Over many years, Morgana had come to realize that hospitals were all the same. Their layout might vary, as might their funding, but they all had the same feeling to them. In general, it was a dark sense of foreboding overlain with a veneer of logic and control: bright, sterile-smelling hallways and state-of-the art equipment meant to disguise the fact that the building itself was intended largely as a place for people to die.

That was, more or less, what they had evolved into, at least for humans. Genetic engineering had reduced the burden of disease to almost nothing, and mechanization had largely rendered doctors obsolete- -at least in the traditional sense. Medicine had died and been superseded by a thriving industry focused on more and better cybernetic implants.

The situation was magnified vastly in “hospitals” that dealt with ponies. In a hospital for humans- -or even the largely unfunded research hospitals for zoonei- -there would always be at least one creative, brilliant surgeon whose job was to solve problems that others could not. In ponies, however, there were rarely if ever such anomalies. Their bodies were mechanical, built from standardized and interchangeable parts. Doctors were unnecessary; in the event of emergencies, the staff of nonsentient robots could be linked directly to the patient’s manufacturer for repairs, assuming they had paid for a proper warranty.

These were the only individuals that Morgana saw as she walked through the barely lit halls of the repair center. They were shambling creatures, something like insects but more upright. They were not alive, but that was not a problem: it meant that theycompletely ignored visitors. Moonlight and Morgana could therefore move completely unnoticed.

A dull mechanical hum filled the halls of the repair center. The walls were designed to muffle it, but they never did completely. It was the sound of the machines running, generating new replacement parts from every basic manufacturer for fractions of a vod. Morgana knew that in many of the closed-off rooms, there were ponies who were being linked and connected to either temporary or new-permanent components.

“They haven’t repaired her yet,” said Morgana, her voice quiet in the darkness of the hospital corridors.

Moonlight shook his head. “They’re working on it.”

“Damn. It’s that bad.”

“Yeah…”

The air beside Morgana seemed to warp. She perceived gleaming whiteness, and then became aware of Lynnette’s projection beside her.

“O’Toole,” she said. “Any word back on the Cult of Humanity?”

“If you mean the name, no. I’ve searched the name quite vigorously.”

“And found nothing?”

“Oh no. I’ve found hundreds of results. Thousands, even. The Network is littered with them. It would take me weeks to process them all. Normally we have…lesser workers for this.”

“No worker is ‘lesser’, man,” said Moonlight. “We all have equal values as beings. Human or otherwise. Every life is sacred.”

“Please stop blathering. It’s annoying.”

“So you threaded in just to tell me you don’t have anything,” said Morgana. “Or did you do it to make my migraine worse? Where’s my damn cigarettes…”

“You can’t smoke in a hospital,” said Moonlight.

“He is right,” said Lynnette. “While the patients may not generally have lungs, it would be simply uncouth, not to mention rude. And no. I did not come here just to tell you what I’m sure you already knew.”

“Then what?”

“I came to inform you that I’ve put in an order for a new leg. Because the one you have is, frankly, la merde. It’s falling apart.”

“It’s fine.”

“You pulled it from a unit that nearly predates our species. It is not fine. Despite the effort I took to reskin it. Here.”

Lynnette turned a corner and walked down a small corridor. Machines were whirring overhead, generating and transporting components. As Lynnette approached, the room revolved, and several robotic arms began assembling a component.

“What are the specifications?”

“Gatok Robotics schematic. Plastic shell, aluminum matrix skeleton, low-grade solid-state mechanism. Middle of the road, ugly, and hardy. And I had a weapon installed. Arm up.”

Morgana hesitated, looking down at the arm she had taken from a dying Rarity unit. She did not want to part with it. It reminded her of where she had come from, when she once had simple and primitive body parts that were so much different.

This hesitation, though, only lasted for a moment. There was little point in holding onto the past like that: those times had long-since departed. Morgana held up her limb and the machines descended, immediately severing it and replacing it with the new leg as the skin and coat was knitted over it. The link only took a fraction of a second, and by the time the machine released her Morgana had already loaded the necessary drivers and performed all the appropriate calibrations.

She lifted the limb, moving it around with ease. It was vastly better than the temporary limb, but nowhere near as smooth or responsive as the MHI limb that it had replaced. It would do, though, at least as a front leg.

Morgana took a moment to consider the weapon aspect, though. With one swift motion, she activated the firing sequence, allowing her skin and the plates underneath to separate along the thin black joints that divided the covering. The retraction was rapid, but the weapon underneath looked strange.

“What brand is this?”

“Parabelle. It’s the budget version of what I use. I took the liberty of having it chambered in 6.5mm Grendel.”

“Well fuck you too.” Morgana looked up into Lynnette’s projection and saw that she was smiling, apparently finding this hilarious. “I hate Grendel rounds. I always use Beowulf. What the hell, Lynnette? Do people even make Grendels anymore?”

“Not generally, no. But you will have to make do, now won’t you?”

“It’s better than nothing.” Morgana snapped her limb closed. “At least marginally.”

She turned around and began walking toward the exit. Lynnette just laughed softly, and then turned the other way. Her image appeared to walk into the walls of whirring machines as she departed, her mental projection vanishing quietly as she did so.

“So which room is it?”

“Here,” said Moonlight, having waited patiently for Morgana’s new limb to be attached. “I’ll show you.”

The room was bleak: gray and dark, with no real furniture save for something that could almost be considered a bed but that was really justa flat, planar piece of plastic. Morgana took account of the room’s size and contents as she entered. The ceiling was dominated by a mass of occasionally shifting surgical arms, and a night table had been placed on the far side of the bed. It contained a small potted plant. What dominated Morgana’s attention, though, was the bed- -and what lay on it.

Very little remained of the pony that Jadeglow had once been. For the sake of repairs, she had been stripped almost completely. Everything below her higher chest had been removed completely, leaving only the metal point of her spinal connector against several muscle installation points. Her skin and hairhad likewise been removed, with only her face allowed to remain. The rest consisted of a partially assembled carapace of whitish translucent plates.

She was wired extensively to the machinery around her. The fact that she was still connected allowed Morgana to reason why the repairs had taken so long: she was undergoing extensive diagnostics on new components, and the machines were attempting to reconstruct parts of her damaged memory and fundamental program. An injury of that severity was both grim and extremely rare.

Yet despite this, Jadeglow- -or what remained of her- -was both alive and conscious. When her brother and Morgana entered the room, her large violet eyes turned toward the visitors. Morgana could see the robotics in the rear of her skull adjusting their angle, and then a second set activate to turn her head.

“Hey…you,” she said. She blinked, still smiling but looking confused. “I feel like I know you. Like, did we meet in a past life?”

“You’ve met me before, yes. I wouldn’t know about past lives.”

“Oh.” She laughed, although weakly. The muscles in her body had been largely either removed or deactivated, although it was apparent that she still had rudimentary control of her head and front legs. “Yeah. Sorry. My short-term memory, man. You know how it is.” She turned to Moonlight. “I remember you, though. Something…Orion?” She frowned. “I feel weird. Like it’s almost there…but I just can’t…”

“Don’t try too hard.” Moonlight knelt beside Jadeglow’s bed and took her hoof. “You can’t force a thought, sis, you know that. You’ve got to wait until the universe aligns with it, you know?”

Jadeglow smiled distantly. “Yeah. That sounds…sounds like something I used to know.”

“Because you told it to me.”

“I did?” Jadeglow looked toMorgana, as though she would offer some sort of confirmation on the matter. When none came, she turned back to Moonlight. “But who are you?”

“Moonlight. Moonlight Elderberry.”

“I knew someone who had that name once. But…he’s just a little kid. He looks kind of like you. Are you his uncle?” Tears fell down Moonlight’s face, and he tried to wipe them away. Jadeglow noticed before he could, though. “You’re crying. Something’s sad. I know it. I can feel it, and I almost know…but I don’t. I don’t know what’s so sad, but I can still feel it. Why can’t we just be happy? I don’t like to be sad.”

“The bad vibes and all…”
“I don’t know what that means.

“You are sad because you were hurt,” said Morgana. “Hurt real bad.”

“I…I can’t feel my lower legs. I don’t know if I ever had any. I can’t…remember…”

“You did. And you’ll get them back, eventually.”

“They…grow back?” Jadeglow’s eyes widened. “Am I…am I a TREE?”

“No. You’re a pony.”

“Oh…that’s probably why I’m sad, then.”

Moonlight looked up at Morgana. “See? You’re a technomancer, right? Can’t you help her?”

Morgana considered for a moment, and then shook her head. “No. I can’t. Sorry.”

“Will she recover? Like, on her own?”

“I don’t know.”

Moonlight’s expression fell, and he buried his head into the flat plastic that made up Jadeglow’s bed. He sobbed quietly. Jadeglow seemed to notice, and she patted him on the head.

“Hey there! It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay, I know it.”

“This is my fault,” said Morgana. She approached Jadeglow. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re fault?” Jadeglow looked confused. “I…I remember you. A little bit. It’s all fuzzy and weird, and I’m so confused all the time…but you were there.” Her eyes suddenly became clearer, and her lucidity seemed to increase. “You were there…when it happened. I remember you.”

Morgana took another step forward. “When what happened?”

Jadeglow looked up with wide violet eyes. “When the angels came.”

Moonlight looked up suddenly. “Angels? You didn’t say anything about that before.”

Jadeglow smiled and nodded knowingly. “They came to me. Beautiful creatures. I remember now. I remember pain, and I was lying there. I thought I was dead. Maybe I was. But…” She turned to Moonlight. “You know, I’ve always wondered. My whole life, since the start. Like, do we have souls? Ponies I mean.”

“Of course you do. Everything has a soul.”

“But do WE? I guess I was always afraid. That I wouldn’t get to go to the cosmic consciousness. That you would get there some day but I’d be…just gone. Out. Like a falling star, man…just gone…” She smiled softly. “But then I saw them. God sent them, and I was there, with them…”

“Since when do you believe in God? Like, the Judeo-Christian one?”

“Since I woke up…but I don’t know if that’s the one. But don’t you get it, man? It all makes sense now! There IS another side and- -and I was almost there! There’s a place for ponies in all of it, and Somebody cares!”

“You may have been hallucinating,” suggested Morgana. “Your consciousness was instinctively trying to consolidate key memories to keep your identity alive. It’s like what humans call dreaming.”

“No! No way! They were REAL! I know they were! I drew pictures!”

“Pictures?”

“Yes! Moonlight! Moonlight, they’re in the end table. One of the robots gave me a marker. I should get him, you know, some vegan flowers or something. Please get them! Show her!”

Moonlight stood up and hesitantly walked to the table. He opened one of the drawers and moved one of the written-text bibles that had been left there, one that had clearly been bookmarked with several small scraps of paper. Much to his apparent surprise, he pulled out a pile of thick papers. He looked through them, his green eyes growing wide as he flipped through.

“What is it?” asked Morgana.

“You had better see this.”

He placed the papers down on the rear of the bed. Morgana stood on her hind legs to reach them and pushed them apart, separating them.

They were well drawn with the sort of mechanical precision that was only possible for a pony. The images were clear, even if they were heavily stylized. Each of them depicted nearly the same thing: being in various poses, surrounded by light or wielding strange swords in a variety of poses. The figures were what caught Morgana’s attention, though: they were not traditional angles by any means, but instead were rendered as tall, immensely thin or completely disjointed semi-humanoids with the heads of unicorns and long silver manes. All of them were the same shade of pale green.

“Sweet Celestia…”

“I saw them. They came while I was dying, from nowhere. An army of good angels…and a black angel of death…”

Morgana moved the stack and saw what Jadeglow was referring to. One of the images was different: instead of a thin, pony-headed creature, it showed a dark image of something else. The stylization was excessive, so Morgana was not able to say what it was clearly, but she saw at least a vaguely human form and what was likely hair falling down over a pair of blue eyes with vertical black slits for pupils.

Moonlight shivered. “That doesn’t look like an angel, sis.”

“But she WAS. She came to me. Crouched near me…looked into my eyes. But she didn’t take me. She took the others, but not me. The others went back to heaven with them…but they let me stay. I think I was meant to survive.”

“The others?” Morgana lifted her head, immediately invested.

Jadeglow nodded. “They came to take them to heaven. The others. Ponies and humans. They came and made them die. The humans fought, but you can’t really fight angels. So they all left me, and I was alone…”

Morgana looked down at the pictures, and she understood.

“Natural-born humans,” she said. “They liquidated the stock…”

“They took them…but they left me…” Jadeglow’s eyes began to cloud again. She started to close them.

“Jadeglow.” Morgana stood up suddenly. “There is something else I need to know.”

“What…is it?”

“Blossomforth. Did you see her? What happened to her up there?”

Jadeglow looked at Morgana, and then shook her head. “No. She wasn’t near me. I heard gunshots…screaming…pain. I was afraid. I heard her shots…they were far away. But then they stopped. And the angels came…”

Jadeglow closed her eyes, and then opened them. She looked around confused before focusing on Morgana and Moonlight.

“Oh!” she said cheerfully. “I have visitors! Why do I feel like I’ve seen both of you somewhere before? Have we met?”

Moonlight slumped, defeated. He picked up the pictures that Jadeglow had drawn and put them back in the nightstand. Morgana watched him do so- -and her eyes fell on the plant that sat on Jadeglow’s table.

“She almost remembered,” said Moonlight. “She…” He shook his head. “I guess you jogged something. I feel…tired. I guess I should thank you. And you apologized, like you said.”

“It’s my fault,” replied Morgana. “I’m not a complete sociopath. I do feel bad. But I’m a little more hopeful now, though.”

“You are?”

Morgana nodded. “If she has part of her personality, the rest might come back. Eventually. She won’t ever be the same, but she’ll be able to function with practice. But she’s going to need help. Your help.”

“Of course. I’d do anything for her. Man…I didn’t even know she could draw, but if that helps her, I’ll spend every vod I have on colored pencils, if that’s what it takes!”

“I like colored pencils!” chimed Jadeglow. “Can I have them in teal? I want to draw something teal…”

“I do have one question, though.”

“What?”

Morgana pointed to the potted plant. “That. Did you get that for her?”

Moonlight and Jadeglow both looked at the plant. It was a small tree with narrow leaves, and it had several bright red, brushlike flowers growing from it.

“No…” said Moonlight. He turned to his sister. “Sis, who got you that?”

“I don’t know,” said Jadeglow. “I can’t…I can’t remember. But it’s really pretty. I love trees.”

Morgana approached the plant. “This is a Callistemon.”

Moonlight blinked, looking confused. “I don’t know that one.”

“You wouldn’t. Because it’s been extinct for seven hundred years.” Morgana stood up and examined the tree. There was a thin string around it, holding what appeared to be a tag. The side facing Morgana was white, devoid of any markings or price tag. When she carefully turned it around, though, she saw that the card bore a single symbol: the image of a sleeping pony lying in the palm of an immense human hand.