“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

The giant blast door leading to the AI core sealed behind me as I tuned my pipbuck’s radio to the frequency that the computer told me to. The section I had been sealed into was more decrepit than the section above, which now looked like it had been purposefully been cleaned to lead ponies in. The walls ahead of me were covered in a myriad of black and crimson stains, painted by the hooves of long dead ponies. Well, I hope they are dead.

The image my pipbuck projected into my vision flickered for a moment before a line spread across it. I wondered what it was doing just before it blipped away, along with all the other objects in my vision. I waited a moment for everything to come back, starting to wonder if whatever frequency she gave me was supposed to kill my pipbuck completely. At that thought, I went ridged. Goddesses, what if this is how she lures everypony to their doom! Fuck, why hadn’t I thought about the possibility that this itself could be a trap, and I’m now stuck in it. I relaxed when the images in my vision came back, in pink instead of the normal green this time.

“Hi!” the small image of a pink filly looked around in the bottom right of my vision, around where my Ammo counter used to be. “When you were out, I had my robotic friend integrate with your pipbuck's software, allowing me to slip in a backdoor through your broadcast receiver’s programming. So now I can hack into your vision spell! Pretty cool, huh!”

“Yeah, sure.” I grumbled, happy that she hadn’t left me for dead, but this meant I’d still have to deal with her. “So, what the hell do you want me to do again?”

“You need to re-prime the main circuit breakers so you can jump start the main reactor.” She smiled as a weird triangle thing showed up on the navigation in my vision. “I’ve marked the reactor maintenance room on your map, so you shouldn’t have trouble finding it.” The color of the display quickly shifted to red. “And don’t try to deviate, if you do, then I will punish your friend.” After she finished, everything switched back to pink. “Are we clear?”

“You should know that he’s not my friend.” I trot forward slowly, looking around the hallway as we approached a T shaped junction. I stopped and looked left and right, wondering where to go before shaking my head and pulling up my pipbuck. She said she had given me a map, so…press this button and, here it is! The picture was not what I expected. It looked like a maze, just like the ones from the foals section of the old world newspapers. The plotted path wound me through room after room until we reached all the way at the other side.

“You should probably head right. At least, that’s what the map says.” The computer filly was getting annoying quickly, so the quicker I get this done, the faster we can leave. Unless…

“Hey, if it was this easy, why haven’t you just used your robot to turn the thing back on?” I turned left, following where it told me to. The filly tilted it’s head as it sat there, probably trying to formulate an answer for that.

“Upon your eight path correction, you will find a blockage, one not even my robotic Iron Will would be able to reach even if I used all my reserves up. You will have to take a maintenance shaft to circumvent it.” She sounded so mechanical with that response, like the earlier personality was just gone now. “I will be leaving your broadcast range soon and devoting all of my remaining resources to my power reserves.” A small clock popped up in the corner, counting down from thirty. “You have until the clock runs out to restart the generator, or you and your friend will die down here.”

“I told you, he’s not my friend!” I groaned, an odd idea popping into my head. “Quick question, but how exactly are you supposed to kill us if your power runs out?” Maybe I could just wait her out.

“The blast door I shut behind you when you left the core, there is one at each research intersection. When the power fails, I will no longer be able to hold them up, and they will shut forever, locking you and… the other, inside.” The pipbuck flickered to blue for a moment. “I don’t want to die. Please, save me.”

“You are a machine, you can’t die, you just turn off.” I was doing so well in watching what I said, but then again, she couldn’t hurt me, not if she wanted me to turn the generator on.

Her image changed to red. “I’m not just a machine! I’m a pony, just like you!” She flipped back to blue again. “It’s not my fault that I was just made artificially.” And with that, she started crying, the image of her fading as I walked around the next corner. My pipbuck swapped back to it’s normal green pallet as I stopped and stared down the hallway. The shape of a pony staring from one of the dark rooms down at the end caught my eye before it slowly stepped back into the darkness.

“Well, this looks like it’s going to be fun.” I spoke up, wanting to keep the eerie silence away before it got overwhelming. I tried to keep my hoofsteps light as I hobbled my way across the crimson stained floor, finding it hard to be subtle when I’ve got one hoof tied up. This whole contract sucks worse than the time those slavers in the badlands double crossed me.

“Come on up, I found a door, might be something valuable.” Mocking Predious did little to help other than to fan the flames of my burning hatred of him. The sound of a tin can bouncing down the hallway made me freeze, the rusted object rolled to a stop just in front of the room I had seen the shape in. “You know what, you think that’s something to be proud of?” I hobbled to the end of the hallway, balancing myself on two hooves while I used my free forehoof to kick the can into the dark room before me. “Tin Can’s aren’t hard to move. You don’t scare me with your…”

The door to the room slammed shut hard enough the glass windows beside it shattered, making me bite my lip as I turned the direction the triangle in the compass told me to and continued on without another word. Whatever IT is, it proved it’s point. I’ve just got to focus on getting this done as fast as possible.

“Just around a few more hallways, then it’s the flip of a switch and I can get out of here.” I tried to ignore the creaking from each office door in the hall as they swung shut just as I passed them. I felt myself start to shiver as warm, damp air that I had been in was replaced slowly with cold air, my breath becoming visible as I made it to the end of this hallway. I braced myself for immediate weirdness as I turned the corner to the next hall, wondering what fucked up occurrence would be waiting for me.

I wasn’t disappointed.

Arranged along either side of the hallway, office chairs had been set out where the corpses of the original staff each neatly sat, their hollow, dead eye sockets stared at me as my legs froze up, refusing to move. The skeleton closest to me canted it’s head slowly, as if to be studying me, sending a shiver up my spine and into my brain, telling it to get my flank out of here. Finally my legs relented, allowing me to hobble slowly at first, speeding to a quick hop as I entered the morbid display.

I kept my eyes locked on to where the hallway curved just out of sight, not looking at the century and a half dead ponies. I knew their heads followed me as I got past them, the creaking their bones gave off as they turned felt like it was sheering right through my resolve. Then I felt something on my flank, and made the mistake of turning to look. They were reaching out for me as I moved past them, their bony hooves pressing at me from all directions. So I did what any mare does instinctively, and bucked hard.

I let out a scream as the muscles in my busted leg torqued at the bone while I bucked, but the sound of crunching bones only drove my body to work harder at getting past them. The next hallway was finally in sight, and I was desperate enough that I pushed myself through them. Unfortunately, in my haste to get out to the hallway, I turned the wrong way. It wasn’t until a few feet in did I find myself blocked off by a mound of dirt that came through the ceiling. I turned quickly, hobbling back out into the crossing where my eye caught a glimpse of the hallway I had just come through.

It was empty. No staring bodies, no chairs. Just crimson stains and the silence that’s been my only companion. I breathed a sigh of relief, taking a moment to let my heart slow in my chest before anything else. I also decided to take this time to finally swap out the rounds in my rifle, seeing as murdering anything alive down here was seeming like more and more of a certainty.

My ear perked as the sound of slow hoofsteps came from down the hallway, intermixed was the sound of something heavy being drug. In the back of my mind, the sound clawed at my instincts to run, pressuring for me to just give in right then, while my wasteland experience told me to just press on forward. The choice, while the obvious one, wasn’t nearly as easy as one would assume it to be.

The next few hallways were more like the originals, pretty much empty other than the smears of blood all over it. The one thing that separated this hallway from the rest though, was that it was marginally darker, as only one of the light panels near the middle was working. I continued my way down the hallway, the hoofsteps and dragging behind me still sounding far enough off that I didn’t have to worry. At the end of the hallway, I noticed that both sides of the intersection were covered by rubble, but the left path had a heavily faded sign that held an arrow and read: Reactor Level.

“Well then, now I just have to find that maintenance hatch.” I whispered to myself as I looked about. The only thing that looked remotely like a hatch was a grating on the outside wall, and as I looked it over, I figured I might just be able to fit myself inside. The sound of my pursuer was getting louder, the grinding noise it made raked at my ears and made my coat stand on end. I quickly used a forehoof to pry off the cover and stuck my head in, immediately met with a rank stench and a pool of sickly green sludge. The odd thing about the sludge, was that it looked like it was boiling.

“Yeah, fuck that.” I laughed to myself, forgetting to control my volume. As I used a fetlock to cover my muzzle, I knew it was too late to do anything about it. The hoofsteps and the dragging sped up, audibly coming closer. “Think think think! Ugh!” I tapped at my head with my hoof before getting an idea. I tossed the grating down the hall to where the approaching sound was, spinning and ducking into an office directly across from me, shutting the door as softly as I could and biting down on the deadbolt lever, twisting it into place.

I took a step back as the quick hoofbeats slowed as they came into the hallway outside. I used my fetlock to cover my muzzle in advanced this time, trying my best to keep my heart from pulsing out of my chest. The heavy, slow breaths of whatever lay outside this room made me try my best to keep my breathing synced up. There was a heavy knocking at the door that startled me. Even though having my gun would have made me feel a whole lot better, I kept myself completely still as the door handle jiggled violently as whatever it was had obviously not fallen for my rouse. I cursed myself for ever boxing myself into this situation, the hope that I would somehow make it out of this cursed place draining quickly from my mind.

As quickly as the monster had approached, it left. My hoof still covering my muzzle until when I swiveled my ears, I could no longer hear the heavy steps. Finally I breathed a sigh of relief, allowing my legs to give out from under me. As I took a moment to rest, the whining of a rotary fan on a terminal spun up, the soft beep of a terminal booting up playing into my ears. I looked behind me to find a large wooden desk with a fairly nice looking terminal set in the middle of it, the green OS giving off a soft light into the room.

“Let’s see if we can’t find another way around.” I whispered to myself, putting my fetlock up again for extra insurance nopony would hear. Trotting over to the old computer, I hoofed at it’s keyboard, finding that the user of this computer hadn’t even bothered with a password. Which was fortunate, because computers just aren’t my sort of thing. I tried to bring up the help directory so I could pull up a list of available topics, but instead, a large file was brought onto the screen. It was obviously the records of something they had been working on before the war, but the name and description that intrigued me.

Project HARMONY Data Terminal #2
User: Dr. Panacea

Outline: Project HARMONY is the brainchild of all six Ministry Mares with the single goal to create artificial life from their combined D.N.A. in hopes that it would be able to serve as the bearer of any and all of the elements of harmony should something happen to the original six holders.

I couldn’t help myself as I opened the file, finding that it was an extensive set of Datalog entries, charts, graphs, and personal project journals. With my mind still reeling from the horrors I’d observed, my curiosity steered me to finding out exactly what they were working on here. Opening the ‘Project Lead Journal’, I sat down and tried to read, though, most of the entries were listed as corrupted, a few proved still readable.

Entry #1

Day 1 of Project Harmony went by without too much incident. As soon as we received the green light from upstairs, Dr. Cobalt and Dr. Berg got to work in finding the proper way of combining the DNA samples given without it destroying itself in the process. As the six Element bearers are all mares, it has been rather difficult and half the team is currently banging their heads against the wall in frustration. We’ve been given the deadline of having a viable sample ready by the end of the month, and been told that funding will not be an issue. This is great news to us, as most of us have come from smaller projects with inadequate funding. I myself know we will be able to do great things with this project!

I scrolled down to the next readable entry, not satisfied with the information that journal kept. For all I know, this thing they were planning is what’s been out roaming these hallways. I need something more than guess work about it, like a weakness, or information on it’s tactics. Anything to keep myself from joining the many dead littering this place.

Entry #68

Success! Our hard work has finally paid off! Everypony in the lab is out celebrating tonight from the fact we managed to birth a healthy foal from the Surrogate Mother process. The team has voted on naming her Harmony after the project’s name, and I can not be more delighted. She has a light grey coat and pretty emerald eyes, which I know for a fact has something to do with Ms. Applejack’s DNA, but it is still unclear how Harmony ended up with her grey coat. Perhaps it is a recessive trait in one of the six families Harmony now belongs to. Ah well, what’s important is after months of hard work we finally get to uncork that bottle of champagne Dr. Humerus bought for such an occasion. Well… they do. I can’t bring myself to leave Harmony’s isolation chamber. Watching her sleep peacefully these last few hours has made the last few months of stress worth it.

There was a picture displayed under the entry of a tiny foal, wrapped up in a blanket and sleeping in some sort of plastic domed display. As far as I could tell, it was just like every other foal I’d ever seen. Nothing so special about it.

Entry #182

Harmony’s annual physical check up came back all in the green, and Dr. Berg is still running the blood samples we took, but everything seems nominal for now. I also checked up on the small scrape she had gotten at her birthday party yesterday after she fell in the hallway while Miss Pinkie Pie and her were playing chase. Hard to believe that Three years ago yesterday Harmony was born.

As before, there was a picture attached. This time is was of what I assumed to be the whole team of researchers, standing around a table where there was a large cake with the number 3 written on it. An excited looking young filly stood on a chair and stared in wonder at the large confection. Upon going over the picture again, I noticed that two of the ponies in the picture weren’t wearing coats, and were in fact, ponies whose pictures I had seen plastered all over the wasteland. Fluttershy, from the Ministry of Peace, and Pinkie Pie, from the Ministry of Morale.

I clicked down to the next entry.

Entry #339

With the completion of the test chamber, and the arrival of the elements of harmony themselves, the whole team is excited for the big day tomorrow. The last 5 years of hard work comes down to 9 am tomorrow, when Harmony will attempt to manipulate the elements both individually and, if all goes well, all together. I can tell that she is nervous about passing this test, so I went to talk to her in her room. I reassured her that even if she fails, we are all still so very proud of the young filly she’s grown to be, and that she is loved by each and every one of us. Her fear notwithstanding, the other researchers and I have the utmost confidence that she will pass, and I myself, know that she can do it.

It seems that entries with pictures tended to hold up better, as this one had yet another attached to it. It was the whole group again, but this time each of the ministry mares were proudly in attendance. The war at this time must have just gotten worse, seeing as everypony in the photo looked extremely worn and tired. Well, everypony except for Harmony, who smiled brightly at the camera, the one eye not hidden by her mane looked like it contained all the bundled joy that’s absent from our current time. Goddesses, what I wouldn’t give to feel happy like that, especially with the events of tonight playing out how they are.

Entry #340

I am sorry to report that Project HARMONY was a failure. It seems something more than DNA of our Ministry leaders is required to use the elements. This morning, Harmony was taken from her room and shipped off to another facility without our consent. They told us that it was for containment and eventual termination, but she’s not just some project they can dispose of, she’s a pony for Luna’s sake!

Everypony here is terribly depressed that after the past five years we’ve spent with her, she could just be taken as quickly as she was. My own personal feelings aside, it leaves the question that now that Harmony is gone, what will happen to the research group? She’s turned us into much more than coworkers, she made us a family.

Entry #348

Even though the others and I had been ordered to clean out or workstations and shut down our terminals, Dr. Patch thought it would be a good idea this afternoon to use his to try and trace our project files back through the system to find out where they took Harmony. Turns out, he ended up accessing some information that was for privileged eyes only, and the Ministry of Morale goons came down and arrested him.

As the new head of research of this facility, I have decided to keep Harmony’s bedroom untouched. It’s a good place to reflect on things while I prepare for the installation of our new A.I. project. A.I. isn’t my specialty, but I am told that it will have the personality and mental functions equivalent to a young foal, so my experience of working so close to Harmony the last few years is expected to be quite useful to them.

Her removal has weighed heavily on all of us the last few days, and my hope is that they keep her alive so when the war is over they will let us see her again. I have given up a lot in my life to Project Harmony. My wife left me in a divorce, my friends and family are now being transferred to the far reaches of equestria, and the one pony who truly made it all worth it, was taken from me. Harmony is the closest thing I will ever have to a daughter, and my hope is that one day she’ll know just how much her ‘father’ loved her.

I shook my head and wiped at my tearing eyes. “Goddesses I’ve gone soft. Feeling sorry for a few one hundred and fifty year dead jerks who probably had a big part in the creation of the wasteland in the first place.” The terminal in front of me sparked and died, startling me and making me jump back. As my hooves hit the floor, the odd sound of a hollow space came from under them. I spun around and hooved the carpet back, reading the faded words ‘maintenance access only’. Hoofing it open, I was delighted to see that it was a simple set of clean ductwork that traveled a good distance.

I carefully lowered myself down into it, finding that there was just enough space to shimmy through it. It took some doing, but as I reached the other end, I felt relieved that if that blockage had kept me on that side, maybe whatever had been chasing me would be trapped away from me. I pressed my head against the hatch, pushing the weighted hatch up to find myself in a fairly plain looking bedroom. The bed was too small to be for anypony other than a filly, so I had to have just broken into Harmony’s old room. My eyes were immediately drawn to the yellow box hanging on the wall with a butterfly print on it.

“Finally! A break for once.” I groaned as I hobbled my way to it, sitting down and pulling it off the wall with my hoof. I set it down on the small, dusty bed and opened it up, Inside was the most gorgeous sight in the wasteland, as this kit had been stocked with a pair of bandages, both normal and magical, a single health potion, and a still in box hydra injector. I quickly undid the rough sling that held my leg up, giving out a heavy whine as my broken bone tweaked and torqued as I adjusted myself to make sure it set properly. Just because dad had shown me how to do it right, and the fact that I had done it more then enough times, didn’t make it hurt any less. I bit down on the sweat coated sling, pressing myself against the wall next to the bed as I used my forehooves to work at my leg.

My scream was mostly muffled through the cloth as the sharp bone in my leg tore at everything around it, the pain made me light headed as I felt like it might have just been less painful to just let the Hydra heal the bone wrong. I took a few labored breaths through the cloth again before jerking my hooves so that they rolled the bone back into alignment. I bit down so hard on the cloth that part of the cloth in my mouth had been cut, and dropped onto the floor. But as tears streamed from my eyes, and my mind cleared from it’s fuzz again, I knew that the hard part was done.

I panted heavily, spitting the rag out to the floor as I rest my head against the wall. For the first time tonight, the toll that my activities had taken on me shone through as there was nothing more that I wanted other than to just crawl into the bed next to me and sleep for the next few days. As I contemplated taking a few minutes nap, the dim lighting above me flickered, as the low whine that was present throughout the facility stopped for a moment before coming back. There wasn’t much time left, and if I ever wanted to get out of here, I’d need to get moving now.

I hoofed the Hydra injector into my hind leg and used my other leg to hit the button on top. With a click and a quick prick, the icy hot sensation of the medicine burned its way into my leg. I ground my teeth as the bones molded together and the various tissue damage the break had caused was repaired. The sensation was bad, but no where near the pain of resetting a bone. As the pain slowly dissipated, I wiggled my rear hoof and bent my leg about, happy that it seemed to be fine now.

I got up, making sure to dump the rest of the supplies into my saddlebag before heading to the door. I held up my pipbuck, pulling up the map section to see that the reactor access door was only down the next hallway from this room. Pushing open the door, I stepped out into a hallway made of pure red, the stark contrast of it making me turn around to look into the room I had just been in. It was spotless. Every other room in this hall that I could see was basically painted red except for this one.

My ear perked as through the debris to my left, I could hear the pony that had been following me before. The hoofsteps and sliding trailed off again as I turned to head further ahead, leaving me again with the quiet of the dim halls. I trotted around the corner, hoping that there wouldn’t be some sort of grim display waiting for me as before, and was happy to find a heavy hatch on the floor in the middle of the hall. As I approached, I could read the off white words of ‘emergency reactor controls’ printed around each of it’s square sides.

I hooked my fetlock around the latch and pulled, relieved to see the piston assisted door swing up and open. Unfortunately for me, it revealed a ladder dropping down into complete darkness, and even as I sat there and looked down, I couldn’t even see the floor below. With no other option, I maneuvered myself to move down it, keeping my eyes locked onto the rusty bars to make sure I didn’t lose my hoofing on it. As I looked back up to make sure my forehooves were hooked around the bars, a black shadow caught my eye.

Looking up, I saw that it was the dark shape of a smokey black pony, it’s burning red eyes sent a fresh wave of fear through my body, and in that moment I slipped from the ladder. I fell into the darkness, and knew right then and there, that I was most certainly going to die here.