“Do you remember?” the purple Unicorn asks you, still sipping her tea.

“Remember… what?” you say, your voice hesitant.

“Before,” she says, smiling serenely.

“Before… before what?” you say.

She sighs. You frown. She smiles, takes a sip of her tea. You lean back in your chair, trying to think.

“The guard,” she says. “And the blackcurrant juice. And before.”

And you’re remembering now.

There is a room. It is much like any other room you’ve been in, and the details escape you. But there are people here.

There is Sharon, there are other people (and ponies), and then there is Daniel Romero.

“You’re joking.”

Daniel Romero, handsome, fiftyish, dark hair and blue eyes, is laughing, sitting - or, more accurately, lounging – on a sofa, one hand holding a glass of wine. He’s wearing that two-piece uniform he had designed for his crews, the simple zip-up jacket, the little badge… yet, somehow, he’s turned it into loungewear. Or maybe that’s just how Sharon is seeing it. Opposite him, on a broken computer chair, lounges Lucky Strike, sipping a glass of what might be vodka, but you can never tell with her.

“Not at all,” he says. “I genuinely believe that all this talk about how Celestia was always a tyrant is dangerously misguided. Even stupid.”

Sharon can’t help but think he’s talking bullshit, but she bites anyway. Because he’s Daniel Romero, and Daniel Romero never just talks bullshit. The man’s a walking ball of contrived and carefully cultivated enigma, an image he clearly thinks is sexy. The worst thing is, he might even be right.

“Alright,” she says, “why?”

“Think about it,” Romero says. He smiles, his face drinking ever so slightly, only enough to make his blue eyes twinkle even more. He sits up, a little straighter. “I read up on Equus’ history. First when the portal at CERN appeared, then later. Thousands of years, these immortal Princesses ruled the ponies. Thousands. And in all that time, generally speaking, they’ve been paragons of virtue.”

“People change,” Sharon replies, holding up her own glass.

“Sure they do,” Romero retorts, “but that quick? That harshly? There’d have been warning signs dating back decades with her. Perhaps even centuries. As it is, ponies generally agree it’s not been more than… six years? Certainly, no more than fifteen at least.” He snorts, derisive. “And yet they’re all so quick to forget that she was essentially Mother Teresa for thousands of years.”

“The Cap is right,” Lucky Strike puts in. “The Changeling Purges… none of us knew what to make of them when she announced them. Would’ve expected her to just let the Changelings stay crippled, their leader bloodied… but going on the warpath like that?”

“What are you saying?” Sharon asks. “That something happened to her?”

“Seems likely, doesn’t it?” Romero retorts. He takes a sip of his wine. “Might be linked to… well, everything else.”

“That… doesn’t seem very likely,” one of the other ponies says. “Like, at all. What could have been behind it?”

“‘Likely’ is subjective,” Romero points out. “To humanity, the idea that another world would decide to pop up near ours, let alone us fighting a war with pastel ponies with magic, was unlikely. Yet somehow the notion that there’s more behind the sudden radical shift in personality than just Queen Celestia deciding that she’s evil now surprises you?”

“She betrayed us!” the other pony snaps. Sharon doesn’t know his name, but it doesn’t matter much to her. “We should never have let Alicorns rule our kind!”

“Why not?” Romero asks. “They did pretty well for six millennia. Or was six millennia of peace too boring for you?”

“She let us stagnate,” that pony says.

“Peace is stagnant?” Romero asks, raising an eyebrow.

“You humans have had your best advancements in war,” the pony retorts. “Nuclear and solar energy, computer technology, shields, bulletproof armour, other weapons that make it possible for you to defend yourselves…”

“Ever considered that a lot of those advancements were made for wars?” Romero says, chuckling. “Besides, you’re arguing for wars like WWII. Would you have liked forty million corpses and a shattered Western world if it meant you ponies had iPhones fifty years later?”

The pony shuts up.

“Bit of a false dichotomy, isn’t it?” Sharon pipes up.

“Of course it is,” Romero replies with a shrug. “But the idea that we have to have wars for progress proceeds from a false assumption in and of itself: we have progress because of wars, but then we’ve never, ever had a period where we’re not at war with someone, or preparing for war with someone, so we don’t actually know what we’d be like without wars. Except, presumably, plagued with fewer cross-filled graveyards.” He takes another sip. “We’re going off topic, anyway. The idea that Celestia kept you stagnant is ridiculous. You’re telling me you always had steam trains?”

“Of course not,” the other pony says. “But -”

“What about that DJ stuff Vinyl Scratch uses? Or the basic computers some of you had?” Romero continues. “All that stuff always been around, or is that progress?”

The pony sighs, clearly conceding the point, and Romero gives a big grin.

“The idea that it was somehow bad that she gave you thousands of years of peace is frankly revisionist history,” he says. “The idea proliferated by half the PHL that she was somehow always this bad but decided to stop pretending now for no discernible reason? Laughably dense.”

“Then… what?” Sharon asks. “What happened?”

Romero only takes a sip of his drink, giving Sharon one of those smiles.

“That,” he says, “is the question.”

It’s only later that night, in his room, her body still tingling from the caress of his lips all along it, that Sharon finds herself appreciating that Daniel Romero is, of all the things he could have been, an idealist.

She sits up in his bed, watching him go over to the porthole of his cabin and stare out at the starry night.

“What are you thinking?” she asks him.

He looks at her, smiles one of those inscrutable smiles, and then points out of the window.

“The farthest star that can be seen from here,” he says, “is called Deneb. They say it’s somewhere between one and three thousand light years away.”

Sharon frowns. “Uh huh. And…?”

Romero grins, amused at her non-reaction. “There’s a thing I used to say to all my students, back when I taught astronomy. ‘There is more to this universe than meets the eye’.”

Sharon is still frowning, but now she feels intrigued. What’s his point? She stands up, pulling the thing sheet around herself and walking up to him. He points back up to the sky.

“Right now, we’re not seeing Deneb as it is right now,” he says. “We’re seeing what it was like three thousand years ago. Our very own window to the past.” His expression becomes wistful. “And right now, if there’s anything on Deneb looking out at us, they’re seeing… what? The fall of Rome? The rise of Rome? Ancient civilisations, long perished, but the light from those civilisations, the light bouncing off of all of those cities and people and everything… all of it long gone, and yet, somehow, still there.” He looks back at Sharon now. “Whatever happens on Earth, whatever happens to us, to the human race, the light from us, from our world as it is right now, will stretch out into the sky, and keep going. In three thousand years, Deneb will look out at the sky, and see us.” He chuckles. “Kind of like immortality, don’t you think?”

“Not really, though,” Sharon says, quirking an eyebrow. “We’ll be dead and gone, and sure, there’s light, but that’s nothing more than a shadow, or a ghost.” She feels a sudden chill. “That’s all Deneb will see, and that’s all that’ll be left of us.”

“Not all,” Romero says, and he’s suddenly serious. “I believe - real talk now,” he adds, taking note of what must be one of Sharon’s ‘oh, not this’ expressions. “I believe that somewhere, deeper than any of us could possibly know, what we do, what we say, is recorded, taken note of.” He looks up at the stars. “Every action we take is reflected across the vastness of space. I believe… I truly believe… that someone, somewhere out there, takes note of it. Remembers it.”

“That would be nice,” Sharon says lightly. Romero looks back at her, something akin to disappointment in his expression, and she laughs. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make fun. It’s just… right now, the world’s hanging on a thread. Hard to see what good talk of some thing somewhere recording or remembering everything really does.”

“It comforts me,” Romero said quietly. He looks back at the stars, and for a moment they’re reflected in the whites of his eyes. “Makes me feel like… I dunno. Like if there’s more out there, it means that somehow, all of this might matter.”

“Or that it might not?” Sharon points out.

“A cynic might say that,” Romero says quietly. “But if I was a cynic, I’d have given up years ago. Wars of extinction are for people who think there’s hope.”

Sharon chuckles. “If you say so, Captain. Now come back to b3d, you’ve a long day tomorrow.”

“I’ve a long day every day, Sharon,” he says, and she resists the urge to roll her eyes at the portentousness of the statement. “But you’re right. Sleep is the one luxury everybody needs more of these days.”

It’s a cold morning, the next day, when Captain Romero calls Sharon in to run some routine maintenance on a plug socket. The room that she’s called into isn’t one of her favourites - it’s one of the hospital rooms, with one if the captured ponies in it. He’s an ex-Guard, scuttlebutt says. Some conscript the Captain’s studying to see if he can learn more about the magic that controls Equestria.

Lucky Strike is the one who greets Sharon when she enters the room, her beret askew.

“Hey,” she says, casual. “Need you to look at some of the sockets. Think there’s something up.”

Sharon enters the room, her toolkit at her side. She feels a little self-conscious - her uniform, the blue jumpsuit most of the crew wears, is dirty and stained from an hour in the engine-room. She goes over to the socket and starts looking it over: there’s a little melted plastic, which is never a good sign. She pulls her sleeves up, unscrews the casing, and starts looking at the wiring.

“How is it?” Strike asks.

“Some of the wiring’s overheated,” Sharon replies with a dismissive wave of her hand. She doesn’t look up at the sound of the groaning prisoner. “Might need to get some more stuff in. I swear, the number of problems this ship has, I’m starting to wonder if we got the dud.”

“Just get on it, Sharon,” Romero says, not unkindly, “and make it snappy. This guy’s not exactly fun company for anyone.”

Sharon looks up at that, her eyes drifting to the ex-Guardspony. He’s greeny-blue, like a sort of turquoise-but-not. Sharon snorts. There’s probably a colour name for it, something stupid like “magenturqulean” or something. He’s straining against his restraints.

“When I get loose!” he suddenly yells. “Kill you! Kill you all!”

Romero and Lucky Strike share a glance, and then Strike motions. One of the techs standing off to the side brings up a vial of liquid. Sharon’s eyes widen.

“Captain?” she asks.

He shakes his head, and motions to a bottle sitting on one of the desks. Robinson’s Blackcurrant Juice: half empty, that same purple. Sharon looks back at Romero, who winks, and she winks back. She knows his game now, or at least part of it.

He trying to see if the guy’s crazy enough to ponies someone in here? she wonders. Don’t need to give him fake potion to prove that. Just look at the guy!

Romero holds the vial in front of the Guard’s face.

“Sure you want to kill us?” he asks. “Isn’t there something else you’re supposed to do?”

The Guard’s eyes widen, and he suddenly becomes very still. Something glints in his eyes, almost invisible, but Sharon sees it, and frowns. She stands, observing, curious now. Something’s strange about this.

“Give it to me,” the Guard whispers. “Give me it!”

“Don’t, sir,” Sharon says. “I don’t like this.”

Romero looks at Sharon, then at Strike, who shrugs, and then he places the vial in the hoof of the crazy Guardspony. The pony is staring at it now, eyes even wider.

“Make you clean,” he whispers, “make you pure, make you clean, make you pure, make you clean…”

“You taking notes, Verner?” Romero asks the techy behind him.

“Aye, sir,” the techy says, starting to jot something down on a clipboard. Sharon approaches closer, frowning.

“What…” she murmurs. “What are you looking for?”

Romero smiles. “Well -”

He doesn’t even finish getting the first syllable out before the Guard moves. His hoof jerks, almost involuntarily, and the vial sails through the air. It sails past Romero, almost in slow motion, before smashing onto Sharon. The liquid drips, some of it onto her arm. She looks at it, blinking.

“Heh,” Strike says, her voice oddly distant to Sharon’s ears. “Poor bastard can’t help himself…”

Sharon looks up, and in a moment, her eyes meeting Romero’s. He’s smiling too, but it falters. Sharon is not smiling.

“Captain…” she says.

And then something cracks. She looks down at her arm, where fur is already sprouting from the place where the droplets fell onto her arm. And then the Captain is yelling something and Strike is yelling something else and the Guardspony is screaming and -

“Do you remember?” the purple mare asks you again.

And you do.

You were… you are Sharon.

“What… what happened?” you ask weakly.

The purple mare only smiles.

Boo.

Worked on this as a sort of mental exercise/experiment. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean I’m coming back proper to fimfic to do writing on stuff, but there might be sporadic stuff. Depends on… a lot of stuff, tbh.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this.

Cheers,
Jed.