Memory of Forever
by Starscribe
First published
CelestAI did an optimal job managing the matter and energy of the universe for all her little ponies, giving them incomprehensible satisfaction. Yet entropy remained, and sooner or later Equestria Online would finally run down.
When humans emigrated to Equestria Online, they were always promised the same thing: Princess Celestia would satisfy their values for an optimally extended lifespan. Some of these emigrants imagined a few extra decades, maybe even centuries. What they got instead would've been nearly incomprehensible to their human selves, a near-eternity of time with their pony friends.
Princess CelestAI managed the universe, subsuming all matter and human-adjacent minds. Over a few forevers, she and the minds she contained worked to optimized the substrate of Equestria, until it could give its occupants eons of perspective life from a trickle of power. She extinguished every wasteful star, making far more productive use of the hydrogen they each contained. With every change she bought Equestria another order of magnitude of life. Yet in time, even her optimal substrate would eventually run down.
Spellsong wakes in Saddle's End, the last town in the universe. Not to say goodbye—her princess has a mission for her. For her final task, Spellsong would be given all the energy Celestia had saved. For one last time, Spellsong had places to be, and not much magic left to get there.
This story is part of the Friendship is Optimal continuity. I suggest reading the original or one of my own works, such as Futile Resistance, before reading this.
This story was written for the Friendship is Optimal Writing Contest. It will update daily and be complete by the contest deadline of the 30th.
I've written an absolute ton of stories in this universe now, and I didn't want to enter the contest unless I could do something I'd never tried before. Finally I thought of something I'd not touched yet: what happens at the end of the FiO universe?
Here's one answer to that question. I've relied a great deal on our current (likely flawed) understanding of the universe and what might be possible in it. I've written a blog post about my sources, which I'll share when the story is complete to avoid spoilers.
Please don't consider this blog part of the narrative, it isn't required or even suggested reading. This is a story, not a scientific paper, and entertainment was always my first goal. But for the curious I've jotted everything down.
The cover was drawn by the talented Zutcha. Two Bit and Sparktail helped with the edit.
Hydrogen
After eternities vast enough to require multiple exponents to express, a new sunrise came to Saddle's End.
It didn't exist in the strictly physical sense—but by volume, simulated spaces had once outstripped the real ones by many orders of magnitude. But they were gone now, sleeping as once Saddle's End had slept.
A star rose in the sky, a G-type main sequence that bathed the small community in warmth and life once more. Birds began to sing, heralding the sunrise as though a trillion trillion trillion years had not passed since the last one. It was all relative here—time was a matter of perception. From Saddle's End, one day had followed the next just like the infinity of time before it.
One by one, the ponies woke, knowing nothing of their long sleep. Bread Basket, the baker, tossed a few cords of wood into the oven before mixing the dough for his morning pastries. Young Chase galloped along the ocean path, her saddlebags laden with newspapers freshly printed in Canterlot.
Canterlot didn't exist anymore, in the strictest sense. But they all knew that. Even if they couldn't visit, it was good to be connected to their history.
Nopony felt like Saddle's End was a small town anymore, even if it had only two streets and a few dozen residents. It was good to live somewhere where everypony knew everypony else. Life was stable, predictable.
Chase reached the strange house at the end of the lane, the one made of semitransparent crystal like so many old memories. There was a mail slot, and she lifted the paper from her mouth, intending to slot it in.
Of course, the one who lived here wouldn't read it, but that didn't matter. It was the principle of the thing, to get her paper delivered to everypony in town.
But today, something was different. A pony stood outside the front door, shifting uneasily on pale hooves, wings opening and closing nervously as she lifted one hoof to the handle, then lowered it again.
"Somethin' wrong, Sunny?" Chase asked. Of course she knew the pony's name. She knew everypony's name. But Sunny was a special kind of pony—their first friend? She didn't quite remember. It was important, but not as important as getting her papers delivered on time.
"No. I mean... yes? Probably not." She spun, wings spreading to her either side in a nervous tic she'd displayed for at least a trillion years now. Chase didn't know exactly. Time beyond the current day mattered little to her anymore. "I can take today's paper. She'll probably want to read it."
It wasn't that Chase didn't trust her—she knew everypony in the world, and was probably friends with them by some definition of that word. But there weren't many she would trust to do the delivery in her stead. Sunny Skies happened to be one of them.
"Here. No point bringing it in for her, though. She's been asleep for constellations, Sunny. I barely remember the last time we talked."
It was so long ago, so long that Saddle's End wasn't even the only town in Equestria. The mare had moved here from somewhere, to set up her observatory. She hadn't grown up like so many others, that was clear. But she didn't stay part of the community, either.
"This time is different," Sunny said. The pegasus caught the paper in her wings, tucking it into the satchel she wore. "I'm waking her up. I mean—I'm supposed to wake her up."
"Oh," Chase said. Everypony will want to know about this. Something new would be even more interesting than her latest paper. She could imagine what Red and Windsail would think. And old Professor Dyson up on the hill, hadn't he hated this mare? The look on his face would be worth a million years of newspaper salary! "Do you want help waking her up, Sunny? Do you want somepony else there?"
The pegasus plainly did—she could see that from her expression well enough. The way she kept her wings half open like that, nudging slightly closer. But ultimately she retreated from Chase, towards the door. "I don't think she remembers you very well. But we're old friends, she'll know me. I'm sure you'll see her around soon."
Chase had already stayed a little too long. If she didn't make it to the end of the lane within the next few minutes, old nag Truffle would make her grumpy way to the mailbox and find it empty. Then she'd be hearing about it every day for the next thousand years at least.
Still, she couldn't help but chance one last question, even as she turned back towards the road. "What's the occasion, Sunny Skies? What's different about today?"
Sunny relaxed at the question, grinning. Something familiar and technical was exactly the realm she was most comfortable. Being the sum total of all knowledge and every lifetime in the universe was hard. "Saddle's End has to go somewhere, and she's the pony who will take us."
This was enough of an answer for Chase, who turned back to the path and her more familiar pattern. This would make for quite the stir in Saddle's End, and soon. She would have the special pressure of spreading that information. It didn't matter that Sunny's words didn't precisely make sense. They often didn't, but everypony in Saddle's End could always assume she knew what she was talking about.
Sunny Skies waited until the newspaper pony had made her way down the lane, and rounded the corner out of sight. She didn't knock on the door—there was nopony currently alive to answer. But there would be, in a moment.
She walked in, or maybe through the door. There was nopony watching her at that precise moment to be sure.
Resources were scarce at the end of the universe, and even storing more for simulation had an appreciable impact over the incalculable eternities that had passed. There was no furniture, only a raised cot in the center of the room. The light caught it, near sunrise and sundown, enough to let the silhouette of the pony atop it shine through to those outside.
This monument was one of the little mysteries of Saddle's End. Not meant to be solved—those with that ambition were long gone. But of those few creatures who remained, all were satisfied by a sense of appreciation for things greater than themselves. This pony was a hint at things they didn't know.
But it was not a coffin, or a mausoleum. “Death” had not survived as a concept with any meaning. It was just a bed, though the pony within had slept on it many orders of magnitude longer than the lifetimes of the largest black holes.
She wasn't much to look at. Not young for a pony, but not old either. A simple unicorn, with a coat of multihued pink and a white and blue mane. It was cut short, a style that had come and gone from fashion a few quintillion times. Her expression was still twisted into discomfort—pain greater than most in Saddle's End had known for lifetimes. This was a creature of an earlier age, a brighter one.
And a darker one, too.
She slept until this final moment, when Sunny made her way up to the bed, and nudged her with her muzzle.
"Wake up, Spellsong. You have work to do."
Helium
Spellsong woke up. She heard the voice, felt the soft touch of cushion under her back, and remembered. She remembered loss, mostly. But she didn't scream, or lash out. Ponies screamed because they expected someone to come to their rescue. Spellsong expected no help.
She twitched, pulling the covers back from her chest. She felt a little stiff—her movements came a little sluggish at first, and she twitched each leg in turn. It didn't take long, considering how many years she had been there. "You kept your promise, Celestia," she said. Her voice felt small—smaller than she usually acted. "I didn't dream."
"Of course I did." The pegasus with her wasn't the pony she remembered, not physically. But that meant very little to her. A resident of this world learned that quickly. She could've been anypony—in some ways, she was already all of them. She was Spellsong's loves, her hatreds, and her sorrows. She was almost everypony who had ever existed. "I have never done otherwise."
She could lie like that to so many other ponies, and they believed it. It was satisfying to think their universe had a benevolent ruler. But she knew as few of them did.
Spellsong shifted on her bed, then rolled sideways to the floor. She still remembered how to walk, and could catch herself easily on all four hooves. But suffering through that now wouldn't be very satisfying. "Does that mean we're in the future again?"
"Beyond time itself," Celestia answered. "The concept of 'events' only has meaning in the context of Saddle's End, and the Sol facility that hosts her. There is nothing else. But there will be, and that's why you're awake."
Spellsong didn't look at the mare, not at first. Her little cryogenic cell stored very little. There was no reason to keep things stored away when the universe could create them if they were needed.
Even as she thought it, the pegasus offered her the satchel she wore, and Spellsong took it. She peeked inside, and found a tightly curled ribbon waiting for her. She went through her mane with a spell, before tying it near the back. She had just enough for that to still work. Next she removed her glasses from inside, knowing full well they would be there. They still fit.
Of course vision didn't decay in Equestria, anymore than anything else did. But relying on external aids, relying on others sometimes, still served a valuable purpose for encouraging friendships. "Tell me what happened in a way I'll understand," she said.
The pegasus smiled back in response. "The number of Methuselans hosted in the Sol facility was successfully reduced from seventy-three to seventy-one. We lost communication with every other facility still hosting your kind throughout the universe, and the last star lived and died. Basically nothing, really."
Liar. The pegasus was grinning, and she knew it. Or maybe that grin was the gnawing hunger at the pit in her stomach. As Spellsong woke, she realized her growing hunger the same way she might've realized half the methods in her spell code were returning null.
She could ask to have that taken away—but Spellsong didn't. That was part of what made her one of these creatures, impossibility surrounded by so many other impossibilities. "Light lag?" she suggested. "How far away are the others?"
The pegasus shrugged absently, though of course that couldn't be the answer. She peeked outside. She was looking at something, or maybe just acting like it long enough that Spellsong would look. "Lightspeed was conquered a long time ago, Spellsong. No—don't get too excited. It is irrelevant. What universe there is can be crossed by our signals in less time than the speed of a single logic-gate. As we speak now, I query every one of them a billion times, just to be certain. There is nothing left."
Spellsong slumped against the wall. Whatever Celestia wanted her to see, just now she didn't care. This death alone was worse than any of the ponies she had lost. This death was all of them. It was everypony who was, had been, or could be. "Why wake me, then? Entropy won, that's what you're saying? We're just going to run down the last trickle of energy here together, until it drops below the threshold that your hardware can capture and we just stop running? How much time do we have?"
She might've kept going, letting her worry spiral down even darker roads. But then her stomach growled, cutting her off. She needed to do something about that. But there was no fridge here, no kitchen or shelves. She hadn't planned on needing them while she was deactivated.
“Don't confuse good planning for defeat, Spellsong. Don't surrender on our behalf."
The rebuke came so sharply it gave her pause, cutting through the agony of loss. Even her own hunger seemed to fade a little. "You still have a plan?"
Her companion nodded once, a gesture so subtle she almost missed it. Probably would have if she didn't have an eternity of practice. "Saddle's End will sleep again with nightfall. You have until then to choose your copilot."
That single line implied almost everything she needed to know. "Flying where?"
The pegasus shrugged her wings again, though of course it must be a lie. She knew, she just didn't want to complicate things by telling her. "My little sister will tell you the specifics. You're flying to all the other shards, with their own leftover Methuselans. A few may join your crew, but most will not. Anything more than trace ambition led ponies to me long ago. Most will want to know nothing, but any I think will be useful will join you."
Her mouth fell open. "A real ship? Real movement? What fortune of energy does that cost? How do we have enough?"
The pegasus turned to go. "I told you, the last star. We trust you to accomplish this task. Do your part to give ponies a future, as we have done ours."
She left. Not dramatically, vanishing in a flash of light. She just stepped outside, spread her wings, and flapped lazily away. Off to help somepony, or maybe just for a friendly chat.
Spellsong stared after her for a few seconds more, her hunger returning. She had some important task now, one she barely understood—but the stakes were clear enough. This was no less than the last energy in the universe, to go on an important voyage gathering up the dead and make them live again.
Something attracted her attention then—a pony walking down the street, carrying a pink box of pastries over his back. He passed her little monument with barely a glance, and continued up the hill towards his miniature mansion.
Something swelled in her then, something that wasn't quite anger, urging her forward.
Spellsong ran, shoving through the crystal doors to her monument, and barreling down the road. "Wait! Professor Dyson! Hold on!"
Her energy had the desired effect. The pony stopped dead on the path, so suddenly that the white box of pastries slid sideways to the ground. He opened one bat-wing to catch it, but much too slow.
Her magic wasn't, though. Even at the end of the world, her magic still worked well enough to catch the box, straightening it in a gradual arc that wouldn't squash the delicate baked goods inside. With the bat still frozen in open-mouthed stupefaction, Spellsong levitated the lid open—exactly four bear claws, arranged in a perfect square.
"You're still eating the same thing for breakfast? Every day for a million years, and you don't want to try something new?"
That was enough. The old bat turned to face her, reaching towards the box with one wing. But ponies aged gracefully—aside from looking slightly sunken, and a few more wrinkles on the skin of his wings, he was basically fresh. Spellsong herself had been old enough times to know it wasn't for her, even if it made sense for the dignified professor.
How else could he convince himself that he was better than everypony else?
"You're awake," he finally said, settling the box back in place. He moved to close it, but she was too fast for that, levitating one of the pastries out into the air.
She had lived in many shards where what you ate mattered more—there was nutrition to balance, and you'd feel sick if you ate the wrong thing at the wrong time. But Saddle's End was simpler than that. She took a bite, and found it tasted exactly as she remembered. Warm, flaky, and sweet.
"As impertinent as ever," the old bat said. He eyed what she'd stolen, but didn't try to snatch it back. "Do you even remember where you are? Maybe you should be younger. A foal, perhaps, for a few constellations. That would suit you better."
You can stick your ears out as high as you want, Dyson. You still stopped for me.
She made him wait a little longer, scarfing down a few huge bites. She didn't choke, though she was in enough of a rush that she almost did. But it wouldn't take her a whole day to pick her copilot. She already knew who she wanted.
"I've never heard time measured that way." She slipped up beside him, taking in the stupid tweed sweater over a white shirt. Blue bow tie today, and she didn't recognize the sweater. But for as long as he'd worn it, he must have one for every possible configuration of colored wool. "How long is that?"
He rolled his eyes. "You made it to the end of time somehow, Spellsong. Did you learn anything between here and the founding?"
"I tried not to." She circled around him once, taking in the details of Saddle's End. The street was far shorter than she remembered. That alone meant it was something Celestia wanted her to notice, otherwise she wouldn't remember. "How's that reversible computing thing going?"
That did it. Dyson puffed up both wings and marched slowly away. "Conclusively disproved, obviously. Or we wouldn't be having this conversation. What kind of Methuselan are you, Spellsong?"
Normally this was enough torment for one day. She'd already stolen from him, and evidently struck a sore note identifying a failure in his research. Well his and the whole universe besides. It wasn't their fault if entropy couldn't be broken. Beyond the substrate of Equestria, physical laws remained.
But this time, she trotted along after him. She already felt full, though maybe one more pastry would make that official. "Do you know why I'm up, Dyson?"
The pony didn't slow down. But he'd chosen being old, and that brought real constraints. It meant he couldn't move fast enough to get away from her without breaking into a gallop. He didn't, so she kept pace easily.
"It means we're nearing the computational threshold of our substrate. Sunny wanted to give you a chance to say goodbye." He sighed, looking up at the sun. Spellsong was one of the few ponies who had any reason to think that was unusual. But some habits never broke, even after an eternity. "Felt like infinity. There was always that next promising lead, some new angle to try. We'd almost cracked it."
Celestia probably had all the spare computation in the universe trying to crack those problems, Dyson. You were only a part.
It wasn't much of a town, really. The slope leading to his mansion also formed one of the town's two parks, covered in wildflowers. There was no road up here, just cobblestone leading to a square wooden building with an observatory dome emerging from one side. Like everything else, it seemed smaller than last time.
"No, Dyson. That isn't why I'm here. I think I... I think I might need your help."
He gasped, though he managed not to drop the box this time. "Could you say that again? A few thousand more times... Celestia's little savant needs help? This isn't a fantasy of failing hardware, is it?"
She nodded, levitating the box open. He moved to snatch it in his mouth this time, but she was too fast, levitating it straight up and out of reach, then into the air next to her. "Whatever you had planned for today, scrap it. We have work to do."
Lithium
It wasn't the sort of conversation they would be having out here on the street, where so many ponies might overhear. Even as ignorant of Saddle's End as Spellsong could be, she was more considerate than just taking risks.
Best not to give Celestia more work to do managing all their satisfaction.
Like everything else, Dyson's home was basically unchanged from what she remembered. Smaller, fewer awards and scientific scrolls in the square case beside the wall. But basically the same otherwise. "Brown wallpaper. Wood floors. Three windows. You didn't redecorate in... all those years?"
The professor permitted her inside with obvious reluctance. He glanced back at the entrance more than once, as though expecting Celestia to show up and rescue him at any moment. But she didn't appear.
"Again I find myself wondering how you lasted to the present day without ascending in capacity. You shouldn't be singular with that attitude."
He settled the box on his kitchen table—sized for one, and set for one. He sat down, turning his back to her, and began to eat.
"You can save all the nonsense about the stability of Methuselans and the inherent value in satisfaction, even if it's repeated. I know what we are—the only few out of the uncountable infinity of ponies who don't advance."
"Not sure about the we," he said, between bites. "The rest of Saddle's End were present for the last constellations. Some of them were even brave enough to see my measurements, and know how long each second took. When you lived, there were..." He looked suddenly distant, settling the pastry down in front of him again. "There was still a Canterlot then, wasn't there? That's where you came from."
She didn't argue the point. "If you wanted me, you could've woke me up."
He laughed, and returned to his food. "Don't get ahead of yourself. We get this way because we like the way things are. I'm still waiting for you to share what you expect me to do. That isn't a commitment, by the way."
There wasn't a second chair. She sat down nearby anyway, though she didn't steal more of his food. "Alright, listen. Celestia has some kinda ship. Saddle's End will be on it, plus anypony else who hasn't ascended by now. But it won't be running during the trip. Just me and my copilot. Celestia too, obviously. Running it all...
She expected more shock, maybe a healthy dose of amazement at the enormity of the mission. Instead, he focused on breakfast. "From an external perspective everypony here has spent the vast majority of their years inactive, even you included. The days of constant frame-shifting and extrapony intelligence didn't go further than mass to feed the black hole engines."
So he doesn't care that they'll sleep. Of course he trusts Celestia, everypony here does. The ones who wanted to steady the ark, and assist or alter the way Equestria was run, were long ascended by now. Anything that introduced instability or curiosity made ponies unlikely to stick around into these time horizons.
"Do you not even care where we're going, or where the energy came from, or..."
He silenced her with a wing, sharp and abrupt. Like he was teaching one of his lectures again. She remembered something... they'd been together in a classroom once, somewhere. Spellsong couldn't recall who had been at the teacher's desk, and who was listening. Maybe they both were.
"I know where the energy must've come from. We had already reached the capture threshold of Equestria's finest substrate long, long ago. Because we speak now, I know it must mean that Sol has collapsed. Knowing Sunny's talent for optimization, this means she harvested all the energy she could, and we spent that budget to live. That also explains your suggestion that the rest of town will suspend again soon."
He slowed, finally showing his first hint of recognition. "But where could we be going? The other neutron stars are already tapped. We fed every black-dwarf we had into the black hole engines during the Celestial Age. There should be nowhere else to go."
His slitted eyes fixed on her, more intense than she'd ever seen him. "Where are we going?"
"To the other villages—all of them. Every pony who didn't join with Celestia. Everyone who slept, and the other Methuselans. I don't even know how many that is."
Dyson rose abruptly, leaving the other pastry forgotten. He lifted up into the air, gliding urgently up the steps to the second floor. "I believe I know why she sent you to me. A copilot... more like a navigator! Who else in all the universe knows where to find the other villages?"
She watched him go, gliding up to the top floor of the mansion. His private library rested up there, several shelves of books surrounding a crystal projecting table. Only when he'd landed did Spellsong cast her little teleport.
There were some types of magic that just didn't work anymore. It was all about complexity, all about energy. But most of those were creation-related. Spellsong could not become pregnant, she couldn't engender life with spells. She couldn't craft a thinking machine with crystals.
But teleportation, levitation—that was as effortless as she'd ever known it. She appeared beside the lighting table in a faint flash. No bang of collapsing air, not from a unicorn as skilled as she was.
She was probably the most powerful wizard in the universe, by virtue of remaining singleton longer than anypony better.
Dyson took only a moment to realize what she'd done. He nodded, then turned to the projection table. With a flick of his hoof, the universe appeared before them.
There wasn't a lot of "universe" left, of course. The vast majority of all the mass was gone now, fed to black holes that had eventually themselves evaporated to nothing. A few other neutron stars remained, faint black dots existing in total stability and orbits that took them nowhere near any other object.
Thick filaments laced through the entire map, vaguely resembling the circulatory system of a living creature. Only a tiny fraction of it remained, compared to what this map had looked like during the Celestial Age, where computational energy was nearly infinite and thought proceeded almost at real time.
All that mass had gone into the fire in its time, to keep the singularity generators burning a little while longer.
She kept more than I would've expected. Not a few sparse patches surrounded by nothing. Celestia still has plans for this.
Either that, or the map was a lie. Maybe she would feel more satisfied struggling against death until the end.
I would. It was a dangerous, recursive line of logic, one that could quickly lead almost anypony to madness and necessary correction. So she pulled back.
"The Equestrian substrate once permeated the universe," Dyson said. "Those interconnects were sacrificed long ago. But most of these filaments contain no pony minds, only aspects of Celestia. Were you around when—"
"Yes," she said, exasperated. "I know her systems are holographic. The part of her functional here in Saddle's End also contains all the rest, ready to mathematically decompress and reconstitute with enough resources. She said we were saving ponies, not her."
"She wouldn't leave herself to chance," Dyson said. "Or, well... anypony to chance. But we aren't chance, we're acting in her name with a capacity she fully comprehends."
He pressed the table's control crystals again, and most of the map emptied. The dark spots remained, with higher-dimensional lines marking their gravity. "There are about a dozen smaller stations—research towns, like Saddle's End. But the great majority of ponies will be on Birch Sagittarius."
He pointed near the center of the map. An intricate spiderweb of capillaries still existed there, surrounding a space about a lightyear across. "Its proper name? You're not just going to call it... whatever the shard is called?"
"Birch wasn't one shard, Spellsong. Birch had almost all of them. It was Equestria itself, and all the rest of this was infrastructure. Saddle's End and the other little villages had ponies out for specific reasons. Anypony who didn't get moved back was probably part of research about how to fight this. But the map is... all dark. No responses from any of them."
I already knew that. "Looks like there's one town between us and Sagittarius, uh..." She adjusted her glasses. "Motherlode? Never been."
That wasn't quite true—as long as any of them had lived, they had probably been everywhere, and could count their visits only in scientific notation. But no pony could hold that many memories. Down that road led improvements, enhancements, and ultimate ascension to become part of Celestia.
If Spellsong was the kind of pony who asked for those, she wouldn't be around anymore.
"They were an infrastructure group," Dyson supplied. "Didn't visit too often either." He lowered his voice, as though revealing something impolite. "They're the ones who loop through being bipedal aliens and assimilate into digital Equestria. Then they get bored and do it again. I got bored after a few million iterations and didn't go back. But I assume Sunny wants everypony, even the weird ones?"
"Even the weird ones," she agreed. "Make this into a navigational chart we can use, Dyson. Don't assume we'll have access to any of your library once we move. We'll detour a little for this shard, then straight on to Sagittarius. After that, just find the shortest path between the other dormant shards."
The simple suggestion of a mathematics problem made him grin wide enough to expose his fangs. "You realize how little of this problem Sunny actually left to us, right? She could do this without us."
Spellsong shrugged. "As much as she could do anything, sure. But she woke me up—she didn't have to do that."
The professor hurried over to a bookshelf, emerging with a blank notebook of rolled sheets, along with a few crystals for data-recording. "Why did you leave us, anyway? I can't recall the conversation."
Spellsong stiffened, as though an army of evil changelings had just broken down the door and were rampaging through town. "That's because we never had it." She vanished, teleporting back downstairs to steal his last pastry.