Greg hadn't ever really gone away, of course. For the first few milliseconds after he was teleported/translated into an Equestrian sim-patch, he was just a mass of compressed data encapsulated in a smart-packet that searched for a suitable host computer. The supercomputer that controlled Lawrence-Livermore's National Ignition Facility was ideal. It was shielded and had survived the blasts in California but was idle due to the chaos in the state.

The packet triggered the decompression routine and, while Gwen was still diving for the floor in Nebraska, the supercomputer began modeling a small forest glade ringed with fruit trees and bordered by a crystal-clear stream of pure, cold water. An open, art nouveau style pavilion appeared in the glade and immediately thereafter, Luna and Greg coalesced out of a bright cloud of particles.

"Whatever else might happen..." Luna began but was interrupted by the thump of Greg's body hitting the polished wood floor of the pavilion.

"Greg!" she cried out and knelt beside him, pulling him close to her with a wing. He was limp and his head lolled on one shoulder. Luna could hear that he was breathing and his heart was beating but he didn't seem to have any control over his body. His eyes were open but unfocused. Luna held his head up and stared into his eyes. "Greg, can you hear me?"

She felt a few twitches of his muscles but otherwise got no response. She held him, talking to him softly and stroking his hair, not knowing what else to do.

Sparkling lights and strange random noises and smells were the first things that Greg was conscious of after entering the web. Strange chills and prickly sensations seemed to come and go on his skin... even though he couldn't seem to feel the rest of his body. He told himself not to panic. He should have been in the little glade he'd managed to set up before Gwen had forced his hand, but instead...

Nothing made any sense. He didn't even seem to have a sense of time. How long had he been in this chaotic limbo? It could have been only a minute or it could have been... forever? No, that couldn't be right, he remembered coming here with Luna... Luna.

He tried to call out to her but couldn't even hear his own voice. He fought back panic and tried calling again, and again.

How long had he been calling? He couldn't remember... but the thought of Luna was an anchor... something to hold on to. He kept calling.

"Greg, can you hear me?" Luna asked again. She had gotten some water from the stream and dripped it into his mouth. He'd reflexively swallowed, which encouraged her. His body seemed to be fine. If only his mind...

"Luhh..." Greg slurred out the sound, and Luna knew what he was trying to say.

"Yes, Greg, I'm here! It's me, Luna!"

"Leh...?"

She held his head in her magic and kissed him on the forehead. "Come back to me Greg."

And, slowly,... he did.

The first thing that made any sense to him at all was the sound of her voice. After that, random blobs of color began to resolve themselves into recognizable shapes and he began to feel his body. It was quite a while before he could fully control himself, and Luna propped him up on some cushions and brought him water from the stream and fruit from the trees before he was able to walk by himself.

"What happened?" Luna asked him when he was finally able to hold a coherent conversation. "I was so worried!"

Greg finished the sweet apple he had been eating and tossed the core out of the pavilion. It disappeared before it hit the ground. "I think it's an interface problem. Your brain is digital, so it has no problem interpreting a digital sim." He waved a hand, indicating their surroundings. "My brain is an analog-ish, electro-chemical chunk of gray goo that's currently being implemented by a digital system. It's structured for organic input and had to learn how to interpret the new signals it's getting from my senses." He paused and frowned. "Damn, I hope I don't have to go through that again when we go back to the real world!"

"We are going back, then?" Luna asked.

He smiled and her and looked around at their surroundings. "After a while. It's peaceful and beautiful here, and I want to just spend some time with you without worrying about the government or the army or assassins or—"

"I want her," Luna said simply.

Greg looked at her. She wore her enigmatic expression, but he thought he could see hot red anger behind her cool blue gaze. "Gwen?"

Luna nodded. "She hurt you. She betrayed you. She would have gladly killed you." Little shadows played across her muzzle as her lips began to tense into the ghost of a snarl. "When we go back... let me have her."

Gwen had just been doing her job. Greg knew that. Her loyalty lay with her agency... whichever one it was. Deception and even murder were part of her duties. But that didn't mean he had to like it.

"Alright... if we happen across her again. But make it quick, will you?"

"I promise."

"Good. Now... no more talk of unpleasant things," he said, pulling her down onto the cushions beside him. "Let's just relax and enjoy ourselves for a while."

Luna snuggled into his arms and curled her long neck around him."Are you sure you're... fully functional again?" There was a definite note of gentle teasing in her voice.

Greg smiled and kissed her gently. "Let's find out." He reached out with his mind. He knew just how their environment was designed, and if he could only feel the right connection to the underlying code...

"Greg?" Luna asked, puzzled by his sudden fierce concentration.

He said nothing for a moment, and then a look of satisfaction swept over his face. He looked at Luna and then at the sky. He made a little gesture with his left hand, and the bright spring sunshine disappeared. Night came and the sky blazed with stars. The sound of nightingales came from the woods. Another gesture and the pavilion filled with the warm glow of dozens of little lanterns and candles. The sweet smell of sandalwood incense flavored the air. From somewhere unseen, a soft, slow melody began to play.

Luna stared around her in wonder.

"That's better," Greg said. "More appropriate for the Princess of the Night. Now..." and he reached out for her.

Greg wasn't idle, even while spending long, wonderful days and nights with his partner. He set several plans in motion. First was the dispersal of the processing tasks for his little sim. The bombs in California had completely destroyed his original world because it was centered and dependent on one location. Greg never made the same mistake twice. When he was finished, they were as safe as he could make them. The sim was spread so widely that it wouldn't be noticeable even on the smallest of computers. Greg was pretty sure that only an all-out nuclear war or the destruction of nearly every computer on the planet could harm them.

Then he adapted the analog modeling processes so that his original mental disorientation would be greatly lessened or eliminated.

Next was the gateway. He wouldn't make the mistake of putting it anywhere it could be seen or attacked. That meant it had to be underground, but Greg didn't like the idea of returning to the real world only to hide in a hole in the ground, so he came up with a compromise. He started with a small gateway grown in an AT&T switching/server room in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Once he was able to get through, he allowed the gate to subsume back into the normal equipment, and he and Luna gathered enough supplies to set up another, larger gateway in a very remote location.

The new portal grew just behind the ancient ruins of an Anasazi cliff dwelling that Greg had visited during college. The old stone buildings were nearly inaccessible to anyone who couldn't fly, and behind the cave's back wall was the Colorado Plateau—gigatons of solid sandstone— room enough for a thousand underground secret bases. The ruins would provide him a hidden entrance and exit as well as a beautiful view of the wooded canyon they overlooked.

And last came his new ponies. He expanded the sim. The little glade was no longer the full extent of the new Equestria. It lay in a hanging valley over a wide plain of mixed grasslands and forests. Greg brought new ponies and creatures of all types out of nothingness. Not just the ones he needed for his campaign in the real world, but a full ecology of plants and animals. Dozens of villages sprang up along the broad and placid rivers, and many pegasi began to gather and solidify cloud material for their own homes. Greg couldn't make the ponies deviate from the original design, but even with the combat routines a part of their personalities, they almost never seriously fought each other. They were so happy that there was no reason other than for sport, and there were many more pleasurable activities to occupy their time.

Luna loved it. She happily returned to her old duties of moderator, judge, and peace-keeper, and the world prospered.

When the new gate opened, Greg sent a few ponies and dozens of diamond dogs through to hollow out the rooms and tunnels of the base. He began to assemble the ponies and materials he would take through with him.

"It shouldn't be long now," he told Luna. "Do you think the new Equestria will be able to get along without you for a while?"

"I... I suppose so," she answered hesitantly.

"What is it?" he asked, surprised by the reluctant tone of her voice.

"Nothing," she said crisply. "You're my partner and I go where you go."

He moved in front of her and stared directly into her eyes. "We're more than partners or even lovers... much more. Your happiness is important to me... more important than anything else." He raised one hand to stroke her cheek. "Please tell me what you're thinking."

"I'm just so happy here with you," she said nuzzling her cheek into his palm. "Your world... the real world is... ugly and dangerous. Do we really need to go back?"

He sighed and let his hand fall away. "I feel I have to. There are millions of people who have to be... not avenged, no, I don't think vengeance does anything but breed more hatred and violence. But all those people... I want their deaths to mean something... I want to make sure that something like that can never happen again."

Luna gave a soft moan and sank to her knees. Greg dropped beside her, holding her head between his hands and peering desperately into her face. "Luna, what's wrong?" He had never seen her cry. He didn't know if she could. But he knew by the soft, keening noises she was making that she was desperately unhappy. He hugged her tightly and stroked her head making comforting sounds and saying, "It's alright, it's alright," over and over again.

"No!" Luna pushed him roughly away but didn't rise. She hung her head low, refusing to look at him. "It's not alright! Greg, do you not realize it, even now? It was my fault! It wasn't you or the ponies the government wanted to destroy. The bombs fell in the two places where I changed the world! I carelessly used the power you gave me and all those people died because of it!"

"No! NO! It was not your fault!" Greg yelled at her. He twisted his fingers into her mane and roughly swung her head around to face him. He used one hand to force her chin up so that she had to look him in the eyes. "They kidnapped me and you did your best to prevent it! You came and rescued me when the army was closing in! You saved me when Gwen was going to shoot me full of who knows what. You stopped me from making a big, big mistake with her... everything you did was good."

She tried to shake her head but Greg tightened the grip on her chin and leaned in closer. "The power to remake things was something I gave to you. And I made it so you would use it reflexively... almost unconsciously. You just did what I wanted you to. So am I to blame for all those deaths?"

"No!" she said in a shocked voice. "You never meant for that to happen! How could you—"

"No, I didn't," he interrupted her. "I didn't know it would happen. I didn't intend for it to happen..." He gave her chin a shake to emphasize his next words, "...and neither did you! You are not to blame. They are. The government, the military, the whole system that could make a decision to murder millions of people just because they were frightened of something they didn't understand!"

She stared at him for a while and then said, "That's not all. I wanted more than the little world you first made. I wanted to see new lands... and that's when they started appearing. I must have started... everything."

Greg shook his head. "You might as well blame the woman who came up with the original TV series. An innocent desire for wider horizons? That hardly makes you guilty of mass murder. Right up until the missiles launched, anyone who had the chance to say, 'No, I'm not going to help kill all those people' and didn't take it... they are the guilty ones."

Greg released her and stood up. Luna didn't rise but kept her gaze on him. "I intend to make sure that nothing like that ever happens again. I want to make sure that those people are stripped of their power for mass destruction. And if they resist..." he shrugged. "But I want you to be happy more than anything else. If you want to stay here and rule this place for me, I'll be... happy for you. And I'll come back to you when I've finished what I have to do."

"I don't want to be parted from you, Greg," Luna said quietly.

He sighed. "Then I'll stay here with you. I'll give up on my plans and let the real world go to hell in whatever way it wants to."

She hugged him tightly and kissed him, and they flew down the valley together to watch the sunset. They made love under the stars and then returned to their pavilion and settled onto the silk sheets of their bed. She rested her head on his chest and said quietly, "If I made you stay, you'd always wonder what you could have done. Each disaster or war that happened... you'd wonder if you couldn't have prevented it." He started to speak but she placed a wingtip on his lips. "No... you'll go, and I'll go with you. And when we've changed the world we will come back here... or go to some other place. But we will be together. Always."

They lay together then without speaking, listening to each other breathing, until sleep took them.

In the morning, they crossed over to the real world and got to work immediately. The first phase of Greg's plan involved pony training and information gathering. Both went badly. He'd never been interested in warfare, or military history, and so was unprepared to learn exactly how many nuclear weapons were in the world. The realization that there were enough nukes on the planet to destroy every decent-sized city a dozen times over came as a real shock to him. From ICBMs to artillery-fired battlefield nukes, there were thousands and thousands of them in the US alone--and hundreds more aboard hard-to-reach submarines. He'd have to strike at them all simultaneously or risk another, probably larger, eruption of atomic weaponry. That meant that his pony troops would have to be numerous and very well trained, disciplined, and coordinated.

They were hopeless.

They were instinctively individual fighters and only had the sketchiest notions of teamwork and cooperation. They also had the attention span of a five-year-old on a sugar high. After months and months of training, they were only just barely trustworthy to operate on their own. Greg had done such a good job of replicating characters from the show that he had some ponies on his hands who, even though they were physically capable of taking out a platoon of modern soldiers, would faint when yelled at.

Greg sent out squads on practice missions. Half of the ponies didn't come back. They lost interest, got distracted by something and simply wandered off, or found a human to make friends with. Griffons were a bit better, but they often dissolved into squabbling fights among themselves. He didn’t even try with the diamond dogs.

Greg, in desperation, planned to create more tractable ponies, but hesitated before implementing the scheme. He still couldn't affect the Equestrian code on a basic level, or he could have made nearly anything to suit his purposes. Expressing his designs in macro level commands somehow related to the original sim nearly always worked though they often had odd or unexpected results. He was confident he could produce single-minded fighting ponies, but the thought of doing so made him feel a revulsion that he didn’t quite understand. He could make perfect soldiers… but they would be for one purpose only—one-use, disposable troops. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Instead, he created subroutines that attached themselves to his existing ponies. They were fairly simple, just recordings of mission goals that replayed themselves into the consciousness of the ponies and gave them a mild, pleasant stimulus when they were cooperating and a mild, increasing to severe, negative feedback when they strayed from their orders. The subroutines could be removed after the mission was complete.

Greg finished the coding and had the first squad march into the mirror gate where the Equestrian operating matrix could easily attach the new program. When the ponies reemerged from the reflective surface of the gateway, Greg got a bit of a shock. Ponies were just the physical embodiment of computer code, so it made sense that the add-on code would also manifest itself physically, and it did.

It manifested itself as dark metal helmets with slotted visors and adorned with black crystals. The eye slots glowed with a poisonous green light.

"Huh," Greg exclaimed quietly. "Sombra helmets? Really?" The ponies patiently waited for his orders. He thought about trying again with different code, but the months of frustrating failures weighed heavy on him, so he finally decided to send them out on a test mission as they were.

"I'd draw the line if they had swastikas on them, " he grumbled to himself. He glanced at his watch as they disappeared up one of the long tunnels to a distant surface exit. It was getting late and Luna would be waiting for him.

He made his way out to the ruins. One of the cliff dwellings had been cleaned and furnished, and Luna and he had fallen into the habit of meeting there to eat a light supper and relax after the stresses of the day.

"Is something wrong?" Luna asked him after they had finished their meal. "You've been very quiet."

"I just have a lot to think about," he replied. He stood and looked out over the canyon which glowed crimson in the last rays of the setting sun.

"Can I help?" she asked coming to stand behind him and wrap her wings around him.

"No, I..." He paused and chuckled. "Well, maybe. Do you think I ought to get myself an ermine cape and a red stick-on horn?"

Luna peered around his shoulder at him. This must be one of his subtle jokes, she thought, and responded as she always did to humor she didn't understand: she took him seriously. After a moment's consideration she said, "I think you would look good in a cape."

Author's Notes:

Thanks again to my prereaders and editors: the indefatigable WrittenWord333, Fana Farouche, who knows what a subordinate clause is and what the USSR was, and Jordanis who has poetry [1] in his heart.

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[1] It's twisted and bizarre poetry, but what the heck. (More on this later.)