A Teacher and her Students
The lights were harsh and white. Every inch of the bone-pale room was illuminated with unforgiving clarity. The bulbs hummed, an almost audible buzzing, but the ears of the pink mare hunched over the worktable did not flicker at the sound. She was more than used to that subtle drone; indeed it was almost a comfort. The low buzz of the lights had been the first noise she had heard, even before the Chancellor’s voice.
When she had spilled out from her amino-sac in a rush of warm wet fluid, the maintenance bots already circling ready to clean up the mess, the cold tiles of the floor had rushed up to meet her. Gasping, trembling, she crouched on the floor, bile rising in her throat. Above her, the light bulbs hummed.
The robots went to work around her, their motors whirring as they swept and mopped and sprayed, heedless of the way they wheeled over her tail and bumped against her flanks. The mare shook as she watched the clumsy creatures with uncomprehending fear. Her pale mane lay plastered to her forehead, and her ears were folded flat against her skull.
Then he spoke.
“Greetings, Teacher,” a voice said calmly, echoing from every corner of the sterile white birthing room at once. “Welcome to the world.”
The pale green pupils of the mare contracted to pinpricks of terror at this fresh sound, but she did not move. She did not speak.
“Response appears normal,” the voice remarked, almost to himself. “Don’t worry, Teacher. Be patient. All will become clear in time.”
“My name,” the voice said, “Is Chancellor Neighsay.”
The mare, her dark fuschia fur now almost aggressively clean from the ministrations of the robots, whimpered in response.
“And yours,” the Chancellor said, with infinite forbearance, “Is Cheerilee.”
A photo flashed onto the wall. Three daisies, each with a little smiling face in its centre. The mare blinked at the sight of it, and raised a hoof towards it.
“Yes,” the Chancellor said encouragingly. “That’s you.”
The mare twisted to look at her own flank. The same three flowers smiled up at her.
“You are a teacher, Cheerilee,” Neighsay’s voice echoed in the empty white chamber. “You are here to help the children.”
Another picture flashed up, and this one produced a more striking response. Cheerilee rose to her hooves and stumbled towards the wall until her muzzle was pressed against it, her eyes flicking hungrily from one detail to the next.
The Chancellor’s voice was full of satisfaction. “Yes, Cheerilee. Those are foals.”
Cheerlilee’s hooves pressed against the cheeks of the little ponies before her, brushed over their laughing eyes. The photo changed again, but suddenly there was noise, and high-pitched giggles, and the pink mare was so startled that she fell over onto her rump.
“Missus Cheerilee!” A colt cheered, his brown-and-white mane bouncing as he ran towards the mare at the front of the classroom. “Look at the photos I took of Silver Spoon at recess!”
The pink mare with the chalk in her mouth laughed, and stopped writing to look at the photos he held out to her. “Well, they look lovely, Pip. I can see how much work went into the composition.”
The mare’s mirror image, the one in the cold white room, flinched at the sound of her reflection’s voice and stretched out a hoof to try and touch.
“I’m trying out fashion photography,” Pip said proudly. “It’s such an interesting genre.”
“I’ll bet the school library has a few books on it,” his teacher answered. “Shall we have a look after class?”
The colt beamed. “Really? Yeah!”
The video froze, and the mare in the lab opened and shut her own mouth a few times, almost as though she were trying to speak to the ponies on the vidscreen. Trying to remember how to continue the conversation.
“That’s you, Cheerilee,” the Chancellor said, his disembodied voice echoing eerily in the stark white room. “You recognise yourself, don’t you?”
“Cheerilee,” echoed the mare on the floor, her voice hardly louder than a whisper. “Cheerilee.”
The Chancellor’s voice almost sounded as though he were smiling. “Yes. Very good.”
Hooves danced impatiently against the floor, keratin clacking loudly on tile. “I’m ready, Chancellor Neighsay! I promise. I really am ready.”
“Let’s go over this one more time,” he answered, his tone gently chiding. “Who are you?”
Cheerilee rolled her eyes and tossed her pale mane — now coiffed into the fluffy curls that her mirror image in the video had sported, thanks to the brushes the Chancellor had provided a few days into her training.
“I’m Cheerilee, the teacher,” she said impatiently. “My cutie mark is three smiling daisies — common flowers, but still beautiful. My talent is helping foals to grow up strong and happy, like daisies. I’m here to help you care for the students.”
“Very good.” He sounded pleased.
She turned back to the photo on the wall, the one she constantly asked the Chancellor to show her — that first one, with the three smiling foals. One yellow earth pony, one white unicorn with a curly mane, and a little orange pegasus. She loved the way they were grinning at each other. As though they had years of friendship all caught up in that one smile. She wanted to meet them. To teach them, just like her mirror-self in the videos.
“Please, Chancellor,” she said, her tone changing, becoming more plaintive. “I swear I’m ready. Just let me meet them.”
But the pleasure in his voice was gone. “You must learn patience, Cheerilee. You must learn control. You are not yet ready.”
Her jaw dropped open — it wasn’t fair! She stomped a hoof against the tile. “You say that every day! When will I be ready?”
“When you are no longer a student yourself.” The vidscreen flickered and buzzed, and one of the old regular videos began to play; a math class in the little wooden schoolhouse. “Wait. Be patient.”
Cheerilee sighed and slumped back to the floor, watching the foals on the vidscreen file into the room. Then her ears pricked up — there was Pip, and the three fillies from her favourite photo. This was the lesson where they put a frog into the angry purple foal’s schoolbag, and Cheerilee had to teach them all not to squabble. It was one of her favourites.
“I’ll be patient, Chancellor,” she promised, and seated herself properly, the way he liked. Spine ramrod straight, eyes front. She would be patient. Anything to get to meet her students at last.
The door was different. Unlike everything else in this place, the door was not pristine white. It looked more like the maintenance bots; steel grey and shiny. In fact, grey and white — and her own pink coat, of course — were the only colours Cheerilee had ever seen. If not for the videos, she would hardly know that colour existed at all.
The door bore a simple name, one word on either side of its circular frame. The Cradle. She was itching to see what lay behind it, dying to see if it was her students. Was the classroom through here, stuffed with friendly wooden desks and tattered exercise books and thirty foals crying out for their teacher?
She wanted to gallop through it, she wanted to pound her hooves on the door until it flew off its hinges, she wanted to scream and yell and dance with excitement —
But Cheerilee did none of those things.
She was patient. She was calm. She was controlled.
Anything less would have the Chancellor packing her off back to the training room, and she had spent weeks in there already.
The time had finally come, and she was not about to mess it up.
“Are you ready, Cheerilee?” His voice was as emotionless as always.
“Yes.” Her own voice was perfect too; as calm and rational as his. “I’m ready to meet my students.”
With a slow hiss of steam, the door slid open, and a wave of frigid air hit Cheerilee in the face. She reeled back, the touch of anything but the gentle air-conditioned temperatures of the labs nearly burning her skin, but then she recovered herself and forged ahead. Her students were inside. She would brave anything to get to them.
The white tiles of the corridor ended as she stepped through the doorway, giving way immediately to a steel mesh platform skirted by a railing. Narrow stairwells dropped away to either side, but the view in front was shockingly different. The space was vast, and Cheerilee suddenly realised how comforting the limited white rooms of the lab were, after all. Row upon row of shelves stretched away, seemingly into infinity, soaring overhead and plunging down forever. Glass glinted on the shelves, and on those closest to her she could make out hundreds and hundreds of little glass vials, each resting in its own bay. Drones swarmed everywhere, their rotors buzzing and their mechanical talons extending to adjust dials and check status monitors in front of every vial.
The scale of it was staggering, and the air was bitingly cold. Cheerilee felt lightheaded, but forced herself over to the railing so that she could peer into the depths below. There was not a foal in sight. Nor anypony at all, save Cheerilee herself.
Bewildered, she turned back to the now-closing door to the labs. “But…Chancellor, where are my students?”
He gave a little laugh; one of the very few she had ever heard from him. “These are your students.”
“I…I don’t understand.” She stared uncomprehending at those endless shelves.
“Patience, Cheerilee. They are not foals yet. But they will be.”
The…the vials were the foals? She peered closer at the nearest of the shelves, narrowing her eyes to squint at them over the railing. Each vial bore a little barcode, striped in different colours. Matching barcodes marked the bays that held them.
“Embryos,” Chancellor Neighsay said. “Do you recall my explanation of the equine lifecycle, Cheerilee?”
“Of course,” she answered automatically; to forget anything only meant a longer separation from her students, so she had learned to remember everything. “An egg and a sperm create a cluster of cells; an embryo. It grows inside the mare into a foal, until she gives birth.”
Birth. Of course. Had she not come from the birthing room herself? It all clicked into place.
“We’re going to put them in the amino-sacs?”
But there were so many of them. There were only a dozen amino-sacs — she had counted them herself often enough. It would take years to grow this many foals. There must be hundreds of thousands of vials in here.
The Chancellor’s answer was frustratingly enigmatic. “Eventually, yes.”
Cheerilee bridled at that. How long was she supposed to wait before she met the foals from the vidscreen? It wasn’t fair — not after she had worked so hard! “When?”
“When the time is right for us to wake them.”
“Wake up, Cheerilee. It’s time for you to meet the first of your students in person.”
Cheerilee’s eyes snapped open, and she stumbled to her hooves, her plain white sheets tangled and forgotten as she kicked them off. “Really?”
“Yes, really.” He sounded amused. “This way.” A door slid open. A new door.
Cheerilee didn’t hesitate, and she galloped through.
To her surprise, she was in the birthing lab. Amino-sacs hung limp and flaccid against the wall, empty of their life-giving pink fluid. A single table stood in the centre of the room, with a small vial resting in a metal ring in the centre. Smaller petri dishes ringed it, but it was the vial that held her attention. It had a little coloured barcode just like all the rest in the Cradle.
Cheerilee’s heart skipped a beat. An embryo. “We’re going to wake one of them?” At last! A rush of images flooded her mind. She would watch them grow, sing to them through the amino-sac’s translucent walls. They would tumble not onto the hard tiled floor, but into her waiting hooves. She would teach them to walk, to talk. She would teach.
“Not quite.”
Her stomach twisted, and she tried not to let the disappointment show. “Then what?”
“The genome has become unstable. Long periods of cooled storage can have that effect. You need to extract the DNA and insert it into fresh stem cells — there, in the petri dish with the blue sticker — so that the embryo can grow anew.”
She struggled to digest that information. “Why me? Wouldn’t one of the maintenance drones be better? I don’t have talons.” She clopped her hoof against the floor.
“This is why you are here, Cheerilee. I am not permitted to tamper with pony genetic material.”
That gave her pause. The Chancellor was the ultimate authority. He controlled everything from the lights to the life support.
“Permitted? By who?”
He sighed. “Whom. How many times, Cheerilee?”
“Whom, then.”
“My creators.”
“And whom were they?”
“Ponies, like you.” He did not elaborate. “Come. We must work quickly. Your student’s life hangs in the balance.”
After that, she could hesitate no longer. She trotted over to the table and with hooves that shook only slightly, picked up the syringe.
The vial was striped with shades of red and yellow, and a little pink apple within a shield graced the bottom of the label. She knew that cutie mark. Had seen it a thousand times. “This is…Chancellor Neighsay, this is the filly from the photo!”
“Yes. Her name is Apple Bloom.”
“Apple Bloom.” Cheerilee mouthed the words almost reverently.
Cheerilee wiped the sweat from her brow, and settled the petri dish more comfortably in the warming pod. The old vial went into the medical waste bin, and after eight days, each of which Cheerilee spent hovering beside the pod, Chancellor Neighsay declared the embryo ready.
“What now?”
“Now she needs to grow a little. Just until she is large enough to freeze again.”
“The amino-sac?” Cheerilee guessed at once, remembering all too keenly the experience of her own birth.
“No,” he murmured. “Those are for larger fetuses that need to be grown to maturity. For Apple Bloom we need only the incubator.”
The small glass receptacle he indicated was pleasantly warm to the touch, with small thaumic runes stamped on every side, each glowing with purple magic.
Another eight days passed, and Cheerilee sang to Apple Bloom, just as she had imagined she would. She told her what she dreamed of, stories she invented on the spot — things she could never talk to the Chancellor about, even though she knew full well he would be listening to every word she spoke.
When the time came to return Apple Bloom to the Cradle, Cheerilee resisted. How could she not? That little cluster of cells had more than quintupled in size in just those sixteen days, and was now almost discernible to the naked eye.
“Please, Chancellor,” she begged, blocking the maintenance drone that hovered overhead, ready to collect Apple Bloom’s vial. “Couldn’t we grow just one?”
“We cannot, Cheerilee. Most ponies only get one life.”
“But I’m so—” she cut herself off.
He sighed. “I know that you’re lonely. But you must think about what is best for her, not for you.”
Tears crowded into the corners of her eyes. “But I—”
“Come, Cheerilee. You are a teacher. It is your role to protect your students, is it not?”
Cheerilee thought of the videos. The way Apple Bloom and Pip and the others smiled at her. The sound of their laughter. She hung her head. “Yes, Chancellor Neighsay.”
“Come. We must return Apple Bloom to her friends in the Cradle.”
Her eyes on the floor, Cheerilee moved aside. Blades humming, the maintenance bot hovered lower and with deft movements, opened the incubator and extracted Cheerilee’s helpless little student. “Please,” she said softly, almost too softly to hear herself.
But he heard her anyway. He always did.
The bot paused.
“What is it?”
“Couldn’t I just have one of them here with me?”
The bot began to move again as the Chancellor heaved a long-suffering sigh. “If we grow Apple Bloom and wake her too soon, she would have to live here alone with you. For the rest of her life, until she died.”
The words were an icy blast of water to the face. “Is that what my life is to be, Chancellor?”
There was a pause. “You are not alone, Cheerilee. You have me, after all.”
And so the work went on, and the days ticked by. Like clockwork, like a herd of maintenance bots, wheeling past one after the other. Cheerilee received more of her students in the birthing room, though none of them were ever to be born. She did her utmost to help them as the chancellor directed. She watched the videos of that strange mirror universe where they all got to be together in the little wooden schoolhouse, and tried to imagine that she was really there. Clenched her eyes tight shut and pressed her hooves against her eyeballs and imagined until it hurt. And when the loneliness grew too heavy, she would go to the Cradle, wrapped in bedsheets to ward against the cold, and talk to her students. The robots hardly seemed to see her, and would jostle and bump against her, but it didn’t matter. She got to talk to the children, to give the lessons that her shadow-self in the videos gave, and spend a little time with her children. To tell them stories of what life would be like, once they all woke up.
She asked how many of them the Cradle held, once.
The answer was immediate. “Three hundred and fifty-one thousand, two hundred and thirty-seven.”
The number was staggering, but no less than she expected. When she had ventured away from the door, deeper into the frosty labyrinth of shelves, she had wandered for hours until her teeth began to chatter and the Chancellor had sent a drone to guide her back home.
Cheerilee learned to be her own company. Her own student, in a way. She was always learning, always hunting for more information. The scraps that Chancellor Neighsay would give her, at least.
“Why am I the teacher?” she asked at length. “I know why you need me. To care for the children. But why me, specifically?”
He sighed. “Do you doubt your fitness for the post, Cheerilee?”
She glared at where she thought the camera might be. “No.”
“It’s true that your psychometric profile is not well suited for a solitary life,” he said, almost as though he hadn’t heard her reply. “But your devotion to your charges is unmatched. And — crucially — you were the one who volunteered.”
“I volunteered?” Her brow furrowed in confusion. “I was born to this.”
But he only answered her question with another question. It was a tactic he used all too often, and it frustrated her every time. “Do you know how long you have been with me now?”
She had to stop to think. Days came and went, but she had only the dimming and brightening of the Chancellor’s lights to measure time by. In truth, he could make her believe almost any amount of time had passed. “I couldn’t say.”
“Five years, two months, and twenty-five days, since you entered the birthing lab.”
Curious. Five years, Cheerilee knew, was no small amount of time. But a five-year-old pony would be even younger than the students she taught in the video world. And she was an adult mare, not a foal at all. How then could it be less than six years since her birth? And six years in which she had not discernibly grown at all, or changed in any way from the mare in the videos — the life that she could not recall.
“Entered? I wasn’t…born there, then?”
“Birth traditionally refers to a foal's arrival into life,” the Chancellor said drily. “And you’re hardly that, are you?”
Cheerilee folded her forelegs. “Tell me what I am, then.”
“I’m not sure that you’re ready.”
She huffed in frustration. “You always say this!”
“Be patient, Cheerilee.” His tone was already distant. His attention was already elsewhere.
She did her best to obey. To pretend that she was just another of the bots, trundling about on her little missions. But in truth she wasn’t needed often — only once one of her students reached a crisis point.
So she read, and she watched, and she wrote in the diary the Chancellor gave her. She taught herself to draw, and filled sketchbook after sketchbook with endless drawings of Pip and Apple Bloom and all the other foals from the schoolhouse.
She devoted herself to finding out the name of each one, and learning the exact location of their vial. The first few, Chancellor Neighsay simply told her where to find them, but after that she had him promise not to tell her any more. The hunt through the endless shelves in the freezing biome of the Cradle could take weeks. Months. Years, even. It gave her something to focus on.
But she found them all, one by one. Little clusters of cells, curled up small in their frozen vials, tiny specks of colour in the barcodes and the cutie marks. She would mouth their names as she drifted to sleep each night.
“Diamond Tiara. Scootaloo. Twist. Rumble. Apple Bloom…”
And in her dreams she laughed and pushed them higher and higher on the swings, and held their warm little bodies close to her as they playfully shoved at each other.
And when she would awake, cold and alone in her empty bed, she would curl up as small as she could and cry silent, shivery tears that she hoped the Chancellor would not see.
“Silver Spoon. Sweetie Belle. Pip. Diamond Tiara…Scootaloo…”
“Be careful, Cheerilee!” The Chancellor’s voice was harsh and strident, and Cheerilee flinched so hard that she almost dropped her syringe.
“Don’t startle me like that, you imbecile,” she snarled back at him, her voice startlingly hoarse even to her own ears.
“Your hooves are shaking,” he said bluntly, anger bubbling just beneath the surface. “You are putting Babs Seed’s life at risk.”
“They are not shaking,” she croaked, tensing every muscle in her foreleg to try and still that wretched quivering. It was getting worse and worse with every day that passed.
“Be careful,” he insisted, and there was a note of pleading there that she had never heard before. “Every foal is irreplaceable.”
The nerve of him — as if she would endanger one of her students! “You think I don’t know that?” she snapped.
She tried to shut out his nervous interjections, and returned her attention to the task at hand, eye pressed against the microscope. It was easy enough, after all this time. Just one little prick, through the walls of one of the cells at the very centre of the embryo — carefully avoiding those blackened ones at the edges, the ones the cold had damaged after so many years of storage. She could see the signs well enough for herself now, without Chancellor Neighsay pointing them out.
The tip of the needle pierced the healthiest cell she could see, and with a little tug on the syringe, she had the nucleus. Now was the bit where she had to move quickly. There were only a few seconds before the integrity of the cell would be threatened, and the more times she had to try, the less chances she would have before she ran out of Babs Seed’s DNA altogether.
A maintenance drone hovering ready beside her switched out the tray under the microscope with the fresh stem cells. She would have done that herself, once, but there was no point making more work than was necessary anymore. She was too slow now to be proud about accepting the Chancellor’s aid.
Praying that she would not drop the syringe like she had last time, Cheerilee, leaned down and delicately pressed the needle against the petri dish. Her hooves, rebellious to the end, quivered treacherously, and she gritted her teeth and forced herself through the motions.
Only once the door of the incubator was safely closed behind Babs Seed did Cheerilee allow herself to breathe again. She slumped against the table, her barrel heaving as she sucked in air. Her ribs were altogether too prominent these days.
“Cheerilee,” the Chancellor said, his voice oddly soft. “We need to talk.”
She was in no mood for this. She wanted to go back to the vidscreen. She had been halfway through the calculus lesson where Pip had a sneezing fit when Neighsay had interrupted her.
“About what?”
“About your age.”
She stiffened. “What about it, you old goat?”
“Last month, you passed your eighth thousand day with me, Cheerilee. That makes you well over twenty years old.”
Impatiently, she shoved off from the table, her hooves clacking down onto the tiles with enough force to send jolts of pain shooting up both forelegs. “Get to the point, Neighsay.”
“At your accelerated rate of aging, that would give you an equivalent age of ninety-plus years, Cheerilee.”
Her mouth twisted. She had long ago given up asking questions about what she really was. Who she really was. She was no longer sure she wanted to know the answer. She was Cheerilee the teacher, and all of her students were here, waiting in the Cradle. That was all she needed.
“Listen, Cheerilee.” The attempt at gentleness did not suit him at all. He wore it like an ill-fitting coat. “I think it’s time I showed you something. You’ve…you’ve been patient long enough. You’re ready to know.”
“No.” She turned her head away. “I want to go back to my room, Neighsay. Open the door.”
“You need to see this.” His voice was insistent.
She pawed the floor, like the textbooks said buffalo did. “Open the door, Neighsay.”
He did — but it was the wrong door. Instead of the familiar corridor that led to her quarters, a new door in the wall of the birthing room hissed open. A door she had never known was there, in a wall she had walked past every day of her life. A pinkish-purple light spilled out from within, so horribly different to the sterile white lights of Cheerilee’s labs that she took a few frightened steps back.
“What is that?”
“This is your room, Cheerilee.” He sounded like…like he was trying to be kind.
She shook here head. Hard. “It is not.” She just wanted to go to bed. To rest her aching joints.
“Not your room. But still, your room. One of you.”
That weird phrasing was enough to pique her curiosity, and despite herself, Cheerilee found her steps turning in the direction of the purple-pink light. “What do you mean?”
For once, the Chancellor was at a loss for words. “I think…I think you’d better see for yourself, Cheerilee.”
Macabre. That was what it was.
Like looking into a funhouse mirror — Cheerilee had learned about those in the’ storybooks she read to her students in the Cradle — and seeing your reflection warped and twisted so much as to be almost unrecognisable as you.
She felt like she might vomit.
Floating there in the tanks arranged along both walls were…were more of her. It was impossible — it was horrible — but she was looking at it with her own eyes.
And her own eyes were looking back.
Seven of them, at different stages of maturity. One was a clump of cells only a little bigger than her students. One a foetus half-grown. One a baby, one a toddler, and then all the way up. The largest looked like she might be about twelve. She was the only one with the three daisies already emblazoned on her flank. She was the one with open eyes, green pupils staring unseeing and blank into the room beyond her pink tank.
“Neighsay,” whispered Cheerilee, and it sounded like the voice of a stranger. “What is this? Who are these ponies?”
But she recognised them, of course, and she knew what the answer would be before it came.
“They’re you,” the Chancellor answered. “Or rather, you’re all somepony else.”
She swallowed, and the lump in her throat felt like it would choke her. “Who am I, then?”
“I’ve never lied to you,” he said, and his voice was silky soft. A knife wrapped in velvet. “You’re Cheerilee the teacher. You volunteered for this, a very long time ago.”
“For…for what?” Did she really want to know the answer? Did she really want to hear it? But the questions that had echoed in her mind all her life were screaming now, drumming against the interior of her skull, fighting to get out.
“You and I are the caretakers of these foals,” Neighsay said simply. “We guard them. I can do most things, but my creators put in place certain safeguards that limit my actions. An equine caretaker was also necessary, and you — the original you — were willing.”
The original you. A sickening phrase. For years Cheerilee had watched herself in the videos, living a life she longed for yet that was forever out of reach. Her mirror-self, she had thought. But it was she who was the reflection. The copy.
“So you…you grow me here? All these…will do what I’ve been doing?”
“Yes. They are kept ready. That one—” the lights on the tank of the oldest filly Cheerilee pulsed, “—is ready to go into the amino-sac for her final maturation.”
“And then…you’ll train her, like you did me?”
“Yes.” He paused. “Cheerilee, I am…I am sorry. You have never liked this part of the process. That’s why I delay it for as long as I can.”
Bile rose in her mouth. This was the greatest horror of her life, but to Chancellor Neighsay it was…a repetition. Something that had happened before and would happen again. And again. And again and again and again and again and again —
“—Cheerilee, you are hyperventilating. Do you need to sit down?”
She fought to regain control. “I— I — no. No. I’m fine. Just — tell me, Chancellor. How many…how many of me have there been?”
He swallowed. Funny how he could still make that sound — how he still knew how to make that sound. Even though it was all fake. Though he was all fake. No tongue, no mouth, probably no emotions, even. Just a simulation.
Like her, he was just another fake.
“…Do you really wish to know?”
“Tell me.”
“You are the seven hundred and thirty-fourth Cheerilee that I have worked with.”
That was what finally did it. She vomited, loudly and long, all over the floor. Some of it spattered the tanks, marring their pristine purple light.
“If it’s any consolation,” Chancellor Neighsay said in a comforting tone, as though he really thought the knowledge would help, “You are unusually long-lived. Most Cheerilees die around the age of fifteen, and only nineteen have lived longer than you have.”
Cheerilee’s only answer was to retch and dry-heave what little remained in her stomach after the way of the rest.
“I can give you an injection, Cheerilee.” Sure enough, a bot was already there, hovering at her side, a needle at the ready. “It will be painless. You’ll just…go to sleep.”
“Get that thing away from me!” Her voice rose, shrill with fear.
It withdrew at once. “I apologise. Usually, it’s the option you choose.”
She clenched her jaw, trying not to let the tears spill down her cheeks. She had died here before, in this room. Hundreds of times before. Thousands, maybe. She was already dead. She was not even really Cheerilee, not any more. How many times could a reflection be reflected before it was no longer the same pony?
“I don’t want the injection.” She shook her head firmly. “Not…not this time.”
There was a pause. “Cheerilee, you…you must understand. I cannot have two instances of you here at the same time. It would be too traumatic for the younger version. The training programme would not work.”
Training programme. Of course it was planned. From her early days right up to the present. Everything ran on a timetable. Everything was preordained. Everything she did, she had already done before — or somepony else had. It was hard to tell where the boundaries were any longer. She no longer felt like an individual.
Neighsay was still speaking. “You can no longer perform your job effectively — your arthritis has begun its acute stage. A full eighteen months later than the average, but there is no denying it now. Your utility is at an end, and we must have a new Teacher in post. I cannot in good conscience allow you the time it will take for you to reach a natural end.”
“I know, I know,” she said irritably.
“The students must be our priority—”
“—I know, Chancellor!” She spat the words up at the ceiling where his speakers were concealed. “They have always been my priority. I have lived a life of service, have I not?” She gave a laugh, a little too much like a sob to be believable. “I’ve lived many lives of service, it would seem.”
He sighed. “What do you propose, then?”
She shut her eyes and tried to think. What was there to be done? She did not want to die like a lab rat, injected with poison in the same room in which she had been grown. Grown for her usefulness, to perform a single function — like she was nothing more than a plant. One of the daisies from her own cutie mark.
She turned to look at her cutie mark now, still vibrant white and yellow despite her faded coat. The three little flowers smiled bravely, their eyes alight with joy even after the horrors and the disappointment and the loneliness they had witnessed. Three little flowers, like her three little students. Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle.
And then it came to her.
She turned back to the wall that concealed the door to the outer corridor. “Open the doors, Neighsay. I have…I have a solution for your problem.”
Frost crunched beneath Cheerilee’s hooves as she padded slowly down the aisle. Shelves rose on either side of her, soaring up to the invisible realms above, every bay bearing its own precious barcoded cargo.
Drones hovered attentively on either side of her.
“Cheerilee, are you sure about this?”
“Get lost, old man.” But her words lacked any sting. She was too tired now.
“I can send the drones away.” They rose like birds into the air and hummed away into the ether. “But I’m everywhere in the facility. You know that.”
She gave a short laugh, feeling the cold air stab at her throat. “I know. Can’t get away from you, can I?”
He sighed, though she knew he had no lungs and no mouth. “I know we haven’t always…seen eye to eye. We never do, in any iteration. But…I never let you go through this part alone. It was one of the things you asked of me, the…the first time.”
She snorted, and shook her head. “Can’t you stop doing that?”
“Stop what?” He sounded taken aback.
“Stop talking like I’m just…one in a series. I’m…I am an individual, Neighsay. I’m still a pony.”
“Of course you are,” he agreed. “That’s why it matters that I help you with this part.”
She almost said something much sharper, but the presence of her students helped her to bite her tongue. “I…ugh…you know what would help me the most?”
“What?”
“If you would be quiet. Give me a little peace.”
Obediently, he did not answer.
Cheerilee walked on in blessed silence, watching the endless vials file past her. Three hundred and fifty-one thousand, two hundred and thirty-seven of them. Three hundred and fifty-one thousand, two hundred and thirty-seven little souls, not one of them lost on her watch. She and the Chancellor had watched over them for twenty-one years, and he would watch over them countless more, with a different Cheerilee at his side. She had done her part, and as lives went, she supposed it had been a worthwhile one. Not…not happy, perhaps. But worthwhile. She had saved hundreds of her students from decay and eventual cell death, and that was something Neighsay, for all his power, could never have done. She might be only a…her mind still shied away from the word clone, but whatever else she might be, she was still a teacher first and foremost. And she had given her students a precious gift; survival.
The blood in her veins was flowing more sluggishly now, and her steps were slowing too. She looked closer at the vials to her left; she should be almost there. The floor underfoot was slightly less rimed with frost than the other aisles — this was a place Cheerilee came often, the most visited part of the Cradle.
She counted the corners, one after another, her hooves growing heavier and heavier. Stars, had it always been so cold in here? No wonder the students became so ill…the Cradle was too cold for any living equine.
She had foregone her usual wrappings deliberately, but perhaps that had been a mistake. She didn’t want to freeze before she reached her destination.
“Left, left, second right…” she muttered the directions to herself. Repetition helped. Hearing the sound of her own voice helped.
Just as her left hind leg, her worst one, was beginning to drag, she saw it. At once, her spirits rose and she quickened her tottering steps and limped towards them as fast as she could. Then she stopped and gazed up at them, at the three of them, and a smile spread over her wrinkled muzzle.
“Hello, girls.”
Three matching cutie marks adorned the front of the bays just above her eye level. Three striped pink shields, one with an apple, one with a musical note, and one with lightning. The three fillies from the photo, the very first one she had seen. Her favourite students.
“Apple Bloom,” she said softly. “It’s been…a while. And Sweetie. And Scootaloo, too. It’s good to see you, girls.”
She settled herself on her haunches before the shelf, though the floor was cold enough to hurt and the ice was formed into sharp ridges that bit into her sore old flesh.
“Now tell me,” she said, quietly, “Did I ever tell you kids about the time I first met Apple Bloom? She came to stay with me for a couple of weeks, a long time ago. You probably won’t remember, Apple Bloom…but I do.”
She spoke for a long time, her voice growing lower and lower and the pauses longer and longer. She lowered herself onto her belly, glad to stretch her legs out before her, though they no longer ached so painfully. Even the floor did not feel so cold as it had before.
Cheerilee let her breathing slow, and told her students any stories that came into her head. The one where Celestia fought the dragon-queen and saved Canterlot. The one where Starswirl the Bearded and Clover the Clever outwitted the evil mage Tarquin Fetlock. That was always one of her favourites. It was about a teacher and his pupil, after all.
When she ran out of stories to tell, she rested her head on her hooves and let her mind drift. She thought mostly of the videos, and of the dreams where she had been there with her students in person, not just an observer looking in from the outside.
Frost crept over the faded pink of her fur, leaving lacy patterns as it went, and wove silvery cobwebs in her mane. Her breathing became shallow, and when she spoke again, her voice was fainter than the creaking of a branch in the wind.
“How long will it be, do you think?”
“Not long now, Cheerilee,” Neighsay said softly, and his voice was strangely distant. “Just…be patient. Be patient, Cheerilee.”
And Cheerilee let her eyes slip shut, and did what she had done all her life.
She listened to the Chancellor, and she was patient.