A Last Warmth at the End of Time

by alamais

Agent Commentary, Endnotes

Tags: XK Priority
Commentary from Oversight Agent 42028

This is an interesting case. The Redoubt hardware woke up far too late, due to a design flaw in this iteration that we've only recently discovered. Things were so late, the source coordinates were basically gone. I’m actually surprised it was even able to locate old Earth. Several of the dynamic paradigms it generated turned out to have quite varied and interesting results (though no other viable lifeforms), but this one is my favorite.

The half-dead, idiot hardware copied a simple, ancient, base-gene human right out of his damned office cubicle on Earth, and woke him up in the middle of an empty, dying universe. Ouch. Thankfully, the dest-end intellifields were fine, realized the mistake before the poor guy took too much damage, and sent a request for an example of something it could modify him into in order to keep his life active.

Here’s where it got interesting. The paradigm’s wormhole generator was so far gone into insanity at this point (less than 0.25 attoseconds before complete thermodynamic failure), that it basically flailed around randomly. The universe’s sub-Planck lexicon had already decayed so much that its flailing appears to have churned things up enough to copy something over from another universe entirely. That’s where Subject #2 came in.

Based on some poking around in the deep archives, Subject #2 appears to come from one of our very old parent universes. I’m not sure how old, but we’re talking near-origin. (!) As far as I can tell, this thing is a ‘pegasus pony’—a high-altitude flyer—from a place called ‘Equestria’. Other details are elusive, what with how weird the archives get that close to the Wars, but this "Pony’s" basic operating gestalt is centered around an animated cartoon series, and thus it fit (both pseudo-real and somewhat in-universe) the requirements of no-O2 and cold-hardy. Not so sure about physical adept for this Subject in particular, but hey, 2/3 ain’t bad for a system so far gone.

The copy made it through just before paradigm loss. The intellifields did their job, and reformatted the human with some cartoon characteristics, allowing his survival in the vacuum.

Post-reactivation observation log is a bit depressing, but subjects kept each other in reasonable spirits, considering.

I’m…going to recommend we pull them out before final dissolution, though I know resources are tight right now. Despite the reformatting snafu, they’re both 100% alive and well. Subject #1 would probably make a decent Agent or Op (though he’s a bit old for a high-level retrain), and Subject #2…well…she’s just so cute…

Marked and Sealed, Oversight Agent 42028

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End of Report. Test universe is cleared, temporal links dropped, dissolution complete via ‘Big Rip’ effects, no cross-universe interference detected. Further paradigm research underway, but for now this file is considered closed.

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Director’s addendum: recommendation taken. Subjects pulled ~4 hours before final dissolution. Subject #2 munitions-class cuteness confirmed.

Comments

[BenRG]

"Munitions-class cuteness". I'm going to have to remember that one!

[archonix]

1925916 Likewise.

Derpy lives!

Overall that was a little confusing, a little tragi-comic and a little... intriguing. Makes me wonder just what's going on.

[alamais]

1925916
What else is it when something's so cute it makes you go HNNNNG?

1926301
Indeed...
Hopefully the other stuff I write in this world (or rather, far in the past of this world) will be less confusing, but now that I've written this, I feel like I might actually do a sequel at some point. I like my crazy technobabble future.