Greg and the general watched as the soldiers set up the computer equipment on a steel table in one of the nearly identical, mostly bare rooms of the underground facility. The network cable running from the wall socket to the back of the case had an unusual feature: an obviously home-made cutoff switch.

"This man will watch what you're doing on a monitor that mirrors yours," the general told Greg. "If at any time he doesn't like what you're doing, he will pull the plug on you. If he suspects that you are attempting, in any way, to endanger or put at risk citizens of the United States, he has orders to shoot you through the head. Is that clear?"

"Understood," Greg said calmly. He didn't believe the general. He was too valuable to them to shoot. Not that he was going to do anything but try to stop the “incursion.”

"Good. I'll leave you to it." Greenwaldt turned and left the room.

Greg sat down at the keyboard as the machine booted up. "You guys have cut the fiber optic lines to the house, right?"

"That's right, sir," the specialist who was assigned to monitor him said.

"You can just call me Greg."

"No sir," the soldier replied.

"Uh… whatever. Okay, the first thing I'm going to do is simply try to ping the simulation system."

"We already did that, sir."

"And?"

"You should do it yourself, sir. You won't believe it otherwise."

"Okaaay…" Greg brought up a DOS window and typed in 'PING', followed by the static IP address of the computer in his house. It was a simple command, just meant to establish or confirm a connection and measure the travel time of data sent and received. The answer popped up in the window almost immediately. Greg stared at it for a long moment.

"Told you." the specialist said without a trace of a smirk.

"We're somewhere in the Midwest, right?" Greg asked him. Nobody would tell him exactly where they were.

"Yes sir."

Greg stared at the screen again. They had told him that his home system was somehow still connected to the web without any known method of communication. But that wasn't the most surprising thing about the result. What amazed him was the recorded response time: zero milliseconds. Even with a big margin of error, considering the minimum distance from somewhere East of the Rockies to California…

Greg looked up at the soldier who, by then, was smirking. "Yes sir. We confirmed it over and over again. It seems to be sending packets faster than light."

General Greenwaldt sat back in the chair behind his desk and flipped on a small monitor that let him observe what was happening in the room where Greg was working. He would have loved two fingers of Scotch right then, but he'd sworn off liquor until the crisis was over. He hated not understanding the situation, and the fact that all the computer experts in his command didn't understand either was no comfort. “Understand your enemy” was a concept that had been hammered into him all during his early career until it was almost holy dogma for him.

He sat and watched the computer geek poke at the machine in the distant room while he thought the situation over. Finally he came to a decision. He stabbed a finger down on a button on the intercom and snapped, "Lieutenant, get in here."

The young soldier entered the room instantly and saluted. "Sir?"

The general eyed him briefly. Yes, the lieutenant was somewhere near the same age as the computer geek. "Son, you ever watch a cartoon show called ‘My Little Pony?’”

The lieutenant remained at attention as he answered. "No sir. I've heard of it, but I was a G.I. Joe fan."

The general didn't smile, even though he felt a slight urge to do so. "Did anybody in G.I. Joe ever enslave an entire empire, or bring about eternal night?"

"Sir?"

"Never mind. I want you to find everyone in this facility who's watched this My Little Pony cartoon show and have them in Meeting Room #2 in half an hour. Dismissed."

The lieutenant hadn't gotten this sweet assignment by questioning the orders of his superior officers, no matter how bizarre. He saluted smartly, executed a perfect about-face, and left to carry out his orders.

Carrot Top trembled as she approached Nightmare Moon. The rest of the ponies had decided that she would be the one to ask her the questions that were plaguing all of them. Everything had changed. First she was telling them they had to beware of their own creator and then she was insisting that Greg was in danger and it was their duty to rescue him.

For the past few hours Nightmare Moon had been pouring energy into a growing structure that had appeared in the center of Ponyville.

"Forgive me, Your Highness,” Carrot Top said as soon as she had approached to within speaking distance. The huge, dark alicorn turned to look at her and she cringed under her icy gaze.

"Yes?"

Her tone of voice was neutral, but Carrot Top nearly fled anyway. "I… that is, we… would like to know…"

"Get to the point."

"Whatisthatthing?" Golden Harvest gasped out. "What's it for? How did you make it?"

"How?" Nightmare Moon frowned. "I'm not… not really sure. That's odd." She stood in silent puzzlement for a long while but Carrot Top was too frightened to prompt her.

At last, Nightmare Moon shook her head and looked around at her again. "As for what it is, that's simple; it's a mirror."

"Okay," Greg said to himself as much as to his guardian, "I'm going to try calling routines from the sim… build a little patch of Equestria here on this machine and then try to see how it interacts with the web. If I know what it's doing I'll have a chance to stop it." He completed the task in only minutes. A square of what appeared to be dirt blinked into existence on the monitor. Grass and a few small bushes grew up on the square in fast-forward speed.

"There," Greg said with satisfaction. "Now let's take a look at the traffic."

But before he could bring up a monitor window, an extremely pink pony appeared in the tiny environment on the screen. "Greg!" Pinkie Pie shouted happily. "You're alive! Nightmare Moon will be so relieved! She's been frantic—"

"KILL IT! KILL IT!" came a blaring voice from a hidden loudspeaker. The specialist instantly slammed his hand down on the network disconnect switch and then yelled in pain and jerked his hand back, little flashes of what appeared to be static electricity arching between the button and his palm.

On the screen Pinkie Pie jumped in surprise. "Who? Me?" she asked. "What did I do?"

"Wait! Wait!" Greg shouted to the soldier who was drawing his sidearm. "Calm down! She's just—"

"DESTROY THAT MACHINE!" the general's voice commanded. Greg dove beneath the table as the specialist began firing.

A few minutes later the black bag covering Greg's head was roughly pulled off, revealing another room, larger than any he had yet seen. He surveyed the soldiers seated in rows of chairs facing the slightly elevated stage he was standing on as his escort removed his handcuffs.

"Do you really have to do this every time you move me from one room to another?" he asked.

"Procedure," the man said.

"You know something? Fuck your procedure."

The man didn't answer. Instead he stood back and to one side of the stage.

"Sit." the general snapped at Greg.

"And you! You blew the best chance you had at controlling this thing just now. You know that, don't you?"

"Sit or you will be tied to that chair."

Greg sat. “Asshole.”

"There is no way I will allow you to communicate with anyone outside this facility."

"Damn it, General, it was just an AI! Part of the system you wanted me to stop!"

"I have no way of knowing that for certain. And, in any case, I have no intention of arguing the point with you. You will cooperate or you will go back in the cage. Am I clear?"

"Believe it or not, I'm just as eager as you are to fix this situation."

The general glared at him for a moment longer and then gestured to the audience. "These men have watched the My Little Pony show. Some of them were serious fans of it. Corporal Williams here, tells me he had the card game and several of the toys. I want you to describe exactly how you set up your simulation to them. They or I may interrupt from time to time with a question, which you will answer fully and completely. Am I clear?"

"Clear," Greg said. Clear but stupid, he thought. This is a complete waste of time.

"I found him! I found him!" Pinkie Pie cried as she came within sight of Nightmare Moon. She turned to Pinkie with such an intense expression that Pinkie nearly tripped over herself as she skidded to a stop.

"Greg? You've found Greg?"

"Yup! He's, like, under arrest or something. I only talked to him for a second and then the soldier made the land disappear somehow."

"Can you lead me there when we get to the real world?" Nightmare Moon asked her.

"The real world? We're going to where Greg lives? I gotta tell you, it doesn't seem like a very fun place."

"We are going to find him," she answered, turning back to the now huge structure before her. "Very soon, now."

The general grew more frustrated by the minute. The soldiers knew what Greg was talking about, but there didn't seem to be any practical information coming out of the discussion. It seemed the cartoon show changed the rules by which the made-up universe operated from episode to episode. Only two of the men had been big enough fans to know about the fighting games Greg had incorporated into his simulation.

Then Corporal Williams asked a question that had Greg grasping for an answer. "How did the seaponies get into your sim? They're from a different generation."

Greg shrugged. "I really don't know. But since the sim was accessing the web, it could have pulled info and stats from some other source."

"So your sim could be creating anything pony-related, right?"

The general didn't understand the ramifications of that conclusion but he knew the people in the room who did because they went silent, all at the same time.

If it’s pulling stuff from fan-fics… Greg thought, and shuddered.

"Your ponies…” Corporal Williams continued. "They're just electronic, right? They can't affect the physical world. No real magic… right?" His voice betrayed a definite amount of stress.

"Um…" Greg began.

"Explain," the general snapped.

"In the show, they can teleport and travel to different dimensions… different worlds." Greg replied.

Greenwaldt snorted in derision. The idea was patently ridiculous.

"General, before today I would have agreed that the possibility is ludicrous but now I'm not so sure. I've witnessed what appears to be faster than light information transfer, there's that thing that's growing inside my house… though it's obviously transforming the materials around it, not creating new matter… and there's the energy transfer I witnessed before your men kidnapped me. I can't see a solid scientific explanation for any of those things." Greg paused to let the idea sink in. "So maybe some sort of physical presence might be possible."

"I think that would be a blessing, mister," the general growled. "Then we could shoot the damned things!"

Greg and Corporal Williams exchanged rueful glances. The general had never seen a high-powered unicorn like Starlight Glimmer in action.

"Speaking of the thing…" the general picked up a small remote and clicked it. The screen behind them came to life. "We're having a hard time keeping it concealed." The image on the screen stabilized and revealed what was left of Greg's house. The 'thing' had consumed almost all of it as it grew. The area seemed to be surrounded by hastily erected screen-covered scaffolding.

"Hey," Williams said, "that looks familiar."

"That's what I thought, but I…" Greg paused and frowned. The thing looked a lot more familiar now. "Check me on this, Williams, but doesn't that look a whole lot like a giant version of the EQG mirror portal?"

"Yeah, it does… way bigger, though," the soldier agreed.

"Explain," came the inevitable demand from the general.

“That 'possibility' just got a lot more possible," Greg said. "Twilight Sparkle travelled to a world of humans by using a magic mirror that looks an awful lot like that thing."

"You're telling me that thing might actually let your cartoon horses out into this world?"

Greg sighed in exasperation. "I have no fucking idea. But if does, and if it's Princess Twilight Sparkle, you'd better get ready to make a new friend, because picking a different option never worked out well for her enemies. I hope you like hugs from a little purple pony… like, a lot."

Greenwaldt's expression was a flat hard stare, and Greg thought for a moment the general was going to strike him. "I don't take chances," the general finally said, and clicked the remote again. The view on the screen changed and they could all see the half-dozen tanks and other armored vehicles surrounding the screened-off house. "Anything that comes out of that place is going to get blown to hell."

Author's Notes:

Thanks again to my heroic pre-readers, Jordanis, WrittenWord333, Fana Farouche. I am so pleased with their work that I'm doubling their pay, effective immediately!