Aaron's time had finally come. He had spent no small amount of time preparing for it, but when the end finally came, he found he was not dead. Much like his arrival to this world, Aaron's departure was that of simple displacement. One moment he was there, the next, nothing. Although, this time, he noticed that something was different. Something had changed.

Suddenly aware of the situation, and despite the memories still pooling into his mind, Aaron reacted on instincts he had long since forgotten. He summoned a virtual console with the flick of his wrist and issued a single command. "System order: Pause simulation."

For the world below, time had ceased to flow.

Aaron was going to have to have a lengthy conversation with Sentinel, the AI tasked with maintaining the simulation, at some point in the near future. Maybe then he'd learn just what the hell was going on. His memories were still in a jumbled state, but were otherwise complete, his mind would need time to sort through the last few decades, however. In the meantime, Aaron needed to discover what had pulled him out of the world. That kind of direct action seemed a little beyond Sentinel's modus operandi.

That particular piece information was not hard to find, thankfully. Aaron didn't even need to scan the whole hemisphere to see it. System, and by extension, Sentinel, had already quarantined the cause. Just a few degrees from the surface, lay the unconscious entity, captured after only a few moments after it entered the void. Aaron recognized the entity as Starswirl, even though he had aged a fair bit since their last encounter.

In Starswirl's wake was a single gaping rift into the fabric of the world's underlying structure. 'That's new.' Aaron thought to himself as he surveyed the damage. According to the console, the hole that Starswirl created wasn't really a hole at all. The structural components were still there, but Starswirl had somehow managed to transcribe a null value to them. The forced error then seems to have begun to spread from the source point immediately after, likely stalled only by Aaron's immediate reaction upon his reawakening.

The breach had thrown Starswirl into the void, but had also freed Aaron in the process. Had Aaron not been there, the world might very well have been doomed. Sentinel wouldn't dirty his hands in an attempt to fix a single planet. It was content to watch and see what happened, which meant that if anything was going to be done, Aaron would have to be the one to do it. After having practically spent a lifetime there, he'd grown a little attached. The least he could do was fix it.

Taking data from a duplicate world, Aaron's original destination, he simply needed to copy over the erroneous data after he moved a few entities out of harm's way. Aaron briefly wondered why Sentinel was content to let the simulation fail and start over, it was probably still following some directive from the earliest iterations of the Sandbox. Either way, Aaron moved to the containment field around the old stallion. If anyone was going to break the news to him, it might as well be someone, or something, he knew.

After nearly 3 decades of work, Starswirl had finally constructed the greatest achievement of his scholarly career. He'd finally managed to build a device that could connect alternate worlds, proving that they actually existed once and for all. Or so he thought.

Starswirl was currently floating through a void, of sorts. It wasn't very empty, for starters, there were a multitude of planets arranged in a grid all around him, and he was pretty sure that there was surrounded in some sort of bubble at the moment. Granted, he couldn't seem to change his orientation enough to confirm any of his observations about that last part.

"Long time no see, old friend."

Craning his neck, Starswirl caught sight of the human, even though he was standing at an oblique angle that made the stallion's head swim. "Um Aaron, was it? Is that really you? My, it doesn't look like you've aged a day! Not that I know what an aged human looks like."

"That's true, I suppose. Oh, here. Let he give you a hand." Aaron said as he noticed Starswirl's discomfort. Aaron summoned his console and entered a string of commands. To the stallion, it simply looked as though Aaron was just waving his hands through the air, but the motion eventually created a small, barren island beneath Starswirl.

Starswirl let out a little yelp as the gravity suddenly kicked into gear, dropping him to the island's surface.

"Sorry about that. It's been a while since I've needed to mess with the physics renderer." Aaron said as he continued waving his hands around in gentle motions. Every action seemed to change something about the tiny island, such as spawning grass, or a tree, or a small pond. The last one even spawned a small cabin. "There, that should do for now. What do you think, Starswirl?"

"I think I remember saying that Humans couldn't do magic." the Stallion said dryly.

"I did say something like that, didn't I? Interesting."

"What do you mean, interesting? I'm sorry, but I haven't the slightest idea about what is going on around here."

"Hmmm? Oh, right! Where to begin? I suppose I should start with what this place is. This void is the staging area known as Sandbox. In it, we've been simulating an entire universe! Or, at least, we did. There aren't too many of us left these days..." Aaron declared with a pained look on his face.

"But, why?" Starswirl asked, referring to both of Aaron's statements.

"I'm afraid that the concepts may be a little far fetched at the moment, but everything as you know it is simply a collection of information. You haven't discovered computers as far as I know, but they are machines that process extremely large amounts of data. Data such as your individual identity traits, future whether patterns, even the different traits of a specific kind of rock, all of it is processed with these computers. Now you might be asking yourself 'why would humans need to build these things?' so I'll tell you. We wanted to know the answers to our questions. The question the Sandbox was supposed to answer was one of whether or not our own universe was a simulation."

"Is that why you are here? To answer a question such as that?"

"Yes and no. I'm here for a different reason. Humans are a dying race, Starswirl. We've already conquered the universe as we know it, but after that, we lost sight of something along the way, something important. I'd hoped to find it here, and save what's left of my people, but things didn't exactly turn out as expected."

"Your unusual amnesia?"

"In part, yes. I'm still not sure exactly what happened there." The answer to that quandary would have to wait until Aaron cornered Sentinel.

Starswirl walked towards the edge of the island only to be cut off by the mysterious field. Much to his dismay, even his magic seemed unable to influence the shield in any way.

Aaron observed the stallion's actions for a moment. "Yeah, sorry about the containment. You did manage to break out of your world back there. The system is treating you as a hostile entity. They're probably already patching the Sandbox to prevent what you did from happening again. Whatever it was you were doing down there left a pretty big mess? That hole I had to patch up was a bit of a doozy."

"After I witnessed an entire city disappear without a trace, I developed a theory that multiple worlds exist, as that was the only explanation that I could come up with to explain the situation. I was attempting to prove that theory when I opened up the gate. The gate got quickly out of hoof though. I tried to stop it, but, well, here I am. I do hope Surprise was able to escape before everything went south."

"I'm pretty sure that you're the only one who got caught up in that mess. Although, I did have to move a few entities before I fixed your gate. This Surprise was probably one of them."

"So how long am I going to be considered hostile?" Starswirl inquired.

"I'm sorry to say this, but it's likely that you'll be kept here indefinitely."

"But what about you? Can't you free me of this veil?"

Aaron shook his head. "Sorry Starswirl, but even I can't override system-level security features. I doubt there's anyone left who can."

Starswirl wasn't liking that prospect too much. "Then what am I to do? I've spent the last few decades trying to prove the existence of multiple worlds, and now that I've obtained my evidence, I can't leave? My whole life trying to reveal the nature of magic to world, and now, nopony will ever hear of my greatest discovery. Was all of my research for nothing?"

"Not quite, You did manage to accomplish something no other entity has ever done before. You broke out of the simulation. You want to return, but you can't. In all the years you were down there though, I'm sure you've helped many of your kind, even if they don't recognize it yet. In a way, I'm kind of envious."

"You wish to be locked up?" Starswirl asked incredulously.

"Not quite. As I said before, I was trying to find out how to help my people. Unlike you, I could return to my people, if I so wished it. But thinking about it now? I don't know if I'll ever go back."

His own fate may have been sealed, but Starswirl believed that there was no excuse for abandoning so many. "But what about your people? Do they not deserve to learn what you've discovered here?"

"No. During my time on your world, I discovered that, for the first time, I was truly happy. I had friends and, more importantly, a family. Out there, in the void of the Outerverse, space is empty. I can't remember the last time I've had a decent conversation. God, I don't even know what, exactly, I was looking for when I first came here. I was just following some vague notion that a solution might somehow exist here amongst the simulations, but I the only thing I've come to realize was one very important, crucial fact. Humanity is already dead, we just haven't noticed it yet."

Starswirl scoffed, he almost couldn't believe what he was hearing. "I can't imagine why how you could possibly believe that."

"It's simple really, in all our eons of searching, we've never once came across another sapient life. As improbable as that sounds, it's true. The whole reason we built this place, the question of 'are we in a simulation?', those are just additional facets of the same, harsh truth. We are alone Starswirl, and until that day I ended up, lost and confused, on your world, I was too. I don't know what it was that made your branch of simulations so unique in their spread of sapient lifeforms, but there's nothing like that in the Outerverse, not even if you took all life in the entire universe."

Starswirl forced himself to see from Aaron's perspective. He could scarcly imagine what it would be like to only have one intelligent species to deal with. Sure, there were always going to be issues when dealing with the other races, even the other ponies, but to be the only ones around and never finding the answer as to why. Starswirl suddenly found that, were he in Aaron's position, he couldn't be sure he wouldn't reach the same conclusion. "So what do you plan to do?"

Aaron thought for a moment. "For starters, I need to give Sentinel an earful. I don't want to end up fragmented like last time. But I will eventually return to your former world."

"Then can I ask you to do something for me?"

"Sure, I guess. So long as it doesn't involve trying to circumvent the System."

"Of course. Well then, since I'm kind of stuck here, and you plan to return to my world, do you think you would be able to visit me every so often? I believe I've suddenly found myself in the precarious position of having too much time on my hooves."

Aaron mulled it over for a bit. "A reasonable request. If it's any consolation, I wish that you didn't have to suffer here alone. So I'll be sure to figure something out that'll let me visit you from time to time. I think we have a lot of catching up to do anyway, once my mind has finished settling. Until then, I really need to deal with a certain AI." Moving his hands across the unseen object once more, Aaron disappeared from Starswirl's sight.

In sudden striking silence, Starswirl sat in deep contemplation as the topics of his conversation with Aaron hit him. "Now I have no idea what an Ay-eye is, but think I do have way to pass the time. If what Aaron says is true about everything being simple data, then maybe..." A wide grin spread across the stallion's face. If that was true, then the magic he knew of must have a higher level of order than anything he'd ever considered before. His magic seemed useless here in the void, but maybe that was approaching it wrong, maybe he just needed a grasp of the bigger picture. "Maybe not all is lost, Aaron, my friend."

Sitting down in front of his brand new water feature, Starswirl started rummaging through every idea that had ever popped into his head, looking for anything he might have thrown away because it didn't make sense in his old world. Here, they might not just make sense, they might just be the keys to how the void worked.

Starswirl had a new goal to strive towards.

Author's Notes:

Huzzah! Now I suggest you pick your jaw up off the floor and get ready to drop is again when you realize that this is only a small part of the Observations Universe!

Before I forget, I do have another project in the works. The story most definitely does not end here.