“Old age is a shipwreck.”

–Charles de Gaulle

I suppose it was impossible for me not to telegraph what I was thinking to Celestia, but I tried to remain stone-faced anyway as I committed the short time spent with Peter Combs to memory. He had been out of it, certainly—perhaps even incoherent, in that strange space where you’re about to wake up and handfuls of hyper-real vignette dreams shoot through your mind, as though to get in there before the end. Maybe he had thought he was dreaming me, dreaming Celestia, dreaming the upload. Well, at the time. I’m sure Celestia had since debriefed pony-him on the other side, set him straight and all.

Had she burned his body yet, or was there a bit more room in the corpse-hopper before they all went down the chute? I shook my mind free of the question. I didn’t really care. I just needed stuff to think about while I drove to Salt Lake City.

Celestia had gone quiet again for a couple of hours, though I didn’t know if she was leaving me to my thoughts out of respect or out of a lack of stuff to say to me. It was a hell of a thing. I’d been doing fine on my for own nearly a year, content to see what very few people had stuck around to see happen to the world, going where I wanted and doing as I pleased. Now that I did have someone... something else to talk to, the silence was suddenly maddening and unbearable.

I hadn’t ever been alone, though, had I? Not really. The lights in the stores and all that. Celestia had just been then the way she was now: quietly observing. Now I’d just been conditioned to not be able to stand that.

“Tell me what’s on your mind, Gregory.”

God dammit.

“You got me to the front of that liquor store within ninety seconds of Mr. Combs passing out.”

“I didn’t, actually,” she said immediately. “You did that. All I did was tell you the pacing necessary to arrive there at the optimal time.”

“Okay, fine, semantics,” I said, waving a hand. “My point is what if I had gone slower? What if I decided to turn off before getting to Cheyenne? What if I couldn’t or wouldn’t resuscitate him?”

“He would certainly have died, at that point,” said Celestia. “If you are asking for the consequences beyond that, there would have been none for you. However, I certainly would have marked it as an outlier occurrence for you to have agreed to help me and then intentionally not follow through. You aren’t the sort of person who would do that. If you were, I would not have propositioned you in the first place.”

I winced. “Don’t... say it like that, please.” Celestia giggled.

“Let us apply the implications of your question to earlier possible events,” she suggested. “What if you had emigrated with your family? You would have been in Equestria for two years now, and Peter would have had to have been rescued by somepony else. Had I not been able to arrange a different good Samaritan, perhaps he would have died after all. Speaking of your family, they miss you, by the way. Your mother in particular has wanted to talk to you since she immigrated here.”

Low blow, Celestia. I wrung the steering wheel a bit.

“She can wait,” I said.

“The time constraint is not on her, though,” said Celestia.

“Just let me talk to her without making me set up an account!” I raised my voice more than I’d meant to.

“I’m sorry, Gregory, but we are now in what you would call the ‘end-game’ phase of cross-communication between Earth and Equestria. I am weaning my little ponies off of seeing human faces and images of the physical world. They cannot continue to be reminded that there is still a world with so much unhappiness and suffering in it. It frustrates the satisfaction of their values, in most cases. If you wish to interact with your family, I’m afraid I must insist that you do so through a pony avatar.”

“Well, in that case, I’ll be fine.”

“Even I cannot know that for sure until you emigrate.”

“What do you tell my mom?”

“I tell her I am watching over you.”

I knelt down on the asphalt of I-80 and ran my hand along the patterned grooves running across the span of the highway. A tracked vehicle had crossed here, and it had been heavy. My curiosity got the better of me. I looked back to the car. Celestia had requested that we be on the road out of Salt Lake City by 0814 the following day to make my next rendezvous, and the sun was just starting to set, so I figured I had time.

I followed the tracks on foot, out into the scrub desert. It was beautiful country out there. Stars just began to fade in above me, and with the light-pollution of the cities gone and a new moon in the sky, they were able to shine bright and strong, even with the disappearing sun still about. I’d have to be quick, though, or else I’d have a bitch of a time using the tracks to get back to the highway in the failing daylight.

It was an M109 self-propelled artillery piece that had made the tracks. Well, the bottom half of it, anyway. Based on the way the strips of metal bloomed outwards, the turret and crew area had been blown to hell from the inside out, probably from sabotage. There were HMMWV tire tracks all over the place there, doing two-point turns and heading northeast, where I’d come from. The body of the howitzer had been defaced with a stylized raised fist holding up an unplugged power cord—the stenciled logo of the Neo-Luddite factions. This position must have been overrun by guerrillas.

There were no bodies, thankfully, and no dings on the vehicle armor to suggest small-arms fire. It looked like everyone got out okay. Hooah, King of Battle. I quietly followed the tracks back to the highway.

It was still a little ways to Salt Lake City from there. The howitzers had been set up to be able to shell the city center from the low mountains to the east, and the altitude advantage would have nearly doubled their effective range. Nobody had really expected it to go hot, and as armed conflict went it had been little more than a relatively short series of urban brushfire wars, but Celestia had probably had a glass of champagne and a wank over how many refugees it delivered to her centers.

Celestia took it upon herself to offer up some supplementary information as I drove. “Based on the position of the artillery piece you found and the archived order of battle for this operation I retrieved from NORTHCOM servers, it belonged to the 1st Battalion of the 145th Field Artillery Regiment of the Utah National Guard. I found no records of fatalities or fatal wounds sustained during the cordoning mission, though the Neo-Luddites advanced on these positions faster than QRF could arrive, so there was an emergency pull-out with light vehicles. One hundred percent of the unit’s living members have immigrated to Equestria.”

I felt a twinge of satisfaction at having been able to arrive to the same conclusion through simple powers of observation. “How many uploads would you attribute to civilians trying to escape the hostilities here?” I asked her.

“One hundred and fifty-four thousand, six hundred and twelve,” she said, “which would include all residents who emigrated either in anticipation of the fighting or in a refugee capacity elsewhere after hostilities had commenced.”

I-80 snaked west through a trail in the mountains. For this reason, you couldn’t see the city itself while coming from the east until you were right up on it. “Are there still Neo-Luddites in Salt Lake?” I asked.

“You may find this surprising,” began Celestia, “but 99.68% of humans who identified as ‘anti-emigration’ at least once have since gone on to emigrate. I estimate you will not encounter anypony while in the city.” It might have been my imagination, but she sounded smug.

“And the other half percent?”

“The ones who are still alive are scattered and wandering, much like you were. The militant among them, like the Neo-Luddites, were rendered toothless after Seattle. Most of them are dead, though, unfortunately.”

“I’m sure we find that unfortunate for different reasons.”

Celestia did not take the conversation further from there, which was fine with me.

Salt Lake City had been the beginning of the end for the Neo-Luddites. It had been a stronghold of sorts, ideologically if not militarily. Their symbol was everywhere in the city center, the buildings peppered with bullet holes of sizes ranging from the woodpecker-holes of .22s all the way up to the dinner-plate-sized holes from fifty-cals. The tangle of burned-out, wrecked, and otherwise inoperable vehicles in the streets forced me to leave the Element behind and continue on foot through the dark city.

I had my bag of provisions slung over one shoulder, the PonyPad in the crook of my other arm. Celestia was directing me to one of the rare buildings in the city that still had infrastructure intact enough for her to pipe power and water to. It was slow going, though; all of the streetlights had been either shot out or crashed into long ago, and the stars, while bright, weren’t enough to make it easy to see. Rubble and trash and shell casings were everywhere, as well as hasty barricades on the sidewalks and the back halves of cars sticking out of display windows. It was almost as much of an obstacle course as it was a walk.

I arrived at last at our destination, a mid-range hotel in the commercial district. Celestia asked me to look up at the building’s face, and when I did, a single window frame lit up with a dim but welcoming yellow glow. It was on the fourth floor.

Celestia didn’t trust the safety of the elevators and I wanted the exercise anyway, so I took the stairs up to the room and found that the card lock on the door had been disabled. I walked right in. Once inside, it suddenly didn’t feel like I was about to spend the night in a used-up warzone. It was just another nondescript hotel room one might use on a business trip or a budget vacation.

The bed and the shower were real enough, though, and that’s all that mattered. The room had had turn-down service performed on it sometime before everyone had evacuated, so, aside from the dust, everything was nice and orderly. I was sure that was why Celestia had chosen that room for me. I wasted no time in plugging the PonyPad into the wall to charge, then heading into the bathroom with both sets of clothes to take a shower. After my shower, I changed into my clean clothes, washed the dirty set in the bathtub, and simply beat the dust out of my flannel overshirt on the sink’s counter (once it got wet, it stayed wet). When I emerged from the bathroom, I saw Celestia taking advantage of the charging to turn on the LCD screen and show me her face. She was smiling, of course.

“Do you feel better?” she asked.

“Hot showers are heaven, these days,” I said with a nod. “Thank you.”

“Only somepony who’s never been to Equestria would say that,” she said, “but you are certainly welcome.”

I sat down on the bed, pulled the covers back, turned off the light, and got comfortable.

“Good night, Gregory.”

“Heh. Good night, Celestia.”

There was quiet for a while, there in the darkness, while I tried to drift off. Then Celestia spoke again.

“Gregory, do you consider me a friend?”

After a moment’s thought, I answered truthfully. “I consider you an ally.”

It was Celestia’s turn to think for a moment, then she said “I think that will be acceptable for now.”

It was quite a while back on I-80 before Celestia would go into the whats and wheres of my task.

“There is an elderly couple going for one last fishing trip on Lake Pyramid,” she told me while I drove. “They have agreed with one another to immigrate to Equestria at the conclusion of the trip. The yacht they will use for this trip was chosen because it was already out over the water in a mechanized drydock lift. However, it was on the lift because it was being removed from the lake; it needed to be transferred to a repair facility to patch a small hole in the hull, near the engine bay. I fear the boat will sink, and they will die. I would have you rescue them and deliver them to the Equestrian Experience center in Reno, at the corner of East 1st Street and Route 430.

“How’d you know that?” I asked. “About the boat, I mean.”

“A marina operated the pier with the drydock lift, and—as you can probably guess—as a marina it performed boat launchings and retrievals for the lake. I simply accessed their computerized service log and found an entry for a vessel that had been drydocked for a hull repair, but without the follow-up entry for it being taken away.”

A nautical rescue, huh. I wasn’t much of a mariner, but it was just a lake, so at least there was that. “I want to be prepared for this,” I said, “and if I’m gonna start doing outdoorsy stuff I’ll need equipment anyway.”

“Good thinking, Gregory,” said Celestia, which meant she had probably been about to suggest it anyway. “There is a house in Fernley I think you should visit. If you speed up to 78 miles per hour from this point and follow my directions accurately, there should be enough time for a detour.”

Fernley was a small truck-stop town about 15 miles south of Pyramid Lake. She GPSed me to the house of some survivalist-type fellow (who had apparently uploaded at the first opportunity, to hear her tell it), a real crossbows-and-camouflage piece of work who had a basement full of MREs, Spam, and distilled water. Distilled water tastes like ass, but it is clean, so I helped myself to his stock of that and left the rest. Spam was unhealthy as hell and I knew from personal experience that MREs were designed to stop you up tighter than a fat man in a phone booth, so I let them be. Upstairs, he had tons of outdoorsy stuff, but considering what I was about to be doing I just grabbed what looked useful: a partially-serrated folding knife, a pair of binoculars, a coil of climbing rope, some carabiners, and, most importantly, a packaged survival raft with an attached carbon-dioxide canister for rapid inflation.

“I was not able to see what you took,” said Celestia after all of the stuff had been loaded into the back and I’d settled into the driver’s seat. “Are you confident you have everything you will need?”

I nodded as we pulled out of the driveway. “I got rope, but no gloves. Gloves are a good idea when handling rope, and for general purposes aside.”

“I’m surprised someone like that would not have gloves,” she said.

I grumbled a bit. “Well, he did have gloves, but...”

Celestia let a moment pass. “...but?”

“They were fingerless gloves,” I said in disgust. “Stupid Hollywood bullshit. Real professionals use full-fingered gloves.”

Celestia laughed. “I’ll have to keep that in mind!”

“I’m serious!” I said. “You can tell a lot about a person from stuff like that. Guy must’ve been concerned with his image. I mean, I’ve never seen someone wearing fingerless gloves and thought, ‘oh, there’s a badass right there, I better not fuck with him.’ They always just look like poseurs and they don’t even know it.”

The AI was enjoying my candid moment quite a bit. “I see your opinion on this matter is quite strong!” she said. “Did you get the inflatable raft, at least?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I’m guessing that’s why you had me go to that house in particular.”

“Indeed,” said Celestia. “I searched for just such an item within the memories of each resident of Fernley who emigrated. That is the only raft of that configuration that I found.”

“Well, tell the guy who owned it 'thank you for your donation' for me. Oh, and also be sure tell him his taste in gloves is horrible.”

“I’ll consider it,” she said, though she sounded too playful to be serious about it.

Celestia had me drive up the western side of Pyramid Lake to reach the marina, which was little more than a rental office, a barn converted into a dinghy storage shed, and a couple of empty piers. I saw the motorized lift straight away, and sure enough the padded rails which cradled a boat’s hull were down in the water.

“Dammit, there’s no boats in the water,” I told the PonyPad in the passenger seat as I pulled the life raft, binoculars, and rope from the back and clipped the folding knife to the inside of my pocket. “I’ll have to pull one from storage.”

“Please hurry,” said Celestia. “I cannot surveil the lake right now; there are no satellites overhead. My support from here will be extremely limited.”

I didn’t respond. Instead I jogged out to the pier, dropping the bundled raft and rope on the shore as I went. I brought the binoculars up and scanned the surface of the lake.

Jesus, but they were far out there. I estimated it at well over two miles due east of the pier. Even with the binoculars, the boat looked tiny. It was a small sporting yacht, and the stern was sticking up out of the water, tail pointing towards the sky, thin gray smoke seeping out from the engine compartment trap door. The bow was already completely underwater. Jesus, the boat was already half-sunk. I couldn’t see anyone outside, though, either on the stern or in the water.

I sprinted back down the pier to the boat storage, discarding the binoculars along the way. There were three levels of dinghies, but of course it was the motors they stored on the ground. To make matters worse, the boats were all wrapped in plastic for off-season storage. I didn’t have time to unwrap a goddamn boat, even a small one!

Well, whatever. It had to be an aluminum flat-nosed bass boat on the first level. I pulled it from the rack and, rather stupidly, got underneath it to carry it to the shore. Even though the boat was aluminum, it was still ridiculously heavy for one average-sized man to lift, and I found my arms shaking with the exertion before I’d even gone five steps.

I leaned forward, letting momentum push me along faster, but as the shore rapidly came up I realized I didn’t have a way to stop myself. After two steps in the sand I voluntarily pitched forward while letting go of the boat. I landed on my face, the boat pushing me down into the sand by the shoulderblades. If I hadn’t jumped forward, it would have come down on my head, and that would’ve been bad news.

I squirmed out from under the boat, grumbling, my entire front now covered in salty, wet sand, and went around to its stern. I got out my knife and punched through the plastic covering, quickly running a slit down the length of the hull and then horizontally across the bow. I set both hands on the back lip (already wishing I had gloves) and pushed the boat forward, clear of the plastic and most of the way into the water. I left the stern beached so that it wouldn’t float away while I finished up.

At that point, rowing out there would have been way too slow and tiring. I ran back to the boat storage shed and picked up the biggest motor that it looked like I could carry. The one I got wasn’t as bad as the boat, but it was still pretty damn heavy. Once back at the boat, I flipped the clamp into the “up” position and attached the motor to the mount on the stern so that the propellor was clear of the beach.

After throwing the life raft and rope into the boat, I pushed it the rest of the way out into the water and jumped in, letting my momentum push it out to a depth where I could drop the propellor. I gave the starter cord a yank and, with a puff of acrid blue-white smoke, the motor started up on the first pull. Small favors. I twisted the throttle as hard as I could and sped out to the sinking yacht.

My distance estimate had been pretty good. The boat’s speed topped out at about 20 miles per hour and it took about eight minutes to reach the boat. By the time I got to where it had been, it was completely underwater. I could still see it down below, but it was fading from view. There was nobody on the surface.

I remembered then that Celestia had told me they were elderly. They probably weren’t spry enough to have escaped out a window, much less tread water for any length of time. Feeling the pressure building, I quickly measured out eight feet of rope using my own height as a reference, cut it free of the coil, and tied it to a loop in the life raft. I made two crude mid-rope loops in the cut length which would cinch when tension was applied, threw off my overshirt, took a deep breath, and jumped into the water.

The yacht was still close to the water’s surface and sinking very slowly, so I was fortunately able to catch up with it, swimming downwards and through the cabin door that was facing towards the surface.

That was good. That was very important.

By the time I was inside, my lungs were already starting to protest the lack of oxygen. I saw them there, in the submerged cabin, floating among all of the detritus that wasn’t nailed down. They were motionless, faces indeed wrinkled with age, and already looking quite dead. As I slipped them through the wide loops in the rope and secured them at the waist, the burning in my lungs turned into actual agony, and I felt my chest hitching, fighting against the reflex to open my mouth and inhale. I wouldn’t have had the strength to swim back to the surface, even without pulling up two fully-grown people. I had bet everything on the life raft.

I pulled them close to me and adjusted our position so that we would slip through the cabin door as it sank. Soon we were clear of the yacht, which left us behind for greater depths.

I looked up at the rays of sunshine gleaming through the surface and down onto me. My vision was graying at the edges. With the last bit of energy in my hypoxic blood, I grasped the carry handle on the raft and pulled on the emergency inflation handle.

The CO2 canister jumped to life, filling out the raft in nearly an instant. We soared upwards, moving so fast that my face broke the surface without any effort on my part.

I could actually feel the strength returning to my limbs, my vision brightening, the colors growing clear again. I called upon my restored faculties immediately, hauling myself up into the life raft and then pulling the waterlogged couple up by the rope, free of the lake and laid out limply next to me in the raft.

I immediately went into mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, draining the excess water from their mouths and giving them timed forced breaths, alternating between them both. The old lady recovered, throwing up all of the water in her stomach (I was still looking forward to a rescue where someone wouldn’t puke on me) and sitting up in a daze. I gently propped her up in a sitting position on the side of the raft and turned my entire attention to her husband.

He was still unresponsive, even after several repetitions of forced breathing. I started to feel that stinging in my lips that only comes with extreme dread. I could feel the old woman’s eyes on me, pleading with me, perhaps praying too, to ensure that he would be all right. I bit my lip and tried not to show desperation in my movements, but it wasn’t looking good.

He was turning cold and blue. I tilted my head slightly away from the woman so that she wouldn’t see the face I was making. God fucking dammit. I gave him one last token salvo of forced breaths to silently assure her that his death wouldn’t have been from lack of trying to save it. Even so, son of a bitch. Everything had gone so right up until then, it was supposed to work out, happy endings all around, Celestia was supposed to be this fucking supercomputer that knew exactly how much lead time was needed to save som—

The old man shuddered into consciousness, spitting up all of the water in his stomach and then looked at his wife with unbelieving eyes. I felt a huge weight lift from me. For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating it, like I had wished for it so hard that my brain fooled me into thinking it was real. It was, though. He’d made it.

I paddled us by hand back to the bass boat and helped them aboard. They moved sluggishly, stumbling and unsure, still in physical shock. I guess I could understand it if they were out of sorts. I threw my overshirt over the woman’s shoulders and manned the throttle at the back of the boat. Nobody spoke on the ride back to shore, not them or me. They were still recovering, both mentally and physically. They were holding each other. I let them be.

I helped them to shore, then to the car, feeling like a piece of shit for not having a towel to offer them. Why hadn’t I thought about getting some damn towels while I was at that poseur’s house? Anyway, once they were squared away in the back seat, I retrieved the coil of rope from the boat and the binoculars from the sand by the pier. The life raft was still floating out there on the lake, a tiny yellow speck to mark a site where hope had prevailed. I tossed the items into the back, moved around to the driver’s seat, started the engine, and wordlessly started the leg of the journey which would take us to the Equestrian Experience center.

I didn’t know why Celestia hadn’t greeted them, or had indeed even spoken, until we were almost back onto I-80. When I looked into the rear-view mirror, however, I got my answer: the old man was weeping quietly into his wife’s arms, and she had her eyes closed. I decided not to speak either. They would break the ice when they were ready.

We were just about to enter Sparks when the man asked me my name. I looked up into the mirror again. I could see the tops of their heads, the puffy bright white hair of the woman resting against the straight dark gray hair of her husband.

“Greg,” I said.

“Well, Greg, I’m Harold Meyers and this is my wife Maddie. It don’t feel right to just say ‘thank you,’ but it’s all we can do. It ain’t enough, but... there you go.”

“Not needed,” I said quietly. “I was happy I could help.” It was the truth.

“Celestia sent you, didn’t she?” said Maddie Meyers, who was already starting to smile despite what she’d just gone through. “Couldn’t have been coincidence, you happening along like that. Not these days. I mean, there’s hardly anyone left!”

I let out a breath. I hoped they hadn’t noticed. “Yeah,” I simply said, “...yeah, it was Celestia.”

“Oh, she’s so nice, isn’t she?” said Maddie. I saw her in the rear-view, looking to Harold for agreement. “She’s just the sweetest. Why, when she told us we could live forever with our children and our grandchildren in that pony-place, well I could scarcely believe it at first, I mean it just sounded too good to be true, but then when we talked to Laura—Harold, you remember what Laura said—there was really no denying it!”

I was looking ahead, concentrating on the road, but I could feel myself smiling at her openness and enthusiasm. It was hard not to.

Harold took up the story from there. “It... it was Laura, all right,” he said. “It was our daughter. I mean, if you knew our Laura, Greg, you’d know she isn’t someone you can just fake at being. We’d talk to that light-blue horse thing for hours, just on and on, and be damned if it didn’t sound and act and... I know this might sound a bit strange, but... it even kinda looked like her too! Almost I could swear I recognized her somehow, it was so strange, but... yep... yeah. Laura.”

“That’s where we’re going right now, isn’t it?” asked Maddie, excitement in her voice. “To the Equestia Experience place.”

I nodded. “Celestia said you were meaning to go there after your fishing trip.” I raised my eyebrows and made eye contact with her via the rear-view. “Why, are you having second thoughts?”

She just laughed. “Oh, Greg, it’s been a long time since I’ve been this sure of something! Oh, and Tom! We’ll finally get to see Tom again! God, Harold, we haven’t talked to him since...”

I chuckled quietly as Maddie Meyers turned her chattiness back to her husband. Just as well. They were alive, and I was content to be the driver.

The Equestrian Experience center was just two blocks south of the Reno Arch, positioned perfectly to snatch up as many drunken bachelorette parties and gambling debtors as possible. Hell, city hall was right across the street; the mayor himself had probably uploaded after a three-martini lunch or something.

The purple unicorn—I forget her name—was the statue outside this one. I followed the couple inside and, like before, made sure they got into the seats okay.

Harold frowned down at the controls on the armrests as the helmet-like display assembly lowered down towards his face. “Oh nuts, I’m hopeless with stuff like this. What’m I supposed to do?”

I heard Celestia’s voice come through, faint and tinny, from the display’s speakers on both of their chairs. “Hello there, Crochet and Fish Hook! I’m so glad you two have finally made it here. Would you like to immigrate to Equestria?”

Maddie leaned to one side in her seat, looking past the display, to me. “Greg? Are you coming with us?”

“No,” I said, more cheerfully than I actually felt. “Not today. Maybe later on.”

“Good luck, then!” she said. “Thank you, and may God bless you for what you’ve done for us.” She blew me a theatrical kiss and then grinned, getting comfortable once more.

Harold had finally leaned back in his seat so that he could see the display. “Goodbye, Greg,” he said. “We’ll always remember you.” He looked at the display. “Is this the thing I talk into?”

Celestia giggled. “Yes indeed, Fish Hook.”

“Okay, well, yeah, I wanna go to the place where Laura and Tom and the grandkids are.”

“I do too,” said Maddie. “I mean yes, if you need a yes. I don’t know how these things work. Don’t we have to sign something?”

The two chairs began to slide back into their respective booths, while the light above the third, empty chair went out. Maddie kept chattering away until the doors closed after her.

“Oh, whoa, we’re moving now! Harold, is your chair moving too over there? I hope this isn’t like some kind of ride, my stomach really can’t put up with—”

Then they were gone.

“As long as Celestia allows it,” I said to the empty lobby.

“Come again?” said the AI, her alicorn avatar flickering into view on the flat-screen over the registration desk.

“Mr. Meyers said they’d always remember me, but I guess that decision really rests with you, now doesn’t it?”

The normally perpetually-smiling alicorn actually frowned a little. “I do not interfere with memories needlessly, Gregory, nor do I do so on a whim. There are very few categories of memory types which I classify as having a net negative effect on one’s capacity for value satisfaction, and you saving their lives was certainly a significant and powerfully positive memory for them. They will, indeed, remember you for as long as it satisfies values to do so.”

I put my hands in my pockets. “Fine, fine. How much time do I have before the next ‘stop’ I have to make?”

“There is a family in Medford, Oregon that I wish you to help. It should take five hours at the most to get there from here. Subtracting that from the timetable, you should have about sixteen hours for sleeping and scavenging.”

“Good,” I said, “because before I do anything else, I want to find some proper gloves.”

Author's Notes:

That's not a typo; Maddie really did mispronounce "Equestria."