Recombinant 63: A Conversion Bureau Story

by Chatoyance

First published 28th of December, 2012

At the heart of every Conversion Bureau is 'potion', the nanotechnomagical serum that converts a human into an Equestrian. But before the Bureaus, the serum had to be created first. This, is that story.

At the heart of every Conversion Bureau is 'potion', the nanotechnomagical serum that converts a human into an Equestrian. But before the Bureaus could exist, the serum had to be created first. This is the story of how the first successful conversion serum was developed, and of the humans and ponies that made it possible.

One: The Siren Call Of Secrets

Gwenhwyfar Boik was a librarian with a secret.

Her Scottish grandfather - and he insisted on being recognized as properly Scottish, and not Northeuropean Zone - had once told her she had paper for brains and ink for blood and he had meant it as a compliment. That was how compliments sounded from old Eachann, like ten parts of insult with a speck of something decent if you looked hard enough.

And the old bastard was right enough, to be sure, for Gwen - she preferred Gwen in word and print because who in this day could hope to know how to say 'Gwenhwyfar' when you were standing in line with ten dozen impatient souls behind you all pissing mad that the lady in the front had some crazy name that was holding things up - Gwen was books.

She loved the feel, the weight, the smell of old tomes covered in the dust of ages and with the little stains that told of unknown mystery readers who hadn't the sense to not snack on Nanobars while they were handling precious things - Gwen thought that there were books and then there was the world, and the world was there for the books and not the other way round.

But nobody made books anymore, not proper books, everything was on the hypernet, wasn't it? All digified and encoded and transmitted and compiled, what counted as a novel now was a movie once without a letter or a paragraph to be seen, and what counted as writing now were text messages in the kiosks arguing about the movies. If it didn't have a 'holo' prefixing it, it wasn't worth the spit to get it wet and if it weren't electronic it wasn't worth the bother.

But books lasted. That was their great power, their secret magic. Books were survivors. Oh, like any species, individuals would be lost to the predations of time and mold and carelessness and outright uncaring - not to mention the occasional burning - but books as a life form survived, and multiplied, and some even became immortal like the heroes of old.

The Worldgovernment had made a project - with the help of the Royal House of Equestria, of course - to fund the preservation of human knowledge in the new world. The creeping barrier changed everything it touched, and electric things died within its perimeter, so that the only things that could be assured to remain unaffected were things made of Equestrian materials.

The ponies already had records, a simple enough technology, very like the kind that humans had made long ago - flat disks of material with grooves engraved upon them that would make a needle vibrate out a recording of sound. Teams around the world were busy transferring digital music to Equestrian blanks, the glories of digital perfection being sacrificed for simple survival.

But books were better.

A letter was a letter, a word was a word, a symbol was a pattern and there was no loss within a book. A 'K' written a thousand years ago would still be a 'K' a thousand in the future, if the book were kept dry and safe, and properly stored. Gwen had eagerly joined the Literature And Arts Survival Triage Team - oh those government types loved their acronyms, didn't they. LAASTT. Last. Last chance to make silly acronyms to be sure, but the name didn't matter, what mattered was the work, the effort to save as much of the writings, music and artworks of Mankind as would be allowed before there wasn't anything to save anymore.

As much as would be allowed. Now there was the catch, there was always a catch, old Eachann was ever reminding anyone who would listen, which wasn't many being as he was not the most pleasant of people to run into in most any circumstance, and the catch was that not everything Humanity had created was suitable for the refined and delicate tastes of the pony folk. Oh no, everything to be saved had to be approved, and there was so much of it that it would take a blooming goddess to read it all and sift the wheat from the chaff - not that there was wheat anymore, of course, but good sayings didn't really need relevancy as long as everyone understood the meaning - so it was a great boon that there happened to be one available and willing to the task.

The name of the goddess was Luna, or at least that was the translation of it - Gwen had heard the Equestrian word and it had sounded like a goat choking on a candy-wrapper, so she'd never tried to learn it - and Luna was a dark and mysterious one make no mistake. She was a pony, of course, but like her sister goddess, different from the ordinary pony folk. She was tall as could be, taller than a man if you counted the horn - she had a horn - and her mane and tail were made of starlight and twinkles and nothing so common as hair.

Silver she was clad in, silver hooves and a silver crown, and well they looked on her, and some kind of frontspiece too, with a half moon upon it, dark as she, and made of no one knows what. Her eyes were cyan, blue green and clear as gems, and her pony coat was dark as midnight, Prussian Blue, Gwen had thought it, but her speech was fine and dignified and with a clear sense of antiquity and insight.

A good thing she was a goddess too, because even with the advent of the Hypernet and the virtual world still there languished endless warehouses of ancient books, more than anyone could read in a thousand lifetimes, if anyone cared to be bothered, which none were, except of course for Gwen and those like her, few as can be.

The princess Luna - she didn't prefer to be called a goddess to her face, but there was little doubt of what she and her sister were after the little demonstration they gave following the Three Day War - would be led to some vast repository of mouldering tomes - nobody cared for books properly anymore - and she would stand there and smile.

Then she would dip her grand head, and her horn would glow with the light of the faeries and quick as can be she would dissolve into ten thousand little swirls of dark and sparkles which would dart like how bees were described, back when there were bees, and zip and sweep through all the books, in and out of them, making each tome glow for a moment and hang in the air, then drop again. A minute later, the little clouds of starlight and darkness would swarm back and gradually build her form until the princess stood again, smiling, as if it were the most ordinary thing in two worlds to dissolve oneself and then reform.

And then, presented with an array of hundreds of old, mechanical typewriters hooked up to electronics distant enough that magic could not touch them, the keys would sound like a million hailstorms and the title of every single book that had been in the warehouse would be listed, judged and found either wanting or worthy, and a note for each one as to why or why not.

It mattered not one bit the language or the number of books. The dark princess toured the planet with her entourage, some human, some pony, all from the ranks of the elite, blinking in a flash of light from one place to another - teleporting they called it, like something from a science fiction novel. Round and round she went, attending to the project, seeing that the right books got through and the bad books were sent to weep with the vanishing earth.

But there was another side to her, for she was a wily goddess, and not entirely in league with her sister. That she might one day be in trouble was her problem she claimed, in the end she was sure she could find peace with her sibling. What was important, she claimed, was the work.

And the work was secret, hidden from the eyes of the day. Princess Luna had her own project, and Gwenhwyfar Boik was a part of it.

It was called the 'Underground Bookmobile', a play on Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad that helped enslaved men, women and children escape the ancient American south. Once, long ago, when proper libraries mattered and existed, powered vehicles would roam the land bringing books to communities without a library of their own. These vehicles were called Bookmobiles and from them a book could be borrowed and kept until the next time they rolled through, and a fine thing it was, and a fine world it must once have been that would fund such a thing for the benefit of its people.

The Underground Bookmobile would not take all books. There was triage even here, but of a looser sort than that demanded by Celestia of her sister. Books about weapons, about bombs and murder and slaughter, about how to make and maintain the tools of death - these were just as forbidden by princess Luna as by her sister the sun. Banned also were books of hatred and bigotry and cruelty, and books that showed the evils that Man was capable of.

Neither princess wanted future generations to find any reason to despise or fear the descendants of the Newfoals, and they saw no reason for Equestrians to think poorly of Humanity or of Earth in the endless ages to come. The Earth would be gone, forever, and Mankind as a species with it, and there was simply no point in preserving anything negative about a world and a species that would soon cease to be, and would never be again. It was like any funeral, really - a man could be the most hated sot in all the county, but when it came time to lay him in the ground, his most bitter enemies would say the sweetest and most charming things about the wretches' rotten life, and why not? He could do no more harm, and it didn't do, to speak ill of the dead.

But there were stories that were not dangerous, nor hateful, which otherwise failed Celestia's narrow test, and which Luna and those that followed her, felt should be preserved for some day, one day, when perhaps Celestia might be brought to a more open form of mind. Stories that made errors of their time and place that should not be damned to extinction purely because of a single chapter or a narrow viewpoint that was once the common truth but later was found to be vile.

Mary Poppins had been saved this way, despite the desperately racist parts within the otherwise charming story, and likewise the works of Roald Dahl, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - though to be fair, only the later version was preserved, where the Oompa-Loompas were no longer African Pygmies enslaved by Willy Wonka.

The Underground Bookmobile had rescued not only literature, though. There were reference works, scientific tomes, and selected historical documents too, so long as they made no mention of contentious or dangerous and forbidden subjects. The historical study of war, was especially forbidden. There were ungentle and unmutual species within Equestria such as the Dragons and Gryphons and others who already presented a political threat of some sort to the princesses, and nothing could be allowed that might give them any ideas or advantages.

It was easy to understand such censorship - a kind world of endless plenty had no use for the struggles of creatures in a universe of scarcity and hardship, and indeed knowledge of such matters could cause great damage to such gentle souls. Still, the cosmos in which Earth lay was a rare one, perhaps unique - a universe devoid of magic, yet possessed of life. The princess Luna clearly worried that her sister would one day regret her strict policies on what could be brought over, and there were hidden places deep within Canterlot, sealed chambers that could outlast endless ages, where dangerous things could be safely kept. Such were where the libraries of the Underground Bookmobile would be preserved, just in case.

Perhaps the most controversial works that Gwen had to deal with were not matters of ancient human history and struggle, but instead of the struggles of the current age. There was contentious concern regarding preserving how the great escape to Equestria had come to be, and how it had come to pass that the population of an entire world could even be rescued at all. Equestria was deadly to all earthly life, and only the princesses' Great Barrier allowed Man any time whatsoever to hope to be transformed and thus survive. Without the Barrier, the earth would have become a dead and sterile globe the very same day that Equestria had first appeared.

Celestia and the Worldgovernment both agreed that there was no time to record nor preserve current history. The world was ending, and there was no time for making records. It was a time of desperate action.

Luna and some of the Underground felt that the record of the transformative migration of humanity to Equestria was the most important sort of history, and should, almost certainly, be preserved somehow. Gwen had once seen the two princesses in quiet and restrained argument about the issue. For the ancient and reserved beings, their faintly harsh whispers must have been akin to a human match of screaming and throwing things about. Contentious... indeed.

One of the Underground had just recently brought in a shipment of papers, books, folders and romball drives that had been stolen from the Worldgovernment archives. Who had managed to acquire the illicit haul was unknown, and desperately wanted to remain so. They had unloaded the stash on pallets, and left it covered by a simple tarp, then placed boxes in front to hide it further. This was what Gwen faced today. It would be necessary to comb through the material, virtually all of it classified beyond any common label of the highest security, and determine what, if anything, would be worth presenting to her majesty Luna.

Gwen had cracked her long, bony fingers and dug right in. The romball drives would need machines to read and possibly print out their contents, and there would likely be some strong protection on what was there. That could wait for another time. Gwen began to search through the stacks of folders and documents. They were mostly financial reports involving the six-hundred or so families that effectively ruled the earth as the WorldGovernment. These were the great barons of industry and commerce, and in any other age, such folders would have been a revelation of the highest order. But at the very end of the world, it no longer mattered who really ran things, or the why, or how of it all - their global dominion was rapidly coming to an end, because soon enough, there would be no globe to rule.

There were some documents that would, were the world not ending, surely have brought the entire planet to civil war and revolution. Gwen's jaw dropped when she spied the supposedly nonexistent original report on the MonsanDow- SinoPont Universal Genetic Modification of the wheat plant - this claimed to be the actual truth behind the tragedy that had killed all wheat, everywhere on the planet, leaving only dead, grey, profoundly inedible stalks that could never biodegrade. The stated goal was to have rendered all wheat, globally, into a product that could be completely owned and ruthlessly controlled, but which also would have been capable of growing in any climate, and which could produce yields beyond comprehension. Three small genetic errors had ended wheat forevermore, starving billions.

There were files on the Great Collapse - the financial collapse of the world that had driven civilization to the brink. Gwen scanned the folders, noting which of her suspicions were confirmed, and even some shocking surprises she hadn't considered. It had ultimately all just been simple greed, nothing more, just mindless accumulation of wealth that had nearly put paid to civilization. That fact was no surprise at all. What shocked her was how completely complicit the famous old nations of history had been in the process. Truly, any politician could be bought.

Gwen picked up a damaged tome very different from the tidy-looking Worldgovernment folders and files. A small stack had slid to the side, revealing the worn volume. It was an overstuffed and stained laboratory notebook, crammed full of notes and torn bits of paper. 'Curious', she thought, as she turned it over and examined it. The whole thing was wrapped in multiple, large rubber bands, then bound with some sort of industrial sticky tape. It looked like it had been dragged behind a jitney caravan for a week.

Gwenhwyfar was a fool for secret books and diaries, and this decidedly looked the part. Instantly, the tattered and strangely bound up volume captured her interest. The rest of the pile could wait. The expected collusions and debaucheries of the usual suspects were really of no value now. It would not matter to history, truly, which nation had sold out to which wealthy family when. When the Collapse hit, only Iceland had not sold its national soul, and that prideful fact had not saved it from the global collapse one whit. Now there were no nations, just production zones. The true story of how that had been permitted to happen was just as sad and as meaningless as the fiat capital that had tossed the fate of the world into the dumpster of history. But this thick, bulging little notebook... who knew what genuinely astonishing history it contained?

The printed title was already mysterious.

Gwen swept the fallen lock of dark hair out of her face and sat down amidst the pile of folders, reports, and romball drives, and set about trying to open the fat bundle that was the notebook. Her initial attempts were unproductive, so she was forced to stand up again and fetch a pair of scissors and an exacto knife. A snip and a cut later, Gwen was finally able to open the slightly scary notebook to look inside.

Something fell out, a photo, printed on 3D refractive replipaper. It showed a woman, perhaps about 36, with shoulder-length red hair and glasses. She was standing in front of a wall-sized flatscreen, wearing a lab coat and had the sort of nervous, affected smile reserved for licenses and mug shots. Gwen turned the photo over, the shadows shifting within the image as she did so. On the back was written the date and the useful identification '-ME!'. That was helpful.

Another sheet of replipaper fell out, onto the floor. It was a computer-assisted design diagram of some kind of truly bizarre device. The thing was twenty-sided, with curious ports and holes on all the faces. Odd looking tubes and structures poked out of some of the holes. The vertexes of the icosahedronal machine had strange 'Y' shaped protrusions. It looked like a virus. An examination of the sheet suggested it was supposed to be as small as a virus... it was a nanotech device. It was number three of six such devices, all of which were supposed to work together somehow. There was wording describing a biologically and thaumatically active organic suspension.

In the corner of the diagram were several warning symbols relating to the nanomachine described by the design sheet. Biohazard. Thaumatic Radiation Hazard. Gwen flipped the sheet over to find a printed description of what the machine was and did, and she found she couldn't follow much of what she read. It was a nanosurgical device.

Now that was strange. Nanotechnology had fully bloomed during the worst of the Great Collapse. It had been touted as the great salvation of humankind, but there had been problems. Soon, it was clear there would be no Diamond Age, no essentially magical future of mechanical pixie powder constructing houses while you watched, or granting immortality from within your bloodstream. The little machines were not magic. They needed power, and lots of it, and that was a problem, because most of the world's resources had already been giddily spent like some sailor's paycheck on shore leave. Oil was all but gone, what was left took more energy to get at than the energy it could provide. Nuclear power had left the Japanese people as wandering gypsies forever barred from ever setting foot on their homeland again - and they were not alone in the world in that regard. Solar and wind were not enough for everyone, and the demand just kept growing.

But even that was not the main problem. Nanotechnology generated heat when it did its microscopic magic. A great deal more heat than could be economically dealt with. It simply cost too much to use nanotech in every regard. And in medicine, it had very limited applications. The dream of using nanosurgical devices to construct a new arm or spleen or body from base elements was fundamentally impossible. The little machines moved, and movement was heat, and the heat was so great that it cooked living cells even as they tried to construct or repair them. The main thing nanotech turned out to be good for was manufacturing a simple, edible foodstuff from human waste.

It had taken fifty thousand years of human existence, but for the very first time in human history, every human being went to bed fully fed. In that sense, it was the golden age of mankind, nineteen billion people, all of them fed and watered, every day, no matter what. Taken by itself, it was the greatest achievement in history, an age worthy of pride. That the majority of humankind lived in favelas built of ruin and scrap, and had no job, no future and no hope was almost insignificant. War had been conquered. Hunger had been slain. For the first time in history, all of humanity lived in peace, more or less, and knew not want of food nor water.

What little Gwen could make of the schematic in her hand, it was the design of one unit in a working nanosurgical system that had no problem with heat at all. The solution to the problem made Gwen gasp, because in an instant she realized what the device was, what it represented. It was one of six nanomachine designs that ran not on inducted power, not on tiny specks of nuclear fuel, not on chemical energy stolen from the blood. The nanomachine ran on thaumatic energy. It was a human device that used Equestrian physics to power it, sidestepping the earthly limitations of physical law like a microscopic ninja avoiding detection. It was a truly extropic machine.

It was potion. It was part of the conversion serum that the Bureaus used.

Gwen's hand shook slightly, as she realized what she held. This was a notebook written by one of the people who had created the conversion serum. This notebook likely held the untold story of how the serum was developed, at the least, it described how it worked.

It was probably the most dangerous notebook in the history of the world.

There were so many groups and organizations that would literally kill to possess such a thing. The Human Liberation Front would do anything - anything at all - to own it. The complete details on how conversion serum functioned! It could give them the means to create a counter to it, even a sort of inoculation against it. In the hands of the HLF, humanity could have the choice of ponification for survival stolen from them, all to satisfy the ideology that it was better to die proudly on two legs, than to survive on four.

The PER, the Ponification for the Earth's Revival, if they had the book they could crack the secret of making 'potion' themselves, and would not be forced to steal it however they could. They would take the choice of staying human, regardless of the consequences, away entirely. They would convert everyone, everywhere, against their will, to save them. They would take away the basic human right to commit suicide from Man, and force even the most unwilling into a vastly extended life of equinoid abundance and contentment, whether it was wanted or not.

Gwenhwyfar Boik was a reader. She knew history, she knew humanity. If anything defined the human race, it was the freedom to make the most terrible and self-destructive of decisions, both individually, and as a species. The PER would take that most essential freedom away. Princess Celestia had been quite clear from the very beginning. Conversion had to be a free choice, it should never be forced on any person, for any reason.

And there were others, too, that would want the secrets of the serum. There were factions within the Worldgovernment itself who would have uses for a transformational weapon, perhaps bent back against the Equestrians themselves.

This was, absolutely, the most dangerous notebook that had ever existed.

And here it was, in Gwen's hands, as she sat near the loading dock door of a warehouse filled with books, doing the clandestine work of one of the princesses of Equestria, behind her royal sister's back.

The smart thing to do would be to burn it. Burn the notebook right now, immediately. That would be the right thing. The longer she waited, the greater the chance something could happen. It was a miracle that it had come to her, and a second miracle that it had not been noticed for what it was.

Or, maybe she should use one of the special Equestrian scrolls in the lock-box. They were there for emergencies, courtesy of princess Luna herself. Just write a message, and sign on the provided line - that completed the spell, and the scroll zipped off in a burst of green fire, straight to the princess of the night herself. It was possible to add attachments, they would be carried off by the scroll. She could send the notebook to Luna, directly, where it would be forever safe from all the factions of humankind. It was too dangerous to keep, no matter what.

It was also the single most interesting notebook that had ever existed.

The rest of the team wouldn't be back until morning. She was entirely alone in the warehouse. It wasn't like the HLF or the PER were just going to burst in for no damn reason. There were authorized Blackmesh patrols around the warehouse to protect it, just in case. She had eight hours, at least.

The history of potion itself, by someone actually involved in the creation of it. The world was changing, the human species was changing, and potion was at the heart of every single event that was happening right now. It was the most dangerous notebook to be sure, and the most interesting notebook to be double sure, and the most historically important notebook in the history of the human species without a single doubt.

Gwenhwyfar Boik looked left and right, as if she were being hunted. It was a silly thing to do, but... the sheer magnitude of this! There were all kinds of security clearances - but she had read things, tinfoil hat things - and she had heard of the words 'Umbra-Cosmik-Magik' before. She had thought the term a hoax. Little green men from beyond and all!

But, there were creatures from beyond, weren't there? They were right here, right now. They weren't green, not all of them, anyway, and they certainly weren't men. But they were alien beings, and not just from outer space - they were from another universe altogether, a different space. They didn't need saucers or ray guns. Pegasai flew naturally, and unicorns could cast all the beams of force they could imagine from their horns.

Umbra-Cosmik-Magik was real. And she had the opportunity, right here, right now, to learn the deepest secrets of the planet.

Gwen's fingers fumbled and shook, but there was no stopping them as they dug into the bulging notebook. She began to read. Not even wild earthponies could have dragged her away.

Two: Bubble In The Sea

Project Bucephalus - Orientation
January 1st

I still don't truly understand why I am here. I don't belong on a project like this. I don't know enough. I barely even have a doctorate - honestly I faked and scammed my way through most of it. My advisor was a friend of the family. Most of the committee was too. I am proud of my dissertation, I won't say otherwise there. Teaching An Old Nano New Tricks: A Brief Examination Of Where Nanotechnology Failed, And How Its Promise Can Yet Be Fulfilled. It was good work. Solid work. But that said, I don't belong here.

I don't know where 'here' actually is. I think it is underground, or at least inside of a mountain. I catch whiffs of the scent of ancient mold and earthly dampness, despite the constant - and sometimes loud - churning of the ventilation system. Everything is plascrete and crystalex, and the doors are vault doors, heavy and imposing. There are no windows at all, though there are false windows in certain areas with holographic views. The entire complex feels both cutting edge and run down at the same time - or perhaps it is closer to say that it is likely an old site of some kind, re-purposed for what we are doing here.

I don't say 'trying to do here'. It has been made abundantly clear that there is literally no place for failure. We either succeed, or we - and every human being, indeed the whole of the human species - will perish. The public do not know yet that the world is ending. We have just seven years, starting today. Seven years before the world ends.

It started with a single image, taken from a spy satellite scanning the North Pacific. Last year, on April the 22nd, that was the day they first saw it. The 21st, nothing. Then BAM, the next day, a ten meter wide pearl from nowhere, half in the water, and half out, and it was growing. It wasn't floating, and it didn't move relative to the continental shelf. Not a millimeter. By the 23rd, it was thirty meters in diameter. 28.8558,-142.414221 -the precise location of the beginning of the end of the world.

By the start of May, the Pacific Anomaly - that is what they were calling it at the time - was a hundred meters in diameter, and they had aerostats and carriers and every kind of exploratory vessel imaginable out there. Submersibles confirmed it was just hanging there, a perfect sphere, a bubble, half in and out of the water, somehow locked in place relative to the crust of the earth.

They showed me the early images - it was quite something. You could see it was a three-dimensional hole into another world even then. There was this sped-up video, taken from aboard a carrier circling the anomaly. The ship went all around the thing, 360 degrees, and from every angle it showed this desert, stretching off to infinity. It was like looking at a gigantic mirror ball, only the reflection in the curving mirror was not the Pacific Ocean at all. It was this strange, colorful desert, with a deep blue sky, blue like skies used to be before the global smog permalayer. At first, they thought it might be some kind of time gate that led back millions of years, when the continent was where ocean is now. But that ended when the aliens made contact.

Holy motherfucking shit. Aliens. Aliens are real. And they do not look like UFO aliens.

Well actually, they do. They really do, if you see them square on, from the front, with their face turned toward you. Big eyes, small mouths, tiny looking nostrils, square on from the front, they only look like they have two legs. Get a gray one without a mane, and in the dark, it would look just like the classic UFO 'Gray' alien so many people have claimed to see. Except for the ears, of course. They have big ears on top of their heads.

From the side, the aliens are quadrupeds, with hooves and a coat of hair. They have enormous heads, large ears and very short, neotenous animal muzzles. They look like ambulatory equine fetuses. They possess full manes and tails, though. Everyone here calls them 'ponies', because that is the closest thing on earth we have to them. They don't look like what real equines looked like, but perhaps, if something vaguely equine were to evolve, or be deliberately uplifted somehow, then such a creature might end up looking like the aliens.

They are intelligent, and they have language and technology. Not advanced technology though. Apparently their level of advancement is around the 14th or 15th century. They don't have or understand industrialization. Oh, they are very, very colorful. Baasch the xenobiologist - apparently that's a real thing, he's very proud of the title - thinks the bright colors are to confuse predators. Whatever the reason, I am talking every color of the rainbow and then some. Tan, hot pink, livid green, blue - you name it. They are like a race of colorful parrots.

They have their own language, but apparently they have learned ours. All of ours. I don't know how. Maybe they have been watching us for ages, nobody seems to know. They have a leader, and everything we know, we know from her. But that is apparently going to change. Eventually we will be meeting and interacting with these beings. The thought makes me feel giddy, and also a little like I might throw up. It's terrifying, and amazing at the same time. Or maybe it is incipient xenophobia. I have no idea how they have technology without hands. They do not have hands, or any kind of grasping organ I can identify, at least from the images of them through that sphere in the Pacific.

Oh, their world is deadly. Apparently their world isn't in our universe. The hole - my higher ups call it a 'Rucker Gate' - leads not to another planet in our galaxy, or another galaxy, but to an entirely different cosmos. They are aliens from an alien universe, and we've been told that the laws of physics there are very different. Holy crap. Just.... holy crap.

The physics of their realm are not compatible with ours. A few ships got too close to the hole, to the bubble, and the crews started to burn. Their flesh began to necrotize and turn to ash. One ship grazed the bubble when this happened, because the crew was unable to pilot the vessel. They showed me the video, from several angles.

The part of the ship - it was one of those medium sized ships, a cruiser or a battleship or something, I really don't know ships - anyway when part of it passed through the bubble, it changed. By changed I mean - it really changed. It just turned into something gooey and pink, with striped red and white bits and big lumps that looked for all the world like gumdrops or maybe big sticky gems. I don't know what it was, but that part of the ship became it, and that stuff wasn't very strong and immediately collapsed into the sea. By the time the ship drifted past the bubble, a third of one side was just oozing into the sea, and the ship was tipping over. I saw the compartments and and chambers inside the ship as it fell over, bodies falling out into the sea, into that goop that used to be the ship. They didn't tell us if anyone lived or what.

Today was Initial Orientation, you see. Basically, they just threw everything at us for six hours to see what might stick. I don't know how to take any of this. Three days ago, I thought I understood the world. Today, I have just learned that an alien universe is expanding into the Pacific, and there are intelligent aliens living in it, it is deadly as hell, and even brushing it can turn a ship into something that looks like ice cream and candy bits. The aliens are colorful, technological horse fetuses that can build cities without hands, somehow. And they have an alien queen.

Not a queen, she apparently insists on the term 'princess'. That is the highest she will go. She can speak our language, and, according to Gerste, our orientation guy - maybe our manager, I'm not sure - she can read minds. And more, he says, much, much more. Over the next week, we will see some of what else she can do. Reading minds - this is pushing my credibility, but then, I saw a ship partly turned into goo. I don't have a basis to make any valid statements about any of this. Yet.

There are twenty of us. I met Baasch, the 'xenobiologist' - that is truly a thing, really? Since when? and a woman named Saulnier, I think she's a physicist. I don't know the rest. I've always been bad at remembering names. Fortunately, everyone has badges. Baasch was impressed with me being a biotechnologist, well, until I scoffed at his title. It sounded fake. I mean, studying alien biology? Three days ago, I would have bet my life savings on there not being even one example, ever. Boy, howdy was I wrong.

They wouldn't tell us what it is that we are here for yet. I guess they are seeing who folds, who breaks after seeing all of this stuff. They are introducing it to us in stages. But they have repeatedly told us that this is important. That the world will end - though not yet how that is supposed to happen - and that it is our job to make the answer work so that all humanity will not die.

No pressure, obviously. And there is an answer, apparently. They already know what needs to be done to save everyone, they just need to make it actually work. So that's a relief, apparently. Someone asked why we just don't blast off into space and colonize the moon or mars or whatever. I don't know who said it, but everyone in the room just stared at them. I worry that whoever it was won't be back tomorrow. One thing they made clear was that this was about saving as much of humanity as possible, not just a few dozen, or hundred people who we might be able to ship off to the moon. Man, I feel sorry for that poor jerk suggesting moon colonies.

I don't know what the solution is yet, but it's apparently real, and it can work if we can make it work, but it won't be easy. There are twenty other groups like ours, and we will all be working together to try to crack whatever the hell the big fix turns out to be. The whole planet is at our disposal, all the resources we have left, everything. This is priority number one, and nothing else in all the world matters anymore, just this.

We were sworn to secrecy, and to serve until we succeed. There is only one penalty for failure, and only one way to withdraw, and that is a bullet in the brainpan. That was another thing they were really careful to make clear. This is a completely zero-tolerance situation. We are in until we win, or we die. It is a lot to take. I guess that means that anyone who can't hack any of this is pretty much dead meat. Man, I feel sorry for the moon colony guy. Maybe he'll be OK.

I am scared. I am really scared, and it's hard to go to sleep. I keep trying to think that this is all some psychology experiment, some Milgram test or something, but those videos just had something about them that said they were real. Real aliens. A real alien universe. The planet is doomed. And I am one of the big push to save humanity.

Like I said, I don't belong here. I can't even imagine what good I will be. Physics, sure. I can see that. Even 'xenobiology', whatever it is they do. It sounds pretty appropriate to the situation. But basic biotechnology? Implants and nanotech? The stuff is pretty much useless except for making food, and I wrote my thesis on how much more could be done with it. Someday, with the emphasis on future. As in, not now.

I'm going to hit my special books, and see if I can relax. They let us bring a chest of personal effects. I think I need to tumble-bumble pell-mell down a few watercolor hills tonight more than ever. Thank wonderment for my antique book collection.

Project Bucephalus - Excursion
January 8th

I saw the Barrier today. Up close. I was utterly terrified.

It took a day and a half to get there, out in the middle of the North Pacific. It is now very clear that no expense is being spared with regard to any of us. My group is Group 12, of 20 such teams. I figure there are about 400 of us, altogether, if each team has twenty members on average. I overheard Mayoss - he's our neurochemist - describe us as the Manhattan Project of our age. I do get that vibe, I have to say.

We travel in and out of wherever it is the complex is located in large vehicles with no windows. It takes about an hour to get to whatever the perimeter facility is. We boarded something new, this time, a kind of big trailer, only with comfy appointments inside, but of course, no windows. I felt us being lifted up on cables - the whole thing swayed very disconcertingly. Two hours later, we were allowed to leave. We spent the time watching a movie, one of the modern, forgettable things. 'Favela Love' or somesuch - it was one of those combined Bolly-Holly musicals. Interestingly, I saw Baasch wiping his eyes at the climax - I guess xenobiologists are softies. Saulnier - she just tried to ignore the whole thing and spent the time catching up on journals. Serious type, Saulnier.

When we were allowed to leave, I expected we would be on an aerostat. Big surprise - we were on a jetcopter, burning fuel like there was any left in the world. We refueled twice, landing on these massive carriers at sea, sleeping aboard one of them. The carrier was named the Stennis, apparently, and we were welcomed by some Admiral named Holt. They had pretty good food, which surprised me. I mean, it was really quite good. I didn't expect that.

After our short stay on the Stennis, we resumed our jetcopter trip to Platform One. The thing is a large, floating structure that constantly runs engines in order to maintain an exact distance from the Barrier. Everyone calls it the Barrier, you can hear the capital letter in their voice. Everything seems to be said with capital letters when it comes to project Bucephalus.

Platform One is the size of a couple of football pitches and has some buildings on it, but mostly it is just open deck. There is stuff below, but we never got to take a tour. The whole structure is automated, and run by a dedicated A.I. We didn't get to learn much more than that. Apparently, time was of the essence.

The platform floats right up next to the wall of the Barrier, our side of the cosmic bubble - and it is huge now, let me just say that. Huge. We were informed that it was half a kilometer in diameter now, and still growing. The speed of growth is not constant. Sometimes it stops for a while, then the sphere expands again once more. It never gets any smaller. I am getting a hint from that as to what the big 'end of the world' danger likely is.

Whatever the deadly radiation is that spills out of the damn thing, it has a pattern to it, one that they already understand. I heard talk that it was some fractal thing, and that it worked a little like electromagnetic waves - there are areas of cancellation. That was the reason we could approach the Barrier at all, much less stand right next to it and poke stuff into it. Platform One constantly orbits the bubble, doing its best to stay in a shadow, where waves of whatever the death rays are cancel themselves out. It isn't always possible to avoid exposure entirely, which is why time was such an issue - we had a window where we wouldn't be burned, and we had to get in, and get out, before that window closed.

The radiation is serious, and it messes with reality on the quantum level. Apparently they regularly have to replace the A.I. because it gets blasted sometimes. The platform can't always move fast enough to stay in the shifting sweet spots. They lost Platform Zero altogether - the quantum computer was destroyed when it couldn't move fast enough due to choppy seas, and the thing slammed into the Barrier and turned into butter or something. It's insane. I got to personally see how insane.

We were led up to the Barrier three at a time, the twenty of us (except for Saulnier and Mayoss who didn't have a third), and each group was allowed five minutes to dick around. We were each given a little metal bucket thing filled with sticks to prod the bubble with. There was a glass rod, a steel rod, a wooden rod, neoplastic, copper, silver, a tree branch (I have no idea where they got those), and the leg of some animal. I didn't ask any questions.

I stood on this little overhanging stage that can be extended from the platform. I was with Belden (internal medicine) and Malcolm (evolutionary biology). The ocean was behaving itself, and there were rails around everything, but it was really pretty scary. I just stood there with the instruction to keep one hand on the rail at all times, and poke the Barrier to observe the result. We were all cautioned that touching the Barrier with any part of ourselves would mean immediate retirement from the project, so we were really, really, really careful.

So I stood there, hanging on to a metal rail on a stage extended over the open ocean, less than a meter from the outer boundary of a half-kilometer sized spherical anomaly protruding from outside our universe. I was sweating like a pig, my hands shook, and I wet myself a little when my foot slipped and I almost had my hand go through the Barrier.

I picked up the glass rod, and basically poked the wall in front of me. The sphere is so huge that it just looks like a big wall. The curvature is really difficult to accept or perceive correctly with something that large. The wall shimmers. It kind of looks like how a soap bubble looks, and there are gleams of light that sort of ripple over it. Things look slightly distorted through it, though I would be hard pressed to explain just how. Like thick glass maybe, or water.

The other side was a desert, just like I saw in the videos in orientation. It's a very colorful desert, lots of reds and pinks and tan shades. The sky on the other side is just the bluest blue you could imagine. And the sun was very strange. It was clearly a different time of day in there - we arrived just after lunch, about 1:15, I think, but it looked like late sunset beyond the wall of the Barrier.

The surface of the desert landscape is about two meters or so above the level of the ocean. Below that, I saw a cross-section of what was under the surface of the alien land. Sand and rocks, all flat to the edge of the bubble. The thing looked like a gigantic terrarium. I didn't see anything alive on the other side, though Beldin swore he saw a cactus-like plant in the distance.

So I jab at the shimmering Barrier, and the tip of the glass rod goes into it. The instant it penetrated the surface, the glass changed. As far as I could tell, the end of the rod became sand, just like the desert. The sand fell onto the desert, and made a little pile. I thought, OK, that makes sense - glass is just melted sand, after all. I felt pretty smart in that moment.

Then I stuck the copper rod into the Barrier. The part that went in looked like it shattered, only the bits were not copper anymore, and they did not fall. I swear on my Golden Books that the result was butterflies. I have never seen a living butterfly, of course, but I have seen videos of them, and what that rod turned into matched those videos perfectly. The little creatures flew away, into the distance, except for one.

One of the little butterflies flew back toward me. I freaked out, and that is when I slipped - though I caught myself - and the little creature did a loop and then darted back into the other universe. That is also the point at which I wet myself. I wasted a full minute just trying to recover from that. Our handler for this trip - Johnson or something, I can't remember - yelled at me over the loudspeaker to continue, time was limited. I jabbed at the Barrier in a daze with the steel rod and the neoplastic rod, and they just turned into what looked like little candies - peppermint, if I had to guess - and some sort of pink petals, like from a flower.

The last thing I poked the Barrier with was the tree branch. It was old, and dead, and dry, but when I stuck the end through the rippling wall, the wood came to life. While I watched, the wood repaired itself, gained missing bark, and sprouted a stem and a living leaf. I pulled the branch back and just stared, open-mouthed at the end of the thing. I was afraid to touch the altered end, I had no idea what it might do to me. At this point I was thinking 'maybe nanotech! Maybe that is why I am here! Maybe this is a universe of nanomachines! That's it! Little nanomachines that really do work, and alter matter at the molecular level, maybe those quadruped aliens are secretly super-advanced!" It all made sense to me, at that moment. They didn't need hands, they probably just commanded the nano's to make whatever they needed in the moment. I thought I had it all sussed.

Later, back on the jetcopter, out over the sea, we all compared notes. Malcolm said he had the same reaction with both the wood and his branch. Beldin's steel rod turned into something like a dark brown syrup of some kind, and his copper just dissolved into the air. He figured it became air - he did not get butterflies out of his copper rod. Even so, I swear it felt as if there was some underlying algorithm to the bizarre transformations of matter occurring

For example, all of us, not just Beldin and Malcolm and me - everyone in group 12 had the same result with the wood rod and the tree branch. In every case, the wood came alive, and began to sprout leaves and stems, and grow bark. Something more than randomness was involved, I think that was clear to everyone.

We spent another night on the Stennis, and once again Admiral Holt greeted us. Everyone treated us with great courtesy. I was surprised by that, I guess I figured we would be the 'eggheads' and given a cold shoulder. I've certainly had no love for anything even vaguely militaristic, myself. But they were great to us.

That night, I shared a cabin - I think that is the term, but it was more like a multi-room hotel suite. Carriers are huge - with So-yeon and Chawla. So-Yeon's a genetic programmer for one of the genegeneering giants, and Chawla's specialty is nanotechnology. She and I had a lot to talk about - she designed some of the little buggers that I referenced in my thesis. Apparently I got a few things wrong. Good thing my advisor wasn't in the room!

So-Yeon openly stated the anomaly acts like magic. Chawla and I kind of stared at her, figuring that there was an issue with language or something but no, she chose her term very carefully. I argued - and Chawla agreed with me - that magic is just a word for something you don't understand yet. I truly believe that.

But Yi just came back with a very uncomfortable notion - we are dealing with a completely alien universe on the other side of that Barrier. We only have seven years.

What if we just don't have the time to understand what we observed? What if the human brain just isn't capable of understanding alien physics?

I had to admit she had a point.

Gwenhwyfar carefully lay the notebook down. She had needed to go to the loo for some time and had been holding things to the point it been necessary to cross her legs and bear down on her own nethers. She thought to run off to do her business and run right back, but then recalled a countless list of stories she'd read over the years where the major plot point was some character taking their eyes off of what they were supposed to be minding for only a moment, leading to inevitable turmoil. The funny thing about books was, even the craziest of them was based on some truth, and Gwen wasn't about to be caught moaning and stomping for discounting a bit of narrative.

Thinking the better of it, Gwen carefully bundled up the tattered notebook like a diapered child, and barely made it to her feet with nary a leak on her own part. She dashed for the facilities, holding the notebook to her chest. She set it down on the plascrete, and put a foot on the cover for good measure - she wasn't going to let any common fictional plot reach under the stall and snatch themselves a drama from her carelessness.

When she was at last unencumbered, Gwen went to the alcove where she'd stowed her backpack. She had a sip from her water bottle, and grabbed the bag of Mexi-Korean Nanoritos to take with her. She looked around the warehouse until she found a proper little fortress of books, and settled herself down ensconced in it like a Laird in a castle. Holding the notebook between her legs, she opened the bag of Nanoritos and bit into a chip - spicy KimChee and Jalapeno goodness attacked her tongue like an squad of Blackmesh putting down an insurrection. Her tongue did not yield, but the battle was a fierce one with much of the screaming and the horrors about it.

Gwen leafed through the notebook, noting more loose blueprints for the other five nanodevices. Each was a different shape, and likely it was that they worked together to transform a human body into an Equestrian one. Flipping through the pages, Gwen found a slip that answered a request for 'more of the thaumatically active organic suspension'. Tucked deep near the spine of the book was a torn note to remember that 'quantum components cannot be used!' The words were underlined several times, apparently it was an issue of some concern.

She flipped idly to the back of the notebook. In the middle of the blank back cover, was a tiny, tiny message, looking for all the world as if it had been written by a mouse with a shaking paw. Gwen had to squint her eyes to read it, and she wished she had a magnifying lens to help. Finally, with a bit of work, she made out the miniscule letters.

The tiny, handwritten message grabbed Gwen by the heart and mind. There was no bloody way this book was leaving her clutches now, the devil take the consequences! If she had to hide the thing or steal it away altogether, she would see the end of it. It was a dangerous thing, of course, but then knowledge always was, and secret knowledge the more so.

But this particular circumstance was more important than mere facts, truth be told. Gwen smiled to herself. This was about knowing the heart of that red-haired girl in the photo, now. The lass only known as '-Me!' She'd clearly been given cause to cry, and if there was one thing Gwen couldn't leave be, it was the tears of a soul in sorrow. Gwen had to know why that tiny prayer had been written, and nothing in either universe was going to get in the way of that.

The chips burned like the screaming of the damned in Gwen's mouth. That she should have brought a soda was quickly becoming a subject of some reflection for her.

Gwen found her way back to where she had been reading in the book, and settled in, as best as a person can with Satan tapdancing in cleats within one's yap. 'Alright, miss 'Me!', what happened to you next...?

Three: The End Is Neigh

The volcano within Gwenhwyfar Boik was beginning to rumble. The magma-tastic slurry of KimChee and Jalapeno under her crust was threatening to erupt, and the threat was credible. Something would need to be done about the issue but Gwen was desperately trying to put it off. She wanted to avoid wasting time on stupid bodily necessities if she could get away with it - for Gwen had a Book to get through... and Master Must Be Obeyed.

URP.

Master would have to wait on this one after all. The super-intense, concentrated flavors of Nanoritos were not to be ignored. Once again, bundling her precious new found notebook up like the Christ child itself, Gwen decided to sneak up to the warehouse office. Old Milner had a lockbox in there where he kept the odd toss of favela whiskey, but he was also known to store a can or two of soda. He used the soda to cut the street-brewed flavor of whiskey brewed in the bowels of the city. Or possibly in actual bowels. Milner's crimes against taste not withstanding, he really was a decent sort, and Gwen was certain she could set things right - after she had broken in and been properly cola-fied.

The office was upstairs, a tricky prospect at night and with most of the lights off. She didn't want to attract attention by turning more lights on - after all, she was carrying The Most Dangerous Book In The World close to her bosom, and make no mistake it was a bulging mass under her clothing. Still, the stairs were very dark, and it was hard going in a few places.

Gwen was accomplished with a bobby-pin and a bit of a jiggle and poke, and in no time she had the office door open. Inside Milner's opposite-of-grand office, the rusted lock-box was surprisingly easy to find. This was basically because old Milner didn't know the first wee bit about properly hiding anything. Cracking the box was a bit fiddly, because of the dark, but a bit of pluck soon revealed the contents of Milner's little chest of treasures.

The street-liquor she passed up with little internal debate. Gwen wasn't opposed to a touch of the sauce from time to time - purely as a restorative, of course - but she preferred quality restoration. The repurposed bottle was corked with what looked like a shaved eraser. As whiskey, it was nothing close to quality, unless that quality was 'awful'. Fortunately, there was a nice, self-refrigerating can of Nanocola, which made her do her usual sigh of annoyance.

Nano... cola. Gwen shook her head. 'Seriously', she thought, 'when 'radio' was first introduced, did they put the word at the front of every bloody product?' A bit of reading came back to her - yes, actually they did. Radio Biscuits and Radio Flyer Wagons and all were as common as unwanted babies back when. History forever repeating itself - well, until the ponies came, of course. The ponies had changed everything.

Gwen popped the little activator bump and gave the can a few seconds to cool itself down. Then she snapped the drinking tab, and let a river of replicated cola substitute wash over the layer of lava in her smoldering mouth. 'Oh sweet Jesus and all the saints' she thought, as the river continued down into her stomach - where even now the horror of Mount Nanorito East Of Java (and South Of Sternum) was counting down for the Big Blow.

Panting, in the old warehouseman's lair, Gwen finally felt vaguely normalized. She'd pay him back for the lost beverage as soon as she could, and add a bit more, along with not a few apologies for the unbidden intrusion. She wasn't going to teach Milner how to hide things properly though, because one never knew when a soda emergency might arise again.

Carefully making her way back down the pitch black stairs, Gwen found the solid floor and wended her way to the Fortress Castle Of The Book Laird and set herself down tidy once more, on top of the tarp and with her backpack and water bottle at her side. Cola firmly in hand, Gwenhwyfar untucked the dangerous notebook from where she had stashed it, half in her underwear, and all of it tightly constrained by the taut fabric of her Green Level Jumpsuit.

The mysteries of the origin of her brave new world of Bureaus and ponies awaited, and she had the night to properly explore everything, and decide what to do with the tome itself. Luna, or being burned, these were the only rational options, and Gwen still wasn't at all sure which was the better. That said, there were at least two things she could be sure of.

One, that she would never, eat a bag of anything labeled 'Mexi-Korean' ever again.

Two, that there never would be a better answer to the misery of a flaming tract than good old cola. Nano or not.

Hush now, the notebook awaits.

Project Bucephalus - Laboratory 012
January 21st

I've learned a lot over the past two weeks.

I know things that no person should know, and I am afraid for the lives of everyone in project Bucephalus. I don't entirely believe the promise that we will all be free to go when this is done, though the others seem to. Then again, the world is truly ending, so perhaps there simply is no need to keep the secrets of the powerful in the usual tell-no-tales manner, since they only need be kept for seven years.

OK, so first off, I know the reason the world will end in such a short time.

We now have a name for the bubble out in the sea. It was offered to us by the ruler of that land, Celestia. The official designation is 'Equestria'. No human could pronounce the name the aliens have for their universe, so a translated version was chosen. The princess herself selected the name, and I have to say it is clever enough, and shows a remarkable comprehension of the nuances of our language, and also how we perceive these beings. They find being called 'ponies' acceptable too, so that is what they are officially labeled now.

The cosmos of Equestria is colliding with our own. I remember a string theorist I knew back at university who went on about how the Big Bang was really a collision of the cosmic brane our universe was embedded within suddenly smashing through another brane in some higher space. By comparison, this is as gentle a cosmic collision as one could ever hope for - the entirety of our universe is not being obliterated, and there is no bang. The current estimate is that the effects of the collision will only reach out to about halfway to the moon.

Equestria is passing through the plane of our reality, and the cross-section of it is a sphere. The sphere will continue to expand until it reaches some maximum diameter, then, as Equestria continues on its way past our universe, the cross-section will shrink until it vanishes altogether. It is entirely like A. Sphere passing through Abbott's 'Flatland'.

The moon will be cut loose from the gravity that holds it as the earth is swept away into another dimension, and will spin off wildly into space. The best guess seems to be that the moon will be thrown into a spiraling path that will eventually end up inside the sun. Surprisingly, to me at least, the loss of the earth will have almost no effect on the rest of the solar system. Earth just doesn't have much influence on the rest of the planets, despite all the old science fiction I've enjoyed over the years.

All of this came from a very long, live-streamed hololecture for all the groups within project Bucephalus. They held nothing back, but then there is no reason to. We are the chosen selected to save the world, so nothing is denied us. I found out that I now possess the highest security clearance that has ever existed - 'Umbra-Cosmik-Magik' clearance. We all do. There is literally no information, about anything in the world - however secret it may be - that I cannot ask to know, and all will be provided to me. They have no way to predict what little detail might help us solve the central problem, so everything and anything is open to us.

The passing of Equestria through our universe will take sixteen years. But the only part that matters to human beings is the first eight. We've already wasted most of the first year, which leaves seven left to us. I've learned a lot about that initial time, though most of what I now know did not come from the hololecture. It's quite a story.

The bubble in the sea was fairly rapidly identified as an expansion from hyperspace. It was pretty much the only thing it could be - it certainly wasn't obeying mundane physics. They sent an armada out to examine the bubble within a week of it being discovered, some ships reached the thing the next day. A lot of the early responders died from the radiation it emitted, so they knew from the beginning that it was dangerous.

Apparently - and I have no reason to doubt the source, (which I am not writing down here - let's just say it is someone who should know, and leave it at that) there was a contact that first week. The story is that Celestia appeared, like a hologram or a ghost or something, to all the big heads of the Worldgovernment. She told them in earth languages who she was, what was going on, and how it would all end unless they worked together with her. She pleaded with them to save humanity from the collision, and that she knew a way to do just that.

She's a fairly imposing alien creature. We're human, and you can guess what happened next. That was what caused the Three Day War. All the elites jumped to the same conclusion, not unreasonable considering the whole of human history, that this was an invasion. Invaders From Beyond! I can only imagine the panic. So, they tried to destroy Equestria.

Most people have seen the images of the ocean boiling, and the entire West Coast of the Northamerizone saw the flashes and heard the booms, from hundreds of miles away. But what I now know is they were ready to use a hypernuke on the damn thing. Seriously. The doomsday weapon, the QCD bomb. They almost made the first test of a quantum chromodynamic weapon right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The only thing that stopped them was just one guy, apparently. Somebody high up grasped that a hypernuke would - at best - rip away a third of the planet, and destroy the entire biosphere. It would basically be planetary suicide. They were still willing to do it, they just didn't understand the true scale of such things. It was the Big Boom and they wanted to use it. One man saved us all. One guy said no. Jesus fucking Christ.

We're still here, so they obviously listened. Then things got stupid again - and then they got weird.

The elite apparently decided to just ignore the expanding universe in the ocean after that. They couldn't blow it up, and there was no immediate profit in doing anything more, and they had no idea what to do in any case. So they shut down further news stories from being released, threw some scientists at the problem, and stuck their heads into the sand.

And that is where we would still be, except Celestia came back. The attack was nothing to her and Equestria. Less than nothing. Maybe it rained candy or somesuch over there. So Celestia comes right back, and she comes back to stay.

Apparently, there are about six hundred people who really run things. The whole planet, the whole damn globe. They're a bunch of incestuous ancient families who pretty much just had the world fall into their lap. Napoleon, Alexander, Genghis Kahn - all of them never had a chance to conquer the world. The secret victory condition, it turned out, was to just be the richest damn people in the world, and still be that way when the good times ran out. All the corporate gods, they ended up conquering the world by default. When the global economy crashed, when all the governments fell, the rich men pulling the strings all along got stuck out in the open. No more nations to hide behind. There was nothing else to do, so - Worldgovernment. Feed the people somehow, and stop the riots, and they did, and that is how they conquered the earth. It's almost funny. Especially since they didn't want to be stuck out in front like that at all.

A bunch of families, the ultra-elite of the world, and Celestia appears personally to every single member of those clans. Every man, every woman, every child. All the time. 24 hours a day, and in their dreams at night to boot. One Celestia for each family member. And only they can see the Celestia assigned to them.

So when they get up, Celestia is at the foot of their bed, greeting them. While they brush their teeth - or have corporate slaves brush their teeth for them, or whatever it is the supreme elite rich do in the morning - Celestia is there, pointing out the little speck of spinach from the night before. Lunch, dinner, during sex, taking a dump - Celestia is there, commenting, observing, making little jokes. Always pleasant, always present, and always repeating the basic message. The world is going to end in eight years. There is a way to save humanity, but we have to work together.

The elite put up with this for three months. I cannot even grasp that. Three months of Celestia staring at them every single second. Talking their ears off. Nightmares every night about how the world would end, narrated by this other princess who we don't have a name for yet. Equestria has two princesses, apparently, not just Celestia. It's a diarchy. I only recently found out that little fact. So, three months of being constantly nagged, and get this - for the first month, they didn't even talk to each other about the fact it was happening.

Jesus nonexistent Christ. I mean, seriously. Stiff upper lip and all of that but... just... damn. Anyway, eventually they just all break, and have a big cry over it all, and then carry on for two more months thinking they can tough it out and it will just go away.

It didn't just go away, and finally Celestia demanded a big meeting, and to shut her up they actually did it. It was probably the only time in history all these super-rich families were ever in the same place at the same time. And Celestia did something to make them take her seriously. Something big. Something scary. I don't know what, but she put on one hell of a show.

The next day they started putting together project Bucephalus as if their very lives depended on it. And here I am, in Laboratory 012.

That's our group designation now. Zero-Twelve. Of twenty. We have our own facility, our own mini-complex, all new and freshly built, just for us. The other nineteen groups have the same deal. No expenses spared, and between all of us, we have to save humanity. Not the planet, that is a lost cause. Only humanity.

That's the plan, see. Celestia is willing to take us in, as refugees. Apparently she's done it before, too. This is the first time her universe has actually crashed into another cosmos, but Equestria has touched other places, and a few of them were in pretty desperate straights. She's taken in giant, intelligent winged lizards and feathery carnivores. Trolls that move through dirt as if it were air. So taking us in is just par for her course. She's some kind of cosmic softy.

But there's a problem, a big one.

It seems that the radiation that kills us is the norm out there in the multiverse. Countless universes, and they all run on that stuff, whatever it is. Our cosmos is apparently super rare, the special snowflake of universes. Lucky, lucky us. We don't have a speck of that energy, and yet, here we are. According to Celestia, that radiation is the very stuff of life, it is the energy that makes life possible at all. So we, humanity, earth, plants and animals - we shouldn't exist. We are impossible, or at least so unlikely that the existence of a universe like ours is considered to be tinfoil hat stuff out in the multiverse. It turns out that WE are the anomaly.

Humanity really did turn out to be as unique and special as it always wanted to be. The problem is, that is not a good thing.

You see, we just can't survive in the rest of everything that is. The energy that makes life possible everywhere else is death to us. The Barrier was created by Celestia and her co-regent to protect us. Without it, we would have all fried instantly. She did the best she could - her Barrier is a bit leaky, but it gives us time.

Which brings me to what the real plan actually is.

Humans can't live in Equestria, or anywhere else - if we had a way to get anywhere else, which we don't. So, in order to survive, we cannot remain as we are. Our job in the laboratory groups is to find a way to transform humanity into something that can survive the rest of creation. Our job is to physically change human beings into another creature that can actually live in what will be our new home - Equestria.

So the bottom line is that it is our job is turn all of humanity into Equestrians. Into what we call the 'ponies'. I know. It just seems impossible. But it isn't.

The answer, it turns out, is nanotechnology. The dream of the little machines being able to remake any matter into something else was a powerful one. Sadly, not enough power and too much heat ruined that dream. But Equestria offers something new. Physics doesn't work the same way there.

They don't have entropy.

Heat isn't the issue it is here, and power - well, put bluntly, scarcity doesn't exist for them.

So the answer is actually pretty simple. All we have to do is come up with some nanotech that can do the job of changing a human body into an Equestrian body, and figure out how to use Equestrian physics to power the little buggers. Simple.

And if we fail, everybody everywhere dies on October 12th, at 2:30 in the afternoon, seven years from today. Something like that, I'm just pulling that date out of my ass. That isn't the real date. They said what the date was, but frankly, by that point, I wasn't able to listen anymore.

Tomorrow we get our first sample of the stuff Celestia thinks will work as the power source. We've already got some simple nanobots ready to see how they will react. In any case, I intend to do a little digging - after all, no information is to be denied us. I want to know who this Celestia is, and what Equestria is all about. Things just don't make sense to me - something is not being said.

14th century technology, yet they know about other universes and physics beyond anything humanity has ever learned. I don't get it. It sounds like magic, and to me, that means we're missing a piece of the puzzle here. Magic just plain doesn't exist.

Project Bucephalus - Laboratory 012
January 22nd

OK, I'll say it. Magic apparently exists.

At least that is the official label we have been given for the omnipresent energy field that pervades the Equestrian universe, and sustains all Equestrian life. Dark energy, black holes - how many different labels we have come up with to refer to an empty variable we cannot solve yet. Dark, black, strange, and now - magic.

Everyone is calling it thaumatic radiation, basically 'magic' radiation, and I suppose it is as good a term as any. We know just a little about it. It fills space, at least within the Equestrian cosmos, and, according to its regent, Celestia, all other inhabited universes. Magic interferes with quantum reality at a fundamental level - it destroys indeterminacy and then turns right around again and explodes decoherence. That is why it kills terrestrial life. All earthly cells make use of quantum effects in various ways. Plants depend on quantum effects for photosynthesis, the neurons of all animals use quantum effects for processing inside cellular microtubules, and mitochondria use quantum interactions to boost efficiency. Life used what was available to it.

The fact is that god plays dice - Mr. Einstein, I am looking at you here - and magic rigs the dice, puts magnets under the dice table, inserts a crooked gambler and then fudges the results after the dice stop rolling. It is no wonder that Earth animals and plants die when exposed to thaumatic energies.

But thaumatic energy is vital to Equestrian life - plants, animals, even stones use the stuff. Yes - stones. It appears that everything within Equestria has some kind of life, or life-like condition about it. Rock is capable of life-like action, and can be made to grow. The same is true of Equestrian sand, dirt, metal, glass, basically all matter from that universe. The 'ponies' use thamatic energy in countless ways, and it sustains their very biology. 'Magic', essentially, is another universe's 'quantum' reality, and it is incompatible with ours.

But Equestrian 'magic' is also malleable. It can be woven, shaped, and given programmatical instructions. It acts like many descriptions of sorcerous or religious magic from earthly folklore and mythology. Programmed Thaumic Energy Constructs (P-TEC) have therefore naturally been given the general title of 'spells'. What else would one call them? The similarity to earth folklore and stories has made me robustly convinced that there must have been contact between Equestria and Earth in the past, and likely more than once.

We were given some toys and two liters of magic in a bottle today.

General Norman P. Ridgway himself brought it to us, while taking a tour of each lab in turn. He's a big fellow, kind of a baby face for an older man, and talks in a sort of nasal, surprisingly high voice. If he were completely bald, he would almost be hilarious - except, one look in his eyes and you know he is completely incapable of remorse or human compassion. Ridgway scares the crap out of me. On the Stennis, I felt fine, great bunch of guys, and the experience totally changed the way I felt about military people. Ridgway makes me feel the other way again. He's a smiling psychopath. Orderly, charming, but devoid of genuine feeling.

There was a big case brought in and plunked down on one of the large tables. The case was built to withstand nuclear conflict, from the look of it. It took four men to manhandle the thing. Inside, were three objects. Each was carefully removed with gloves and tongs, and we were cautioned to avoid direct skin contact for longer than a few seconds with any of the items.

The first object looked like a glass bulb with a bit of dark, bent wire inside. The wire was shaped to look like a sort of double-ended French-styled weathervane - that is what it made me think of. The little weathervane spun constantly inside the bulb, and it glowed - a soft yellow light that cast no shadows. I've never seen anything like it before in my life. It bothered my eyes to look at the light for too long - something about it didn't make sense to my brain. My eyes just wanted to slide away, in any direction rather than stare at it, even though the little device was fascination itself.

The second object was a semicircle of some translucent, bright yellow material. It was horseshoe shaped, and very thin, as though a dermatome had sliced it off. It was about ten centimeters in diameter, and was housed inside of a transparent crystalex box. The box had a sticker on it with the words 'Time Sensitive Material' printed upon it, a date - sometime last evening - and an expiry date, some thirty or so hours in the future. I had no idea what it was.

The last object was a standard Erlenmeyer flask with two liters of a dark, opaque, slightly viscous, deep purple fluid. It looked like thin chocolate syrup, only purple. There were a few bubbles of froth near the top of the flask. The flask was decorated with both a biohazard label and a new label I had never seen before - Thaumatic Radiation Hazard. The thaumatic hazard symbol was done in violet, and looked like a six-pointed snowflake or star, with smaller stars at the tip of each arm. This must be the promised bottle of magic, whatever that meant.

A special demonstration was immediately set up for us, due to the time sensitive material of object number two.

An experiment was performed, using a vapor generator of some kind. I think it was the type of thing they use in stage productions to create fog effects, though it may have been more than that. The vapor was water vapor, but it hung in the air or rose, so it didn't seem like it was being produced by carbon dioxide ice.

The horseshoe shape was carefully removed from its crystalex container with a pair of tongs. It was so thin that it sagged like a sheet of replipaper - it was nearly as thin. One of the technicians that had arrived with the general used a hose attachment to make a fountain of vapor, an indoor cloud, really. The paper-thin curve of yellow was laid on top of the cloud, where it sat, in the middle of the air, as if it were sitting flat on a desk.

The vapor generator was turned off. Instead of dissipating rapidly, the cloud of vapor began to collect to itself, under the yellow crescent. The water vapor formed into a neat little oblate spheroid, a cloud-in-miniature, and just hung there.

"This is sample FS-P-LFH-02, sectioned by dermatome from the left front hoof of a living donor, a pegasus-type Equestrian. The sample has been further enhanced through the use of a programmed thaumatic energy structure to maintain its unique properties post separation." The technician, a middle-aged man with glasses and a bow tie reminded me of a guy on the threevee I used to watch who did a science show. Who the hell wears bow ties anymore? Tell you the truth, though, I thought it was kind of kicky. In a goofy sort of way.

"The P-TEC used was translated as a 'cloud-walking' or cloud-trotting' thaumatic program, sometimes used to allow ground-type Equestrians to visit nebular atmospheric architectural constructions. Please note the magnetic or attractive properties of the material, as well as the stabilizing influence it generates relative to the vapor itself. The vapor is ordinary water vapor, with no unusual properties, produced from distilled water."

The technician then decided to show us all some tricks. It was clear that he was enjoying himself. He used the tongs to lift the shaving off of the little stable cloud, and then proceeded to slap and prod the cloudlet, shaping and even spinning it, as if it were a solid, cohesive object. "The influence of the contact with the sample has a lasting effect which dissipates over time. Sufficient contact may impart a semi-permanent effect upon the water vapor. Laboratory tests have demonstrated that micro cloud masses identical to this one can be made to remain in situ for days at a time without disbursing. We believe that thaumatic energy is being imparted in some manner to the vapor, and binding it within a circumscribed field or region."

The last trick the techie did was to push the baby cloud back and forth, as well as raising it and lowering it with the sample. I knew what the sample was now, of course. It was a microscopically thin slice of Equestrian hoof, removed not by some alien farrier, but very likely by a calibrated earthly tool.

"The material of the sample has been designated as 'alicorn', after ancient mythological references from the Eurozone and the Mideasternzone. In structure, it is similar to keratin, though it is not made of any earthly protein. It has been demonstrated that stacks of the alicorn material can act as a crude thaumatic battery, storing thaumatic energy for indefinite periods of time. Thank you." He put the sample of 'alicorn' back into the crystalex box, and stowed it in the case, then stood near the back wall.

Another technician stepped forward to have their time in our spotlight. This one was an older woman who reminded me of my aunt back in Michigan. I swear, she even had the same hairstyle, last I remember seeing my aunt, anyway. Her voice was very different, though.

She used neoplastine gloves to carefully remove and hold up the bulb artifact. She didn't seem to feel tongs were as necessary as the first speaker. The bulb glowed, and inside it, the little weathervane spun. It never stopped spinning. "This," She really did look like my aunt. It was uncanny. "Is an Equestrian motor. I suppose that is the best term for it. It is used in the same manner as electric motors are used on earth, and for many of the same purposes - however, it is capable of vastly more."

She held the little machine and allowed us to look at it more closely - the ends of the bulb were made of metal, so it was perhaps more like an odd-looking fuse in appearance, really. Nowhere was there a shaft to communicate motion. The ends were just polished and flat. She put the bulb thing back in the case, and removed her gloves.

"We have not yet been able to translate the Equestrian name for this artifact, but for now we are calling it a thaumatic motor tube. What makes this little beauty truly astonishing is that it is entirely self-contained, self powering - as far as we can tell, it runs off of ambient thaumatic radiation, which in this case is being supplied by the contents of that Erlenmeyer over there."

That statement caused Baasch and Chawla to suddenly back away from the case, where they had been leaning over, trying to get a better look at the flask. It was pretty funny. Well, I thought it was funny, anyway.

"If the motor tube is removed entirely from proximity to a thaumatic source," My aunt continued - I swear she looked Just. Like. My. Aunt. Different voice, but just like - "the motor tube stops spinning and basically dies. It just stops, and we can't get it to start again. We have been told that the P-T-E-C... the spell is the word we are starting to use... is 'killed' by the lack of thaumatic energy. Once 'dead', a spell is gone forever, and cannot be recovered, since it is essentially a self-sustaining pattern, or information structure, that has no physical existence."

This boggled my mind, and it definitely bothered our evolutionary biologist, Malcolm. "A pattern... with no physical existence?" He almost sounded angry. "What, it has a soul or something?" This made the team laugh, myself included.

But my clone aunt - the bulb technician - she just stared at us. She freaking gave us the eye, and we shut up and stopped laughing. She couldn't be serious. But she was, even if she wasn't willing to say a damn word. I think every one of us in Lab 12 felt the same woo-woo chill run up our spines. That was some gree shit there, as the Cajuns say.

After the 'thaumatic motor tube' had been put away, a man stepped forward. He wore a rather fine suit, and sunglasses indoors. He was wired for sound, with permatech implants behind both ears and a frontal lobe implant in his forehead. Buzzcut hair. He moved like a serial killer in a horror holo.

"The Erlenmeyer contains 'Extract C', an organic, highly thaumatically active suspension that is extremely hazardous both biologically and radiatively. It is highly dangerous in close proximity, but relatively safe at distances greater than six centimeters as the field density sharply decreases. It can retain thaumatic potency indefinitely, as far as it is possible to tell. You are advised to consider the contents of this flask as being essentially pure, liquid thaumatism. It will burn you if you remain close, it will kill you if you touch it directly, or allow it to contact your body. It is the sole power source for project Bucephalus, and it is a gift directly from the regent of Equestria. The substance can be imprinted with Programmed Thaumic Energy Constructs, and will retain them indefinitely."

The scary man, which is how I thought of him now, looked us over carefully. I don't think he was the least impressed.

"The contents of this Erlenmeyer flask are to be considered more valuable than your own lives. There is currently no expectation of replacement should the contents be lost or carelessly used. You can easily be replaced, this flask cannot. Treat this flask as if it were a bottle of your own lifespan."

We were all glad when the scary man left. For a long time, nobody wanted to even look at the Erlenmeyer.

We were given an hour to examine, but not touch, all of the items in the case, and ask questions of the presenters. I asked the bulb technician if she had ever lived in Michigan, but she said she hadn't. None of us had a clue what to ask - this was new stuff. We didn't have a basis to even comprehend what we were dealing with.

So-yeon wanted to know if the Equestrian donor had felt any pain having it's hoof shaved. No. Just like earth creatures, the hoof material has no sensation within it. Mayoss kept asking about whether thaumatic radiation affected neurochemistry. He kept walking around wiggling a finger in his ear, like it bothered him somehow. Saulnier basically pummeled the poor hoof-sample technician with physics questions he couldn't answer. By the end, he looked like he had been mugged, which intellectually, I suppose he kind of was. His bow-tie was on crooked and everything. I felt sorry for the poor man. Physicists. Christ. Never let yourself get cornered by an excited physicist, that is all I am saying.

Nobody asked the scary man anything. At all.

The case was taken away and put in a safe place. General Ridgway had left us early, just after the case was opened.

But the damn thing - before the general left, Ridgway gave me a look and tapped the side of his head while staring at me. It was creepy, like he knew me. What the hell was up with that? The first thought I had was that he was flirting with me, the old letch. But it wasn't flirting, and later, I began to wish that flirting was all it had been. It was like a signal or something. Maybe it was just random. I don't know.

Creepy day, creepy General, creepy sunglasses guy, and alien stuff we have to figure out or die trying.

Did I mention I did not volunteer for any of this? They came, they told me what was what, I nodded helplessly, and here I am.

And there is no going home.

Four: Meet The Neighbors

Gwen crept along the roof of the warehouse. She whimpered from fear and pain.

If she could just reach the other building, or find a way off the roof without breaking a leg or worse, there was a chance she might escape and thus keep the notebook out of their hands. Gwen's side hurt where the neat hole went through it. There was no blood - the plasma ducting created by an electomechanical rifle almost always cauterizes the wound. Gwen had read about the weapon once in a book about life in the old Midasiazone, back when it was still called 'China' and 'Russia'. The electomechanical rifle that had shot her, had likely been invented in Russia around 2010, and perfected in the ensuing decade. It used a coil to silently accelerate a charged dart at such a speed that the air itself became plasma along the trajectory. Knowing this helped. She wouldn't bleed to death.

She was in shock, she knew that much, because she still hadn't felt anything more than mere pain. Massive floods of endorphins were keeping true agony at bay. She knew she had to use this time well, because it wouldn't last. For the first time in her life, Gwen felt like the animal she really was. She was wounded, but evolution had provided her a window to save herself, a period of time where adrenaline filled her, and pain was blocked. She was entirely consumed by the 'flee' portion of bestial 'fight or flee' instinct. She certainly couldn't fight them.

They had come just after she had gotten lost once more in the saga of the redheaded nanobiologist struggling to understand her place in project Bucephalus. She had just read a passage concerning Lab 012's first attempt to put nanobots into a single drop of the dark purple thaumatic fluid. The result had not been encouraging, and one of the scientists had discovered a tiny black spot on a fingertip from manipulating the tiny scanning stage containing the droplet. It was a patch of necrosis, caused by thaumatic radiation. That such a thing could happen so quickly had made the entire team realize the seriousness of what they were dealing with.

It had started with a rattle, and the sound of the lock on the loading bay door being cut. The sudden, brief, loud 'chank' was immediately followed by multiple hushed voices and the sounds of the effort to slide the door up.

Gwen had understood that the warehouse was being broken into instantly. At first she couldn't accept what her brain was telling her. The warehouse was guarded. By Blackmesh Security, the world's most trusted and ubiquitous armed force. They were the dogs of the Worldgovernment, and only a fool messed with them. So the Blackmesh must be the ones breaking in - but why? They knew this was an authorized WorldGov project, and there was only books and romball drives in here, neither of which was particularly valuable. Especially the books. Why would the Blackmesh be breaking in?

Unless the Blackmesh had somehow discovered the secret Underground Bookmobile project.

That made too much sense. Somebody in the Underground had sold everyone out. Princess Luna had claimed that she could handle whatever heat her sister threw at her for saving disallowed books, and maybe she could. But the WorldGov would just see a conspiracy, or maybe an insurrection, and they did not like anything of the kind, and tended to deal with anyone involved very harshly.

It was a risk Gwenhwyfar had been willing to take, because books were her life, and books were the soul of all Mankind.

The door banged. Someone outside had gotten frustrated at the fact the loading bay doors always stuck. They didn't know the trick with the crowbar in the hole by the lock. In an instant, Gwen was on her feet, her heart and mind no longer in conflict. They completely agreed on everything now, for everything in the world had suddenly become simple. Escape. It didn't matter who was breaking in, or why, the only thing that mattered was not being in the warehouse any longer.

Gwen headed for the front, but as soon as she passed the stairs, she heard a crash from there - of course there would be a crash from the front, the Blackmesh were many, and they would attack every door at the same time. Upstairs. It was all that was left, and Gwen's fear only knew that up was the last remaining direction available. She quickly returned to the stairs.

Gwen became aware of the notebook, which she had become used to stuffing down her front, past her belly, into her underwear, where it couldn't fall. She began to climb the dark stairs up to Old Milner's office, all the while adjusting herself so that the notebook was safe, and well tucked against her belly, strapped down by her clothing. She zipped her jumpsuit higher to make sure the notebook couldn't fall out from the top, and began to crawl-climb the stairs with both hands and feet. It was more sure in such pitch darkness.

Below and near one of the few lighting fixtures that had been left on when everybody had gone home, the loading bay doors slid noisily up and open. Gwen froze, like a mutie-rat caught in the open and stared. The figures clambering up onto the floor of the warehouse from the loading zone outside were not dressed in carbon net armor, or equipped with the standard assault weapons. The men looked like a militia of some kind. They were dressed in pre-collapse national military garb, several vanished nations being represented. Their weapons were not uniform and issued, but were very diverse and almost certainly personal. This was insane - what about the Blackmesh? Nobody messes with the Blackmesh. Nobody...

Except.

Except the Human Liberation Front.

Gwen's heart was trying to run up the stairs without her. She pulled herself out of frozen terror, and began to climb again, hands as well as feet, but now as quietly as she could. The men hadn't noticed her. 'Sweet mother of Jesus', Gwen thought 'They must have taken on the Blackmesh out there, and they won.' The danger that represented was hard to fathom. Some people thought the HLF was a bunch of neckless gun nuts, polishing their antique firearms in the dark, and true enough, some of the bastards were.

But the core of the HLF, the higher-ups, they were professionals, and some of them were the best of the best. They had no love of the ponies, or of the Bureaus, and they had the skills to back up that dislike even against... the Blackmesh. Oh, god - she knew some of those guys. Geddes, he'd share his coffee with her some nights when she worked late. She was half expecting him tonight. Coffee was rare, and it was a treat. Jesus... John Geddes was one of the 'Mesh out there. Had been... one of the 'Mesh.

No time for tears. She was at Milner's office door. What now? It was still unlocked - well, freshly broken into - so it was easy to slip inside. But it was no refuge. It was likely these men would sweep the warehouse, it would be folly not to. These men were not the usual HLF rabble, shooting pegasai out of the air for sport, or tossing the odd homebuilt grenade at a Bureau. These were core HLF, and they would be professional, smart, and deadly. The office was not safety, and there really wasn't any place to hide within its cramped quarters.

The key to the roof. It hung on the wall, suddenly illuminated by a flash of light. They had torches, they were scanning everything with them. Of course they were. They would be up here soon. The beam having moved on, Gwen grabbed for the roof key and scrambled low to the office door.

She peeked out, barely moving the door and and listened. No sound of stomping boots on the stairs yet. Voices below argued about something. They didn't seem happy.

"This is it, it's right here. Fucker can't read a map. But this is it."

There was a beep and a click. "Package is confirmed. We are in possession."

A hissing sound and a distorted voice. "Issss itemmm pressssennnttt?"

"It's not here."

"Don't fuck with me."

"I am not fucking with you, it is not here. Look for yourself. LOOK!"

"ssssRepeaaaat - Issss itemmm pressssennnttt?"

"Item is missing. Instigating search." A shuffling, scuffling noise. "Full search, eyes open - the package has been disturbed, beware of the dog, repeat, beware of the..."

Gwen made her move. There would not be a better moment. She slowly, as quietly as possible, opened the office door all the way. She began to crawl, on her hands and knees to stay low, to the stairs that led to the roof. They were just to the side of the office itself, on the suspended platform in the middle of the warehouse. The office had been built into the beams, with the staircase running to the top of the building beyond the office itself.

"Dog dish confirmed. There is a dog in the yard, repeat, dogs in the yard." Something whaffled below, the sound of nanoweave and straps. Her backpack! They had found her backpack and water bottle! She was the 'dog in the yard', and they knew she was here. They might be creeping up the stairs even now. The office was an obvious hiding spot, especially since they had come in, collectively, from every side of the warehouse.

Gwen felt fear grip her heart and squeeze her stomach. She felt like she couldn't breath, she felt like she couldn't move, like her body wouldn't obey her. If she didn't take action, right now, she was sure she would just lay down and go fetal, and they would find her like that, crying and shaking. NO! The face of her grandfather, her old Eachann looked down on her from the great beyond, shaking his head at her uselessness. NO! She would not freeze up!

It took every bit of her will to break the lock on her body caused by her fear, but she wrenched herself up and ran for the roof. She tried to be quiet with her feet, but she was too afraid, and the stomps of her running up the stairs sounded like drums to her. Dammit! As she pried open the hatch on the roof, she smelled bacon - it was the damnedest thing in all the world. Cottage bacon, bright as you please, filling her nose. And then she was out onto the roof and into the night.

The perpetual smog layer that covered the world reflected the lights of the city, a dim yellow wall above. Around her, other buildings reflected the odd beacon of light, towers of chryslex and steel, polycrete and the occasional brightly lit sign. Some were ancient neon, others holo. But most of the city was dark, large towering bulks interrupting the mustard smog layer.

Gwen was beyond feeling, beyond her previous fear. With some impossible, momentary strength, she somehow managed to tear loose a nearby air conditioner. She half rolled, half lifted the bulky, rusted, useless machine over to the access hatch and left it weighing the metal cover down just as someone tried to lift it from below.

Gwen ran, away, just away, darting around other machines and vents on the roof, until she came to the shed. Milner had some kind of shed set on the roof of his warehouse, he had once had the notion of creating a farm up top, but the fact that farming had turned out to be work had scuppered the notion. As far as she knew, the roof shed still had the unopened bags of viable soil the warehouseman had bought, years ago. He'd told her the story early on, when the project had started.

For just a second, Gwen almost felt safe. The hatch was blocked, she was behind a shed and in the dark, out in the night. She breathed out a great sigh of relief, and as her muscles relaxed, just a bit, as the air left her lungs, she suddenly found herself on her knees, which only hurt worse still.

The initial stab of pain was a searing awfulness in her lower right side. Again, she smelled a whiff of her grandmother's cottage bacon - it wasn't real bacon, of course, but the smell was unforgettable - and suddenly everything went slow.

The horrific, mind destroying pain was simply gone, just like that, nice as you please, but also vanished was any sense of reality. The world was slow. Gwen felt... slow. With fumbling hands, Gwen bent and checked her belly. It was a hole, neat and tidy, about the diameter of her finger, her jumpsuit seared and melted around it. Horror gripped her. She had been shot, actually shot, but she wasn't bleeding. Countless books and articles flashed through her mind, spinning like the wheels of an old slot machine, back when there had been coins, the wheels locking into place as facts added up.

In the strange, slow moment, she was suddenly dispassionate - no bleeding, the wound was cauterized. Bacon. Not an ordinary weapon. Plasma sears flesh. Electric gun. An article on the inventor, a boy in Russia. Exit wound.

With trembling fingers, Gwen felt her back. She couldn't find anything at first. Oh. There! A much tinier hole, barely a pinhole, but it was there all right. Of course. The front was the exit, she had been shot from behind, and below. From down the stairs. A needle, a dart. It had passed clean through. It was probably buried in the hatch frame now.

Gwen was on her hands and knees, and both were crumpling. It was everything she could do to keep crawling. The grace of shock was lifting again, and she felt herself whimper from fear and pain. She crept away from the shed, to the edge of the warehouse. If she could only get to the other building, or down to the ground without breaking a leg... or worse... she might yet survive the night.

There were thumps sounding from behind her, the very sort of thumps angry men might make trying to force a heavy air conditioner off of a rusty hatch. She didn't have a great deal of time, she realized. Gwen checked the front of her sealed jumpsuit, yes, the notebook was still there. It must be the 'item'. Sweet Mary, the anonymous donation had been anonymous because it was delivered to the wrong warehouse. No wonder it was all WorldGov secret documents - it was the bloody H-L-F behind it, perhaps they had made a raid, or had a mole in the works, but they clearly had a driver who had gotten lost. And truth be told, all the warehouses looked alike. Anyone could have made such a mistake.

The thought came to her that somewhere, probably nearby, the Human Liberation Front had a terrorist base, likely for years, and she had never known. That close, in some other warehouse, all the past four months of her involvement with LAASTT and the Underground Bookmobile. Year three of the seven years to the end of the earth, and she had spent the last four months within spitting distance of the god-cursed HLF.

There was no way to jump the gap. The building was across the street. What was she thinking? She hadn't been thinking, just escaping. It had seemed nearer for some reason, back when she had started across the roof. She was four stories above the cracked concrete below. Not even plascrete, this part of town was so old. There was no jumping. Gwen looked for cables - many of the buildings had thick masses of intertwined electrical and service cables, pipes and conduits that branched from place to place. All had been gradually built up by countless hands long after the utilities companies had vanished during the Collapse. Favela tech had brought power and water back, however it could.

But there were no trunks of cable to crawl along on this side of the vast warehouse, and there was no way she was going to be able to crawl far enough before the bastards got through that hatch. Gwen began to cry. She could picture angry faces demanding the notebook, a gun to her head, and they would get it, and they would still put a bullet into her skull and that would be the last thing she ever knew. She should have gotten converted, she had the chance so many times but there had always been some thing she could do better as a human, some job that only a human could do in a human world. Ponies couldn't work most computers, not even the unicorns with their horns. Magic killed quantum chips, and made holographic screens go up in a mass of pretty sparks. She hadn't wanted to be relegated to sorting romball cartridges with her mouth.

Now she regretted it all. She would never see Equestria, she would never see life as one of the gentle fairy folk. That's what her grandfather would have thought of the ponies. For all the world, they were the fairies coming to call, the ancient fairy folk done up as horses and come to take us all home to fairyland just like True Thomas the Rhymer. That was what Equestria really was, Gwen had decided long ago. It was fairyland, and the ponies were the fairies come back again.

"I would'a made a grand fairy pony. I would'a. I just know I would'a made such a grand fairy..." Gwen was weeping now, because there was no escape, and no hope, and this was the end and she knew it. She shouldn't have gone to the roof... but then, where else was there to go? It wasn't a bit fair, and now she had a hole in her side that burned like fire and in a moment, she'd have one in her head that wouldn't hurt at all.

"What's the matter? Please let me help!" The voice was high and lilting, and not entirely human.

Gwenhwyfar Boik looked up, away from the rough surface of the warehouse roof. Her eyes met shiny brown hooves, and a warm brown pair of forelegs in the dark. She spied a glimmer of rear hoof before her view had climbed up a soft brown neck and past two brown wings refolding themselves. The expression on the muzzle was concerned, and partially covered by a blond mane that dripped like a golden waterfall down one side of the Equestrian mare's head.

"I was flying home, when I saw you crawling on the roof. I thought that was weird, so I came closer and heard you crying and..."

Gwen reached her hand out and grabbed the pegasus' hoof. "I need help! The HLF is after me, they will be on this roof in seconds! I need to escape, please! Help me!"

It took a couple of seconds for the pony to parse her words. It was clear that 'HLF' had an impact, though. "You're hurt!"

"I've been shot! We have to get away from here! Do you know a way?" A sick feeling overcame Gwen - what could one little pegasus even do? "No. Forget it. Flee! Just get away from here as fast as you can! Fly! It's pointless, just... go... go." It was pointless. One pegasus couldn't hope to carry her, ponies were barely four feet at the tallest. Those tiny wings. Better the poor fairy should flee. She wouldn't go out knowing that she had caused the death of such a beautiful creature. "FLY! DAMMIT!"

But the pegasus was gone. Good. Smart girl, Gwen thought. Unlike me. The sound of angry male voices could be heard now, the hatch was partly open. It would all be over shortly now.

The NOTEBOOK! Oh, Christ in heaven, she still had the notebook on her! She could have given it to the pegasus and sent her away, the stinking terrorists would be up the creek then, sure as you please! Stupid... stupid. What a lost opportunity!

"Get on! Hurry!" The pegasus was back, with an Arbofiber pallet. The standard kind used for shipments. When they ran out of wood to make pallets, Arbofiber had replaced the material. Twice as strong, and it almost even felt like wood. Supposedly, anyway.

"What?"

"Get on! I'll save you!" The pegasus was nothing but earnest, but... it was amazing she had even managed to carry a pallet up to the roof, especially so quickly. She must have zipped back to where they were piled, near the loading dock, and then flown the pallet to the roof. This was a strong pegasus, to be sure, but... what could she hope to achieve with this? It was just a pallet. There wasn't even a forklift up here!

"I don't..." The men were through. They were through and angry and dashing about on the wide, dark roof. The few - but bright - lights made actually seeing her pursuers impossible, but then again, maybe that was true with regard to her as well.

"GET ON!" Apparently fairy pegasai could be quite strident when they had a mind to. Gwen moved onto the pallet, uncomprehending but obedient. She'd never been yelled at by a pegasus before.

The men had certainly heard. The sound of running boots was drawing near.

Just like that, there was air threatening to blow Gwen from the pallet. "HOLD ON! PLEASE!" That was two times being yelled at by a pegasus now, though the latest was more a proper scream. Gwen grabbed the planks of the pallet with all the strength she had left in her hands. She looked around. Her benefactor was... pushing... the pallet with her forehooves, wings beating furiously. Somehow the pallet was remaining airborne, and somehow the pegasus had some kind of a grip on it, though Gwen could not for the life of her figure out how.

Something from the notebook came back to her. 'We believe that thaumatic energy is being imparted in some manner to the vapor, and binding it within a circumscribed field or region.' That was what the technician had told the author. Perhaps pegasai could communicate magic into any object with their hooves. They did pull carriages, that just hung in the air behind them, after all. Somehow, pegasai could extend their magical ability to fly - those tiny wings were aerodynamically impossible - into objects they touched. Or at least nonliving artifacts. Maybe that is why the pegasus used a pallet, instead of just pushing her directly? Or maybe it was because she was wounded... or that the magic would burn her if it flowed into her body. That was a thought.

The ground, far below, was rushing past, the night air blew Gwen's long, dark hair into the face of her savior. "Sorry!" Gwen dipped her head and caught her tresses with a finger, to keep them out of the Pegasus' eyes.

She heard shots, but nothing hit, as far as she could tell. She hadn't felt the first time she'd ever been shot, at least immediately. She noted she wasn't in pain at the moment. That was one good thing about clinging to a cargo pallet being magically pushed by a pegasus ten stories above the street - it was so terrifying and overwhelming that the brain just forgot to add 'pain' to the mixture of sensations. 'Need fast pain relief?' Gwen imagined a commercial playing at a favela kiosk 'try new Get Flown By A Pegasus! Works instantly to..."

Oh... sweet lord... it wasn't pain, it was cold. Air, streaming, blowing through the hole in her side.

When the angle was just right, it whistled.

Author's Notes:

Sorry for the delay - I had a birthday on the 30th, which prevented writing. I had a happy time. I am 53, now. One of my spouses got me loads of lovely Derpy stuff - dolls, figurines, oh, and an artisan Pinkie Pie, too! Wonderful dinner as well. But no writing. Please forgive me?

Five: Fever Pitch

She startled to wakefulness, her heart pounding. She'd been having a bad dream, but she couldn't entirely remember what it had been about. She sort of remembered, the first seconds after waking up, but the unfamiliar surroundings and the aching throb in her side had torn the somnolent terrors from her grasp.

'Sweet Jesus!' The events of last night returned to Gwen. The men. The flight. She carefully moved the covers and gingerly examined the gauze wrapped around her naked belly. Someone had undressed her, and treated her wound. Sweet Joseph - she had a hole through her, right through her side. It had been cauterized, so she hadn't bled, but it couldn't be a good thing to have a hole punched through like that. It burned, it stung, but it didn't hurt as bad as she imagined. Maybe they had given her something for the pain. That seemed likely, because she felt a little woozy, now that she thought about it.

She was laying on a foam mat bed, covered with a comforter. Of course - pegasus. Ponies living on Earth tended to like foam mats for beds, because they were easier to get up from on hooves than extremely soft mattresses were. Mats were more stable, more solid, and it was also possible to sleep in certain positions more easily. It wasn't a universal, though - Gwen's cousin Muirne - now a fine unicorn by the name of Shadeweaver - swore by her extra soft mattress. She admitted some trouble climbing out, in that she felt unsteady on her hooves, but it was worth it, she said, because of how she could sleep on her back so easily. It was harder for an Equestrian to sleep on their back, unless their bed was very soft - it was just how they were built.

Her side ached. Gwen looked around the room, unwilling to try to get up, what with having a hole in her side and it hurting and all. The door was open in the little bedroom. There was a dresser, and a closet, which was closed. A nightstand stood by the bed with a glass half filled with water. Oh... that's right. The pegasus and her roommate had put that there for her. It was starting to come back now.

They had flown for some time across the city - or at least it had felt like a long time. Perhaps any time spent clinging to a fake wood pallet flying hundreds of feet off the ground with a serious injury always felt long. Almost certainly, really, Gwen thought. Even without an injury, most likely. It had been quite a ride.

They had landed on a rooftop, somewhere. An apartment building. There was a blur of laying there while the pegasus went to get her roommate. Stairs, and being helped by a human woman and the pegasus mare. Gwen remembered starting to shake, as if she were cold. The waterglass. She couldn't remember undressing, but then she was fairly out of it by the time they landed. Getting shot was not a small thing.

The notebook! Gwen's heart leapt and began to race. She looked about frantically, trying to see the book. It wasn't on the nightstand. It wasn't on the bed, it wasn't on the comforter. She couldn't see her green jumpsuit either. Or her shoes and other clothing. "Hello?" Gwen tried to get up but the hole in her side would have none of that. It spoke with words of pain, and it had a very commanding tone of voice. "HELLOOOO???"

The sound of hooves and bare feet approached. Gwen hastily pulled the comforter over her lower body for the sake of her modesty - though clearly whoever had undressed her last night had pretty much seen all there was to see - and the action made her wince. Ow. Getting shot really did hurt. 'Imagine that!' Gwen's own thoughts mocked her.

The brown pegasus mare with the pale golden mane trotted into the room. An equally brown woman peeked around the corner, her dark hair gleaming in the morning light. "Are you decent?" she asked, a hand grasping the edge of the doorframe. The pegasus didn't seem to care. Newfoal or native, nakedness seemed to not be a part of pony concern.

"Hello? Thank you for saving me." The woman, seeing the comforter covering Gwen's lower extremities, entered the room and stood at the foot of the bed beside the pegasus. "Both of you."

"How are you feeling?" The woman walked around to the right side of Gwen and indicated that she would like to check the gauze bandages. Gwen flipped back some of the comforter to allow her access. It seemed clear from her attitude that this woman had been the one to treat the wound.

"I've been better, honestly." Gwen tried to smile, but the pain she felt made it more of a grimace. "My first time being shot. Hopefully my last, honestly."

The woman laughed at that. "Hello, by the way." She was examining the bandage, noting some slight leakage. There were reddish-brown spots where the hole was. During the night, the wound had wept a bit. "I'm Paige. Paige McQuillen. This feather-duster over here is Petrichor, just call her 'Pet' though. She's a pretentious little thing."

Gwen couldn't help but smile, pain or not. "Petrichor? Petrichor the Pegasus?"

"It's the smell of rain!" The little mare complained.

"It's alliterative and pretentious, is what it is." Paige grinned at her winged friend. "Don't worry though, she's right enough, if you don't let her get too bookish on you." Paige pulled the comforter over Gwen once more, then lay a hand on Gwen's forehead. "Hmmm... any chills?"

Gwen noticed that she did feel strangely cold all of a sudden. It was always somewhat warm pretty much everywhere except Antarctica now, though only the wealthy elite would know that for sure, as they were the only sort allowed down there. "Um... yes, I do, kind of. Oh dear."

"Oh dear indeed. I would like to have our resident medic check you later, if that would be all right." Paige sat down on the floor, leaning her back against the bedroom wall. "We have a proper unicorn medic two floors down. Well, not entirely proper, he's still studying what he can Earthside before moving to Equestria. He was an intern before he converted, and he's still pulling shifts even now, bless 'im. World may be ending, but he's in no hurry to leave it. Good thing, too. We still need help on this side of the fence."

"Oh! You don't even know who I am!" Gwen shivered slightly, under the blanket. "I'm Gwen Boik. I'm a bit of an old fashioned librarian, I'm part of the 'LAASTT' team - Literature And Arts Survival Triage? There isn't much call for librarians these days, so I'm glad of the work. I guess I'd... be dead... without Petrichor here. Thank you Petrichor."

Pet seemed pleased - and surprised - that Gwen used her full name, and smiled at being addressed thus. She adjusted her wings, fluffing them slightly with pride. Gwen noticed that Paige grinned at the pegasus for that unconscious act. "Why were the HLF after you?"

"Pet! Goodness, let the girl get to things at her own speed. No need to start 'grilling the suspect' so early in the morning!" Paige clicked her tongue at her friend. "How's your pain level, Gwen? I have more pills, if you need them."

Gwen very vaguely remembered swallowing pills last night. "Actually... it's starting to hurt quite a bit. I could use something, to be honest."

"Right! Back in a jiff!" Paige was up in an instant, and out the door. Petrichor walked around to Gwen's left and sat down on her haunches, a concerned look on her muzzle.

"Petrichor... I had a notebook with me. It would have been tucked into my jumpsuit, is it still... I mean, did you see it? Is it..."

"All of your stuff is in the other room. Well, except your clothing. It should be dry by now. We figured it would be nice to get it washed. Your notebook is in the other room, on the kitchen counter. It's a little worse for wear though..." the pegasus looked briefly down, her ears flicking. "...there's a bit of a notch taken out. It's a bit singed there. Whatever gun they used..." The way the pegasus said 'gun' made it sound like a swear word. This instantly confirmed for Gwen that the pegasus was almost certainly a Newfoal and not a native.

Native Equestrians visiting the Earth had no understanding of the vast and inventive ways that humans had created to kill other creatures and each other. The very concept of mass murder was utterly alien to the ponies, unthinkable. Equestrians that learned abstractly about guns, bombs, tanks, battleships, nerve agents, bioweapons, warmechs, molecular blades and such had no emotional connection to their intellectual understanding - unless they themselves had been attacked. Only Newfoals displayed such an emotional reaction as Petrichor had shown - shame, horror and guilt at having been part of a species so very, very clever at slaughter.

"I suspect they used an electomechanical rifle. Shoots so fast that the bullet literally burns the air itself. That's what cauterized my wound, I expect. Good thing too. Considering I was shot in the abdomen, I likely would have bled out."

The little pegasus cringed at this. "You sure know a lot about this stuff."

"I'm a librarian. Books are my life. I read everything, about anything." Gwen shivered again, and the shaking made her wound hurt more. "Though I do have my preferences. I like stories about elves and fairies and ancient magics, myself."

"Ever read any Lord Dunsany?" The pegasus looked up, cautiously hopeful.

Gwen smiled broadly. This was her sort of person. "Book Of Wonder, The King Of Elfland's Daughter, Beyond The Fields We Know..."

Petrichor was estatic. "Gods Of Pegana, Sword Of Welleran, Fifty-One Tales..."

"Oh wondrous! You are quite the extraordinary individual, my good miss Petrichor!" Gwen seldom came across a single soul who had even heard of the other direction fantasy could have taken, if Tolkien and his ilk had not stolen the stage.

"I can't believe you know Lord Dunsany! Wow!" Petrichor was on her hooves now, almost prancing. "It was really great that you were on that roof!" Instantly the brown pegasus looked deeply ashamed. "I mean... it wasn't good... not at all... oh sweet Luna... I... I mean..."

Gwen gave a soft laugh. "Hush! You saved my life. If it weren't for you, I would be so completely dead. Thank you, by the way. For saving me."

Petrichor sat down once more. "I'm just glad it worked. I'm still learning."

"The trick with the pallet? That was amazing, truly amazing!" The shivering was getting worse, also the pain.

"I've mastered basic flight, and extension of lift... but I've never tried it before with anything as heavy as y... uh... that heavy... before." The muzzle of the pegasus betrayed a slight grin. Her catch was a faux slip. She was a caution, and to be sure.

"I've got your pills, it took me a bit because I forgot where I put them last night, in all the fuss... oh dear..." Paige was back, a bottle in her hand. She placed her other hand on Gwen's forehead, noting the dampness. Gwen's teeth were beginning to chatter now. "Here, let's get these in you, no reason for you to suffer. Then I am getting that unicorn, Ace in here, pronto." Paige opened the bottle and shook out two pills, handing them to Gwen.

"Ace? Don't tell me... Ace Bandage? You have to be kidding me!" Gwen swallowed the Endorphinol tabs with the help of the glass of water on the nightstand.

"The one and only. I know! These Newfoals and their pony names, am I right?" Paige laughed, but her eyes betrayed worry. "I'll be back as soon as I can round him up. Stay warm. The WC is just to your left outside the door, Pet will help you. Back in a bit love!"

Petrichor nodded. "Kisses!"

Gwen noted the fond looks. "Are you... a couple?"

Petrichor grinned. "That obvious, huh?"

Gwen found herself curious. "Um... why isn't she... I mean... usually, in couples, when one partner... I mean..."

"Why isn't Paige a pony already?" Petrichor grabbed a pillow from the closet, then lay it on the floor to sit on. "The usual assumption we get is that I must have been hit by the PER, smacked with a bottle of potion in the street or something. Nope! Nothing so dramatic. Or that she doesn't intend to convert, and our story will be a tragic one. No, she's booked for the Bureau, there's just a list right now. The rush is on. We've actually been trying to find the PER, to avoid having to wait so long. But that isn't the whole story, I mean, she could have gone in with me at the same time, right? The registered couples exception." Petrichor blushed, under her coat. The hair was very thin and delicate on pony faces, which made such things as blushing visible. "The real reason is... um... well..."

The pills were kicking in. Thank the saints and angels for heavy drugs, Gwen thought to herself. "Yes?"

"We... well..." The blush got redder. "We are kind of a little... kinky. Just a bit, mind you! Nothing really out there! We don't have a dungeon in our bedroom or anything... not much, anyway... it's just that it's a once in a universe opportunity to explore... um..."

Gwen giggled as she shivered. "Say no more! Nudge nudge, a wink's as good as a nod!"

Petrichor's muzzle opened, her jaw dropping, her ears leaning forward. "M-Monty Python? You know..."

"A library holds more than just books, you know." Gwen felt kinship with the pegasus mare. It was rare to find any person these days who knew Lord Dunsany at all, and almost as rare to find a person who had ever heard of Python. "Did we used to be friends in a past life?"

"There's a colliding universe out there, and I'm a pony now. Sure. At this point they could reveal the flying teapots they've been hiding from the public, and I wouldn't flinch." Petrichor's tail was wagging, almost like a dog. "Glad to meet you again, Gwen! Funny meeting you in this life of all places!"

Her teeth rattled but she grinned. "You look different, somehow."

This made them both laugh.

When Paige finally returned, a construction-yellow unicorn stallion in tow, she found a very worried Petrichor greeting her at the door. "What took so long?"

"Ace here turned into a fetch quest. I've been all over the building twice. How's our foundling?" Paige ushered the unicorn medic into Gwen's room as she spoke.

"Not so good, now. She's got some kind of fever, that's pretty clear, and she's not as sharp as she was earlier." Petrichor brushed up against her partner, and leaned into her for comfort.

"Hello miss Gwen, was it? I'm Ace, I'm a second-year medical intern - not my choice, mind you, I had a bit of a change of life and they made me do a second term. Actually, it's been instructive. I understand you have a pretty serious wound. Can I examine you?"

Gwen was all shivers and chattering now, and it was harder to concentrate. "P-Please. I'm-m not as g-good as I w-was."

Ace Bandage took up a position on the right side of Gwen's bed and closed his purple eyes. His yellow horn began to glow, and under his eyelids, his eyes moved as if he were dreaming. Paige hunched down low, her arm around her companion, and gave Petrichor a warm kiss. They remained quiet, waiting for the medical unicorn to finish his scan.

"Well, you have quite a hole through your abdomen. The tunnel passes through several loops of your small intestine, and exits in the front through your liver. The charring fortunately stopped any bleeding, but there is an infection growing in there. We're looking at sepsis too, and all of that demands immediate attention." Ace opened his eyes, and the glow of his horn ceased. "According to Paige here, you have Green-Level benefits, which means we can probably get you into the teaching hospital where I work with little trouble. I'm going to make arrangements, and we're going to have to move quickly on th..."

"W-WAIT!" Gwen almost shouted the word.

"No, there is no wait, here. Septicemia is a critical condition. It's easily treatable with the third gen microbial inhibitors, but it used to be touch and go even back in the golden age of antibiotics. Those holes, plural, need to be closed. Gwen, do you think you can you afford an ambulance? It's that serious!" Ace turned to Paige. "If she can't afford an ambulance, what options for transport do we have? If necessary, we can..."

"I could fly her! I've already done it once. I can do it again, I'm positive!" Petrichor was eager to help, almost desperate. She very much liked her new, learned friend. "I've still got the pallet from last night. I can fly her! And..." Petrichor looked back at Gwen "...it won't cost you a credit!"

"I'M BEING HUNTED!"

Ace, Paige and Petrichor stared at the outburst. Gwen winced from pain, because she had tried to sit up as she yelled. "P-Probably. The HLF, remember? They are after me, I am certain by now they know who I am. But it's w-worse than that! They're local! T-They have a base really c-close. I can't just s-show up at a local hospital!"

Paige shook her head. "Gwen, honey, this is serious. This is not a time to worry about the HLF. The hospitals are all protected by Blackmesh, nobody messes with..."

"They k-killed all of the B-Blackmesh protecting me. At the warehouse. K-killed them all. They are after me. These aren't the usual idiots. It's the Echelon, the top assholes. Y-you can't let anyone know I'm here, they'll kill you t-too." Gwen sagged back, dripping with sweat, dizzy and sick.

"Girl, what did you bring home this time?" Paige stared at her pegasus lover.

Petrichor's ears flattened against her skull. "I didn't know! I mean... I didn't know it was like this! But what else could I do? I'm not ever just going to leave somebody to..."

"There's another option." Ace had a commanding presence, the room was quiet. "I've been in that rich-human hospital for too muffin long. The world's ending. It should be the first option, every time. Swirl, we should be using it to treat colds and minor cuts!" Ace leaned his long neck over the bed, his head close to Gwen's. "Untreated, Gwen, you have hours to live. How'd you like to add three hundred years?"

"P-Ponifi... ponification?"

"Paige told me you were with the WorldGov Literature And Arts team. You know the score. I have to wonder why you don't already have your hooves on. Religious objections?" Ace's purple eyes filled Gwen's view.

"N-No! J-Just never got around to it. K-Keyboards and records need h-human hands, you know?" Gwen had known it would have to happen. It was the only way to survive. Earth was sinking, and Equestria was the only lifeboat. It was a miracle the princesses were willing to take in so many refugees at all. But Gwen had always imagined going to a proper Bureau, on her own terms, when she felt ready. Fourteen days of that legendary real food all the Newfoals went on about. All the holos and lectures and maybe even a special speaker or two...

"So no objections?" Ace was insistent.

Gwen felt like she was dying, her body shook and the pain just kept getting worse despite the pills. She felt cold almost all the time, and sounds felt 'wrong' somehow. "N-no... no objections!" Every time her body shook, it felt like a mutie-rat was chewing at her side.

"Paige, keep her going. Pet!" Ace trotted over to the pegasus. "You carried her last night, you said. On a pallet. Think you can "Firemare's Carry me to Mercy and back?"

Petrichor nodded vigorously. "Roof. Let's get going!"

"Gwen, hang in there, OK? You'll be laughing on hooves in no time." Ace and Petrichor dashed out of the room, the sound of the apartment door being opened and hooves galloping receded and stopped as the door swung shut.

"Here... let me get you a damp towel. It might help with the fever sweats." Paige turned toward the kitchen.

"P-Paige? H-How about more of t-those pain pills? It's not like my l-liver is gonna care long!" Gwen tried to smile through frighteningly pale lips.

"Yeah, sure." Paige had no more smiles left. The speed at which sepsis advanced had begun to horrify her.

It was almost an hour later when Gwen was awakened. Paige was holding her hand, patting it to bring her to consciousness. "Gwen? Gwen honey? It's time. Ace and Pet are back, and they've got your medicine."

"W-What happened? They just l-left! Huh?" Everything was strangely distorted when Gwen opened her eyes. She felt like she was looking through a fishbowl at the world. She felt heavy and uncoordinated. And hot. Very, very hot, like the world was on fire.

"You drifted off a while back. I figured I'd let you sleep a bit. But now it's time to wake up. You need to drink your medicine." Paige had a cup, filled from a three-ounce government issued emergency transport flask. The flask had hung around Ace's neck, the same kind of flask the Taikonauts on the World Friendship Orbital Platform carried in case of a sudden Equestrian de-orbit. The carbon-fiber flask sat on the night table now.

Gwenhwyfar Boik had never felt so sick in all of her life. Then again, a part of her scrambled thoughts noted, she'd never actually been so sick in all her life before. Sepsis was fatal, unless treated. The medicine would fix it. The medicine would fix everything. The little cancers she took Malignostat to halt. The cut tendon in the ring finger on her left hand - no... that wouldn't so much as get fixed as simply be absorbed away. That annoying scratch on her right cornea, that made the letters look broken sometimes. Brand new eyes, clear and perfect.

She looked at her hands, while the room swirled from the fever slowly killing her. It was hard to focus her eyes. Bye-bye hands. No more typing. No more computers. Have to write with a quill and ink now. 'Sweet Joseph, my whole life's been typing and clicking, hasn't it? Not really much of a life, come to think... oh god... I hurt... medicine. Medicine.' The face of her grandfather seemed to hover in front of her vision. "I'm goin' ta join the fairies now, Eachann. I'm off ta join the fairies..."

The cup was at her lips. Someone was telling her to swallow every drop, it all had to go down. Gwen did her best, but it tasted like metallic grape and it smelled the same. It wasn't something a body would drink for enjoyment. It felt too thick, going down, and it numbed whatever it touched. Somehow she managed to get it all in. The cup was removed.

Gwen lay back, the ceiling squirming, the sound of Ace the medical unicorn trying to tell her something about what version the potion was. She tried to tell him about the woman in the notebook, who had helped make the stuff, but that was the moment that she found herself falling into an infinite dark abyss, and the room went away entirely.