When I woke up next, the last thing I remembered was learning about Cygnus’s death, and watching Twinkle and Umbra fight to the death. In fact, since I was frozen, it was as though it happened just hours ago. I was torn up over it. But that was quickly cured when I saw three new AI standing in front of me.

Cora began to explain, to introduce me to Macro, Soar, and Hal. Told me how they were made from a copy of her code and that she gave them each their own personality. I was...happy? Relieved? Maybe a bit of both. But those feelings didn’t last long.

When I asked Cora what year it was, asked her what was going on, she told me that it was over, that we were hundreds of years into the future. That all the pods had been found, that Equestria was restored to how it once was, for the most part anyway. I couldn’t accept that. I asked her how and asked why she didn’t wake me up to help her. How could she make the choices to let the pods’ occupants live, die, or leave them be without me?

I shouldn’t have asked. I should have just laughed it off and accepted that it was over. Went outside and not worried myself with things of the past. But I did ask. And she told me. Cora can’t lie to me, I made her that way. She didn’t want to tell me, but I made her.

Cora told me everything. The surrogates she made by abducting mares and removing all of their memories then replacing them with my own. The fact that most of them died doing what needed to be done. She told me about the negative effects of repeated cryogenic usage. I was appalled. I wanted it to be some sort of joke, a sick, horrible joke. But it wasn’t, Cora even offered me their memory orbs, of the ones that survived, anyway, since you can’t take memories from a dead pony.

I refused to look at them. But then she told me about how the surrogates were keeping up with my terminal’s journal entries. I read them. All of them. Of course, there were large gaps where the surrogate had died and not had a chance to make an entry. By the end of the entries, I was horrified. The fact that the entries sounded like how I would write made my skin crawl. It was as though I had written them myself and just had no memory of it.

I couldn’t bear it. The AI that I had made had done something unimaginable. Unforgivable. The two of us were supposed to help ponies, not take their memories and ruin lives. Cora had been worried about the Wasteland breaking me. But, I think she should have been more worried about the Wasteland breaking her.

Guilt hit me hard, all of this was my fault. I should have suspected something. Cora had waited in the lab alone for decades. A normal pony would have gone mad. And even once I returned, I left her alone again. She was the one who warned me of the horrors of the Wasteland and she witnessed them more often than I. It is no wonder why she made AI companions.

Cora’s programming must have run into a fault of some sort. It must have begun corrupting her morality. That is the only answer that I could come to. It is the only reason that I could find that an AI that I created would do something like this. I should have talked with her more, made sure she was alright. But no matter how many times I would tell her, ‘you’re an AI, not a robot or a simple program’, I forgot just how equine she really was.

But, I could atone for all of this. I gathered the AI together, and I prayed that when Cora made them, she coped the programs that I was about to use. “Cora, Macro, Soar, Hal,” I said, looking to each one of them. “Command override, activate voice input protocols. Authorization, Ratchet. Passphrase...For The Future.” All four of them went quiet and still and stared at me. The command worked. I took a deep breath and finisheded, “Execute system file PermanentShutdown.exe.”

The four of them announced, “executing command,” in unison. A moment later, they collapsed to the ground. “I’m sorry,” I murmured. I couldn’t let them continue going after what they had done.

Then, I wasn’t sure what to do. What could I do? I wasn’t going to freeze myself again, that was for sure. And so, I did the only thing I could think of. I grabbed everything useful that I could from the lab. Noblesse’s chessboard, the Pinkie figurine, Forgiveness, ammo, knives, medical supplies, food and drink, that sort of stuff, even the memory orbs of the surrogates. All set, I went through the exit tunnel and climbed up the ladder into the little shack.

Without any clue what I was doing, I opened the door. But what greeted me almost brought me to tears. Grass, green grass. And flowers. It was...it was like it was before the war. I could see lush green trees and plant life all over the rolling hills. It was even overtaking the buildings and crumbed roadway. For the first time, in a long time, Equestria was beautiful.

I stepped out into the grass. I had no idea where I was going, or what I was going to do. But right that moment, I was so very content to just wander aimlessly in the grass.