First Chapter and Last Chapter
I can see. I know what's in front of me, to the sides of me, and I can just as easily figure out what's behind and above me. It's not really that hard, I just look up or twist my neck so I can look back. I can see well. I know where everything is, I've studied it. Everything. Not a thing escapes my sight, I see them all. Not even the things that don't want to be seen, I see them too. Charles doesn't see some of the things but I do.
What did I expect anyway? Charles is a moron, he doesn't know left from right. Lavender is much better than Charles. She sees what I see. The world is a funny place. Some ponies see things that others don't, and nopony can ever get the full picture. But I will. I've studied the world, and I know.
The first time my eyes opened I saw it all and took it in, but what I first saw wasn't all that was there. After a few years I found things that existed that I never knew of before. For instance, there is dirt underneath the grass. I didn't even mean to find it, but I did. Just dug my hoof into the grass and there it was, the brown substance. Charles said it was called dirt, and although he was an idiot, I didn't know what to call it so I went with what he said. Lavender didn't know what it was so Charles' name was final.
The next day I looked in a tree, and I found another brown thing. There weren't just leaves after the thick stump, there were thinner stumps that held the leaves. Charles called them branches. He said that they were brown just like him. He told me that everything had an original name. He called these names "colors" and that each one was different. Some things were red, or green. He spent most of his time by a tree, underneath its shadow to protect himself from the light-giver. Charles called it the sun, but I didn't like that name. Neither did Lavender. But the others seemed to like it. I asked Charles how the light-giver made everything bright, but he didn't know.
Charles taught me everything I needed to know about colors and the things I could see. He told me what each one was named or what each one did. It wasn't long before I knew just about everything he did. And at that point Charles was just a moron who enjoyed talking to himself and staring off into the distance. Every time I'd ask him a new question he would just say he didn't know.
Lavender and Charles were the only ponies that I knew well, I didn't pay much attention to the rest. There was Click, the orange pony who lived far away from me. He lived near Turnip. Turnip was always causing trouble, poking at the flowers or worrying about the gardens.
Sometimes the air would move and Charles would call it wind. When I asked him where it came from he said he didn't know. Of course he didn't know, he's an idiot.
Across from Turnip there was another stallion with a unicorn horn. He was the only unicorn that was alive, and he did most of the tasks that required precision. We relied on him to do anything that required magic. His name was Cosmic. He didn't talk very much or interact with the rest of the world, but he helped out when we asked him to.
It was a nice day as all the days were. The "sun" was shining brightly as it did every day and there wasn't any wind blowing. After a good long rest of keeping my eyes closed while the light-giver was out, I felt refreshed. Every day I'd take a walk around the area. It wasn't too big. I measured the distance from my patch of grass to Turnip's once. It took me three hundred steps to get from my patch to her patch. And that didn't even take very long.
There was one tree, the little brown pole that came up out of the ground and turned into a green ball. Then there was a small structure made of wood near one of the trees. Charles called it a bench. They were designed to be sat on, but nopony ever sat on it. We were too busy.
I trotted down the carved pathway. Everypony traveled on a certain line of grass so much that the grass eventually flattened out and made a clear line. I said my greeting to lavender as I passed her. She was tending to some flowers, pouring some clear on them. Clear came from the small hole in the middle of the land. Right in the middle of the grass there was a small hole that had clear in it. At first I had named it brown, because it looked brown when I saw it. But then Lavender took some out of the hole and it wasn't brown anymore. I could see straight through it. It was clear, so that's what I named it.
Every day after I found the hole I trotted to it after waking up. I put a hoof in it and moved it around a bit. Clear was interesting. It didn't have a shape, it just took up the area that hadn't been taken up already. And I couldn't hold it, it would just fall out of my hooves. I could put it into my mouth though, and it would be held there. Clear doesn't taste like anything though. It was like I was just putting more saliva in my mouth, but less thick.
Everything needed clear. Lavender and Turnip gave it to the grass and the flowers and the other green things that game out of the dirt. They ate clear, too, and so did I. If I didn't have clear for a long time my body would make me have some. I didn't know what it was about clear, but I needed it, or else I felt sick.
I trotted to the hole and stopped to put my hoof in. The clear moved away. It was scared of my hoof, so it let my hoof take some of its empty space. I laughed at the clear because it was so scared before, but it just showed me laughing, and I didn't want to laugh at myself. Charles called clear something else but I wasn't going to listen to Charles about everything. He's an idiot.
I came to the end of the path, where Click and Turnip stayed. They both had small little gardens and patches of tall grass where they slept. The middle of the patch was flattened down where they slept. They were nice ponies. Turnip smiled at me and handed me one of her daisies, which I promptly ate. Cosmic was busy feeding some flowers. His horn was glowing while he poured clear onto the flowers, and they drank it. He didn't look at me or talk to me. He never did. I didn't greet him either, he didn't deserve my greetings. I trotted back to my side of the world.
Charles was there, looking out into the distance. I didn't know what he was looking at exactly, but some "wind" was blowing and causing my mane to billow. He looked up at me and back out into the distance. I looked where he was looking, but there was nothing of value. I knew as much as he did that there was nothing out over there.
I trotted away from Cosmic, leaving him to do whatever he pleased. Lavender was out by the clear, filling up a "bucket", as Charles called it. She asked we if I wanted any, like she always did. I took a sip I thanked her like I always did and trotted back to my side of the world. Darkness came soon after. The light-giver went away and I couldn't see anything very well. It did that every once in a while. I got into my patch of grass and closed my eyes, and when they opened again the light-giver was up again.
It was interesting, really. There was the light-giver, and then there was the sky. Charles said that after the sky came "space", and that I could see it when the light-giver went away. I looked at "space" once, and it looked exactly like the sky except black. There were small dots of light, some bigger than the others. Charles said those were the other planets. They were far away, and small. I couldn't imagine going that far.
Nothing changed much. We were going to build a small house out of the branches of some of the trees, and it was my job to collect them. I didn't like to collect the branches, but I did. I grabbed any of them that had fallen and put them into a small pile. When we had enough we were going to build a small cover to protect from the light-giver. That way we could close our eyes whenever we wanted to. Sometimes the light-giver didn't go out for quite a while.
As I picked the branches I looked up at the sky. It was so big and far away. One time I even climbed a tree to the top and tried to touch the sky, but I couldn't.
One time I had even trotted to the end of the universe. I felt it, too. The universe wasn't too big. The only thing I couldn't get to was space or the sky, but I knew those couldn't go on for too long.
Charles called to me from under the shade of a tree, so I joined him.
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The scientists moved around the area. They all had their lab coats on, and most of them had a clipboard. One of the unicorns tended to a machine with multiple buttons, and others looked at an array of screens. Each scientist was working on some sort of machine. Some of them gave off of steam, with tubes coming out from the side.
In the middle of the room stood the crux of the entire project. A large box. Tubes led into the box and out of the box, some of them going underneath the box and coming up from under it. Some of the tubes fed oxygen, and others water. Some of them just held air.
The entire room centered around the box. And outside of the room was a sign that said,"Test Room 5". It was a test indeed. A successful test, too.
Three years ago the test box had been built, and five ponies had been placed within it, their memories totally wiped. They wanted to see if by confining them behind walls they could create a false sense of what the universe was.
They secretly put oxygen and water into the box. The sky and space were both created using images, and the sun was just a bright light hung from the roof of the box. After a few years of testing the five ponies inside had all accepted the fact that the universe was only as large as the box itself. Because they could not see anything past the box, the only universe they knew was the box.
Charles was an undercover scientist, volunteering to monitor the test subjects for the years that the experiment would take place.
Three years later, the results became final. As the scientist galloped around Test Room 5, they realized that they had finally done it. They had convinced five ponies that the entire universe lay inside that one box.
This result answered the question that had stimulated the entire experiment.
The scientists had been digging for the answer for a long time. With the final results in hoof, they could finally come to a conclusion. They had been able to convince five ponies that the universe only extended as far as the boundaries allowed.
A couple hours later all the scientists found themselves outside of Test Room 5 and outside the entire scientific facility. Each one stared up at the night sky.
They had always thought that space was infinite.
But the experiment taught them something.
Take five ponies and put them in a box. Never tell them anything or show them anything about a universe existing outside the box, and they'll believe the box is the universe.
Take the entire pony species and put them in Equestria. They'll believe that space is infinite.