a short bout of conversation with Frankie mouse and Benji mouse, the old man got back into the car. He looked around, and just as he was about to take off again, he spotted Fluttershy by the pink twist of hair she had neglected to conceal behind the corner. She did not want to run and was not in the mood, so she peered out cautiously, dilating her eyelids along with her pupils, making sure to bring her full countenance to bear in order to enhance her cuteness-factor to its highest potential. Fluttershy was aware of her inherent adorableness, of course.

All of a sudden, the conversation coming from the room became shrill. The man did not mind, however, and his eyes gleamed with excitement as they came to recognize Fluttershy. “You know the fjords up in the far North and the grand moraine of Manehatten?” the man asked excitedly as he jogged towards her. Fluttershy nodded unconsciously. “I made them! Oh you are undoubtedly my favorite! I’ve always wanted to meet you, but I couldn’t because of the reality contract and professional honor and such. Don’t worry about any of those things. Bureaucracy and such. Anyways, why in Zarquon’s name are you here of all places?”

“Well—I don’t really know—it’s a weird story,” she began to raise her voice over the conversation inside the room that was reaching a fever pitch.

“Well then get in the aircar. You can explain while I take you to see the factory floor,” the old man said as there was a crash in the room, “Hurry now!”

They got in the aircar and zoomed off as the door behind them burst open. Soon the doorway behind dwindled and then shank below the underground horizon while the inside of the world on all sides raced past faster than her eyes could fathom. She looked down at the instrument panels to stave off vertigo. “Well where do I start?” she inquired, trying to find footing for the commencement of the story as well as for her legs.

“Well, Fluttershy, start from the beginning.”

After a brief period of silence, she began, “A long time ago, in a past life, if you can believe it, I was out alone at night when this big white shoe zoomed in from out of the sky. I assume what happened is that I appeared inside of it along with a ton of horrible things, and then I ended up, after witnessing the weirdest show in my life, in another place where there weren’t any ponies—there were dragons. Then I lived there for a while, made friends, made a new life for myself, and the same thing happened on a similar occasion—the white shoe appeared and then I appeared inside of it only to survive on another world and to advance some inane cosmic plot, or so it seems to me. Here I am, across the Universe it seems.”

“You mean to tell me you were on that ship on the surface? The Heart of Gold?”

“I guess that’s the one. If so, twice.”

“Well my instrumentation is reading that your two encounters are each six billion and seven billion to one against. With improbability, you multiply, so your experience takes the number four spot on improbable events. The third was today,” the old man explained.
Fluttershy had no idea how to retort, so she allowed the man to continue speaking.

“What I am about to tell you may come as a surprise to you,” he said, making full eye contact with her.

“Okay then. Can I at least know your name?”

“It’s not that important,” the man insisted.

“If you say so.” Fluttershy did not want to be rude.

“Well I’ve said it a few times today to a far lesser being than you, so I suppose that it’s only right you get to know. I’ll be reckless for once,” he sighed and looked forward, unfazed by the dizzying lights that zipped past the aircar. “It’s… Slartibartfast,” he annunciated each syllable.

Fluttershy smiled warmly, taking care not to seem at all amused by the name. When she attempted to look at the multicolor-stream zipping past at incredible velocity, Fluttershy staggered to the side and was forced stare once again at the aircar’s instrumentation in order to regain her balance. “Alright then. Surprise me, Mr. Slartibartfast,” she challenged dizzily.

Hearing this, Slartibartfast giggled and jumped up once, shaking his curled up arms by his head most uncharacteristically. He regained poise and took a breath. “You see, we were told not too long ago—maybe thirty years—to commission a planet. Making planets, if you haven’t heard, is what Magrathea does. Most of us Magratheans stayed asleep for complicated economic reasons you may pay any passing hitchhiker who is well-versed in Magrathean history to recount in exchange for a ride to Alpha Centauri and a warm meal.

“But back to what is relevant: A few were awoken, not including myself, but some of my work was copied and given due credit to me after… Anyways, we had a client whom we are forced by contract, and for the customary privacy of our customers, to call by one name. This man from Earth, a planet now recently destroyed and soon to be recreated, is to be known amongst outsiders as G.N. Other than that, all I know is that he was a pretty successful business man. Something to do with steam, if my memory serves.” Fluttershy continued listening, debating whether or not to believe.

“Well this guy had a map of a place called ‘Equestria’ and a ton of written and animated material for us to work with. He threw money at us, unbeknownst to the residents of Earth. He wanted the Universe to see—he wanted them to see you and the rest of the Equestrians. Naturally, we complied.

Magrathea makes planets, and we made the planet of Equestria. From your account, it sounds like we also made the planet you were just on. It was commissioned by another Earthman, a real enthusiast on these dragons. Don’t ask.

“Back to Equestria: we engineered the planet around the revered television show My Little Pony Friendship is Magic and added a few necessary aspects—a planet has to be a planet, you know. We also put in millions of cameras to document you and the other five ponies’ (but sometimes another three’s) adventures for Galaxy-wide Sub-Etha. It’s been the most popular thing on the waves since the Vogons destroyed planet Arrested Development.”

Fluttershy was surprised. “So you mean to tell me that nodr—nopony in Equestria knows about this… this program, and it has been going on for as long as there has been an Equestria?”

“Until very recently, that is. As the show was in the middle of a production cycle, you vanished. And to answer your other question, there are at least two… ponies, as you say and think, who are ‘in on it’. One is a director while the other is an assistant director. It’s possible that a small support crew exists, too.

“What’s more important is that you, my favorite of all the ponies, and every—everypony in Equestria, have inspired an entire galaxy for years now. When it all shut down midseason—when you got picked up by the Heart of Gold—right after, we the Magratheans reset your world to the conditions right before your departure. It was pretty simple considering that a show as popular as yours is prepared for just about every contingency, renegade presidents included. Just today we finished it, and it really is in its pristine condition at the very point you were no longer there.” As he said this, the aircar zoomed into what appeared to be an infinite space. It seemed to Fluttershy, as every reference point twinkled out of existence behind, like they were not moving at all.

“This,” Slartibartfast referred with his outstretched arms matching his smile in breadth, “is our factory floor. In reality, the space is only a sphere three million miles across—though you’d be forgiven if you were to think that it’s infinite.”

They sped through the space until an arbitrary moment passed, and soon after, the aircar slowed gradually to stop in front a floating cube whitewashed and with a simple white door with a simple brass doorknob. “And here is where you make a decision,” Slartibartfast said, snuffling a bit with the knowledge that he only had a few fleeting twinkles of time left with his idol. He straightened out some by getting up from the driver’s seat and looking away. Together, he and Fluttershy walked out of the aircar and through the doorway.

The outside of the small cube, only a few meters to an edge, was an illusion. Inside, it appeared ten times larger than it did on the outside. The walls were covered in various sets of instrumentation and pipes of all sizes. Slartibartfast shuffled to a small keypad fixed to the wall and typed in a few numbers. An ovular portal opened up behind Fluttershy, prompting her to turn and face it. A few more keys were pressed, and a second portal opened up. Fluttershy looked back at Slartibartfast as just two keys were pressed, the first key pressed on the pad, which had nine numbers arranged in a square and one key below, was in the middle row on the left-hand column. The second was on the bottom row in the central column. Something zipped into their part of the cube and stopped.

What Fluttershy saw when she turned back around was a green tube filled with some sort of bubbly liquid. Floating in it was something very similar to herself. “It looks weaker than I remember,” Fluttershy remarked at the creature locked in indefinite slumber.

“It’s you. Well it’s almost you. It’s a perfect recreation of you the instant before you were gone from Equestria. In fact, it has all the same memories. Now, behind you are those two portals. Your personal, individual fate is up to you, Fluttershy. Each portal leads right back to a forest you know in the exact spot you left them. The one on the left is your first life while the one on the right is your most recent one, although I detect a very dangerous beverage in the vicinity there. You can guess as to the ramifications of your decision, whatever it may be.” Slartibartfast blew sorrowful mucus into a handkerchief recently pulled from a pocket of his.

“If you go back to your original home, you have to act and grow as a pony the same way you did before. It’s okay that you’re in on it if you don’t tell a soul the secret. Really, there is no interference with the outside Universe, and everything there is as real as this room we are in, or as real as me, Slartibartfast. That I assure you wholeheartedly. Who is to say that the Universe as you or I know it isn’t just another fiction?” He smiled weakly through the tears in his eyes.

“Is the beverage really dangerous?” Fluttershy could not help but ask. As for the whole show thing, she knew that what she had always considered reality was reality, and that reality in of itself is simply what one believes and perceives is so.

“Oh yes it’s terribly dangerous, but it’s really quite nice,” Slartibartfast’s responded as his eyes zoned away nostalgically.

Seeing no reason to tarry any longer, the sublime plurality of all Fluttershy past, present, parallel, and future, gripped the little pony and stiffened the small figure. It turned about to face Slartibartfast. Finally ready to return, it took off its bands and its necklace and asked with the voices of all the aforementioned forms, “You can add all of my memories up to this point to the creature in the tank, correct?”

Slartibartfast, taken aback by the straightforwardness of the question and sincerity of implied motives, replied, “Uh. Er—ye—yes we can.” He turned around, and his fingers flew across the keypad for a few moments. There was a short beep from the keypad and a steadily increasing bubbling in the holding tank. Then, unseen forces gripped Fluttershy as she advanced mechanically towards a portal.

“Wait!” Slartibartfast rummaged in a chest and pulled out a pair of tweezers. “One more thing.” He brought them up against the side of her head, finding her ear under the thick mane. Slartibartfast held the unremarkable tweezers against her outer ear, cupping her head against his chest while he did so. Fluttershy began to wonder why he was hugging her for so long. “Almost done,” Slartibartfast said, trying to keep himself businesslike. All of a sudden, Fluttershy felt a slimy sensation deep in her ear tugging outward. An uncomfortable moment later, in front of her was a miniscule yellow fish in the grips of the tweezers.

“If I didn’t have one, too, you wouldn’t be able to understand me,” Slartibartfast explained. Fluttershy was not inclined to contemplate his remark, so she established in her mind that it was time she got on with her decision.

“Goodbye, Slartibartfast,” her soft, regular voice cut in for a moment, and then sternly, “You know what to do.”

In a dazzle of pink and yellow, Fluttershy was gone. The only sounds left in the room were the whoosh of decompression and an old man sobbing tears of immense loss.