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Twilight Sparkle vs. The Heat Death of the Universe
"What are stars made of?" A young Twilight Sparkle looked up at her mentor.
Celestia peered down at her pupil as the two stood on the balcony and the night breezes blew down from the Canterhorn. The filly was excited, as always, to be spending time with her, and though she tried to steel herself against becoming too attached, Celestia found the feeling to be mutual. "Well," she began. "It depends on the star. Ones like our sun are mostly made of hydrogen, and deep inside the hydrogen is squished together so tightly that it combines into helium. When that happens, lots of heat and light is made, and works it way out to the surface over a really long time, before finally shining into the darkness."
The lesson continued through most of the night, as the Princess of the Sun told a story about the stars to her favorite student.
There was a gentle hooftap on the door frame. "Princess?" A teenage Twilight called.
"Yes, come in." Celestia answered, finishing a few more quick strokes of the quill before looking up. "What is it, Twilight?"
"I wanted to ask you a question, about the stars."
"Oh?" Celestia said, and with years of practice, hid the slight hint of worry from her face.
"You see, I was... I was reading about the basic elements, like hydrogen, and helium, and how they combine in stars."
"Fusion, yes."
Twilight felt her cheeks flush. She wasn't explaining herself well. "No, I know that," she said. "But all the books I could find say stars have to be enormous for that to work. Like, bigger-than-all-of-Equestria-a-million-times-over big."
"And you wonder how something can be that big?"
Twilight flushed again at being treated like a child, as she knew it was her own fault for sounding like one. But she mustered her courage and continued. "No, I know things can be that big out there in the empty sky, but how do you... move them?"
"Move them?"
"In the sky, you move them around. One night, some of the constellations aren't quite the same as the night before, and then the next time you raise the moon, they've gone back, but something else is a bit different. I know you move the sun itself everyday, but that's just one star. How do you move so many so often?"
Feeling the corner of her eye twitch, Celestia knew her mask had slipped for an instant. Thankfully, her star pupil was much less attuned to social cues than to scientific ones and likely hadn't noticed. But still, she knew she'd never been as good with the sky as Luna, and letting little mistakes like that get noticed... She'd have to do better.
"Princess?" Twilight asked after a moment of silence.
"Sorry," Celestia said, shaking her head to clear it, before reforming her perfect smile. "You just reminded me about somepony from a long time ago."
"Oh! Anypony interesting?"
"A story for another time, perhaps. But for now, the stars, yes... That's a tricky one," she lied, even as it hurt her to do so to one so young and innocent. "A difficult spell that can truly only be mastered by alicorn magic and years of practice."
"Is it in a book somewhere? I want to study it!"
"I'm afraid I'm the only one who knows that secret."
"Teach me? Pleeease!"
Celestia couldn't help but giggle. "Maybe someday, when you're older, but not today."
"Do you promise?"
Feeling a catch in her throat, Celestia paused. What could she say, but "Yes, I promise." Even as the words left her muzzle though, she wondered at her own mind. Would she, really, share that secret? Or was she again lying to the one pony who trusted her more than anything else in the world?
Celestia found herself wandering through the castle gardens, listening to the gentle clink of her shoes against the cobblestones. The cool night air was such a relief from the mid summer heat.
The party, or "soiree" as Pinky Pie had insisted on calling it (having recently returned from Prance) had been wonderful. Sweetie Belle, as Twilight's apprentice, had taken it upon herself to prune the guest list. The young mare had matured so quickly in the past few years, somehow seeming to embody all the geniality of her older sister, while being almost as practical as Applejack. Everypony (and griffon, dragon, minotaur, hippogriff, yak, and zebra) there had been genuinely kind, interesting, and friendly, and there had been none of the one-upsmareship or passive aggressive behavior that so often came with royal social functions. "Ten years a princess," Sweetie had said. "Twilight shouldn't have put up with anypony she doesn't like by now."
She'd have to remember to thank Sweetie Belle again—and maybe give her some books to nudge her toward more diplomatic interests. A mare of her talent could be useful abroad after she finished her tutelage with Twilight.
Hoofsteps interrupted her thoughts, and she looked up to see Twilight Sparkle herself approaching.
"Well, if it isn't the mare of the evening!" Celestia gave an exaggerated bow.
"Oh, stop it." Twilight said, rolling her eyes.
Celestia chuckled softly. "You never were one for much formality."
"Nope," Twilight said, as her aura began tugging the clasp from around her neck. "Pomp and circumstance, I leave to you." Clasp now free, she was able to extricate herself from her dress, tossing it over a nearby bench. "Oh, so much better," she sighed, giving her coat and wings a light shake and fluff. "Far too hot in there."
Celestia smiled. "Why do you think I stick with just the peytral, crown, and shoes?"
"Yes, but you're not sitting on a throne across from Equestria's premier (and insistently 'generous') dressmaker, are you?"
"Touche."
Twilight trotted off the path into the well manicured grass of the lawn, flopped down, and rolled onto her back.
"Twilight?" Celestia asked. "What are you doing?"
Spreading her wings in answer, Twilight began rolling back and forth in the grass. "Oh yeah, that's the spot."
A very undignified snort escaped from Celestia's nostrils. "Seriously, my little pony?"
"If you know a better way to scratch your back in a thousand places at once, I'm listening."
"Magic?"
"Bah," Twilight kicked with her back feet, sliding downhill a bit. "Magic works, but it's not... not real. I can scratch an itch on a single hair, or preen each feather to perfection, but it's not the same as cool grass after a hot evening."
Walking over to her former student, Celestia peered down.
"Your nose looks funny from this angle," an upside down Twilight said, staring at the mare towering over her. "Like two letter Us tried to make a W but had only heard about it in a song."
"And you, dear Twilight, have had too much to drink."
"Hey, I resemble that remark."
"Indeed."
Letting out a sarcastic huff, Twilight turned her head and found her attention drawn to the beautiful starscape. "Princess?" she said, her voice far more meek than even a moment ago.
"Oh, so it's 'Princess' again now, is it?"
"Sorry, no... Celestia. I just... I was just thinking about something you said years ago."
Kneeling, Celestia took off her crown and shoes, before lying—regally and upright—beside her student.
"Do you remember," Twilight said, once the two were closer to eye level. "When you promised you'd teach me the spell to control the stars?"
Celestia felt her heart jump. It'd been years since the topic had been last broached, and Luna's return to the duties of the night sky had almost made her forget the reality of things herself. She took off her peytral and rolled onto her back as well. "Yes, Twilight, I remember."
"Then tell me now! What's the... the shpell... to move all the big super big big stars around."
"You should ask Luna," Celestia said, seeing an excuse to avoid the pain. "The night sky is her domain once again."
"I... I did... She said... she said..." Twilight punctuated her words by waving a drunken hoof at the sky above the both of them. "She said to talk to you."
Of course she did, Celestia thought. Her sister was so every much her equal, and even if Luna herself still doubted that, Celestia didn't.
"Okay," she said. "Where should I start?"
"At the..." Twilight was interrupted by a hiccup. "Start at the..." Hiccup. "At the beginning... and... the end... stop there. Stop at when you." Hiccup. "The end."
Twilight rolled onto her front and, on unsteady hooves, stood up. "I think, " she said. "I think I... Urp..."
Smirking, Celestia pointed a hoof toward the nearest restroom. "That way."
"Tomorrow?" Twilight said, putting a hoof over her mouth in case the alcohol in her stomach decided to try a surprise exit. "Tell me tomorrow?"
"Yes, my little pony. We'll talk tomorrow."
Nodding, Twilight turned and quickly trotted off toward the castle restroom.
"And if you can't make it all the way inside," Celestia shouted. "Aim for the geraniums... it might improve the smell!"
As the sound of of drunken hoofsteps receded, Celestia turned back to the sky, sighing. She lit her horn and used it to peer through the veil surrounding Equestria. There, beyond the illusory stars, moon, nebulae, and comets that were Luna's beautiful tapestry, she saw the true sky. To normal pony eyes, it would be a dark void, cold and empty. Her spellwork let her see light from the far reaches of the spectrum though, and there, barely above the background glow of the universe, shimmered a few distant, dying stars. She counted them, one by one, like she hadn't done since Luna had been banished. Many more had died since then, winking out of existence shortly before the protons in their very elements decayed into the entropy of the universe. Only a few thousand left, and even as she counted, another disappeared before her.
In that background glow of miniscule energies, only the faintest patterns could be found. Some arose from the universe's own birth, but as more and more of everything decayed, the majority of the patterns now came from its impending death instead. She liked to imagine the universe itself as a massive bell, ringing with the fires of creation; all of existence echoing back and forth through spacetime. For eons, the energies in the true sky rang clearly with the knell of the primordial beginnings, but now, echos of the inevitable demise canceled and damped those energies, overwhelming all the ancient patterns with new forms of vaguely discernible currents, all leading to maximum entropy. The sky no longer echoed the past birth, but the future death of all things.
But not here, not yet. Equestria was on the very edge of a very, very young galaxy. It would be a few thousand years still before the sun here collapsed, and another few million before it too decayed. So Luna and Celestia had set up a bullwark against the darkness, enfolding the world in images of beautiful skies; of healthy stars and bright, yellow sun.
But nothing lasts forever, Celestia thought to herself. And all too soon, her little ponies would fade into that horrible nothingness, becoming just the tiniest of imperfections in the homogeneous soup of entropy.
"It's all a lie?" Twilight Sparkle shouted, before rubbing her forehead with a hoof, the hangover doing her no favors with loud noise.
"Not a lie as such," Celestia said. "An illusion. A comfort to the ponies and others of the world."
"No," Twilight said, her voice calmer, quieter, but no less determined. "It's a lie. The stars are a lie, the sun is a lie, our whole world is a lie!"
"What would you have me do?"
"Fix it!"
"Excuse me?"
"Don't just hide the problem from everypony, find a way to fix it!"
"Twilight, some things just can't be fixed."
"I... I can't believe that. Did you try?"
"Twilight, calm down. It will be thousands of years before we even start to see the effects. No pony needs to worry about that today."
"Not worry about proton decay? Not worry about the heat death of the entire universe? How can you say that?! Of course we should worry!"
Celestia stood up and walked over to Twilight, who'd taken to pacing back and forth in her office. "Twilight," she said, putting a hoof on her student's shoulder. "Look at me."
Twilight acquiesced, and turned to face Celestia.
"Everything ends, Twilight. Everything. The good things, the bad things, and everything in between. The universe is no different."
"But it should be!"
"Why?" Celestia asked. "Because you want it to be?"
"Yes!"
Shaking her head, Celestia looked away. "I thought you were more mature than this."
"Mature?" Twilight said in a huff. "Mature!? Is that what you call giving up on existence?"
"Twilight!" Celestia let her temper flare briefly. "You just have to accept that sometimes, some things just can't be changed! Everything eventually comes to an end, and there's nothing you can do to stop that!"
Nostrils flaring, Twilight took a deep breath... then another. Then another. She opened her mouth to speak, but thought better of it and turned, storming from the room.
"Spike!" Twilight called, more out of habit than anything else. "I think I found it!" Her voice rang hollow through the empty castle, Spike having moved out more than a decade ago when he could no longer fit through even the largest of the doors, and Starlight having her own castle years even before that.
Twilight didn't seem to notice the echoing silence in the slightest, and quickly retreated with her newly found book to the basement lab. There, the latest in computational hardware surrounded the entire room, centering on a dentist's chair re-purposed for neuotropic brain scanning.
Dropping the book on a work bench, the grey-maned Twilight hastily flipped back to the passage she'd recently found. The ancient writing detailed one of the most powerful mind control spells, long forbidden in modern Equestria. More importantly, it showed a spell matrix component which converted logical thoughts and "orders" from the caster into the neuotropic structures in the brain itself. Now she just had to reverse that, then connect it into the data acquisition software and...
Twilight Sparkle 48927 spread her fields and flared against the photon breeze of the red dwarf. It was an old star, but was only a few thousand parsecs from the project and had enough mass left to be a worthy, if small, contribution. Scanning for a moment, she computed the optimal nuclear alchemies, then folded in on herself and dove to the core. There, carefully manipulating strong and weak forces with her field arrays, Twilight arranged for a core material eruption to be angled precisely opposite the Project intercept.
A few hundred years from now, that fusion burst would erupt from the surface, ejecting a stream of hyper-dense material with enough energy enough to push the star itself to join the Project some million years later. It'd be close, but it should make it to the accretion disc with at least a few hundred years to spare before the front of the collapse reached it.
Manipulations complete, Twilight Sparkle 48927 vectored back into space and on to the next prospect star. As she entered her coast phase, and prepared to hibernate most systems for the next few thousand years, she let herself pause a moment, and examine the rest of the sky. So few stars remained visible this close to the edge of the collapse, even in the most extreme ends of the spectrum. Most of the sky was that awful, homogeneous, lifeless beige of entropy. The exceptions were now all in this tiny bubble of what remained of the universe. Sure, there were at least a couple dozen galaxies left, but that was it, out of the entire cosmos, and that bubble was shrinking at nearly the speed of light as protons decayed and the universe died.
But it was the center of that bubble that gave her hope. There, the great Project sat. There, her and her millions of sisters were herding together the largest and most precise arrangement of matter the universe had ever seen; an artificial galaxy precisely machined for the most important of missions: Survival.
The remainder of space was now barely larger than a dwarf galaxy. In it, directly at its center, was exactly one dwarf galaxy. That galaxy—if it could truly be called that, since there was no great attractor at its core—spun on a single axis far, far faster than any baryonic matter had right to do so. No life, or at least no organic life, could even have the potential of surviving, as the matter itself, at least everywhere but the innermost orbits, was literally being ablated by photons as it moved at significant fractions of light speed. Were a being to actually observe things from any of the outer masses in the disc, they'd see a hugely distorted and smeared sky, with hard, destructive x-rays the only visible light in the forward direction, and rearward, almost complete darkness, as radiation there was redshifted to well below that of the general entropic glow of the dead universe.
This was the Project.
At the center of the galaxy's disc, a small, empty core remained, where normally, in ancient times of natural cosmology, a black hole would be found. Inside the rim of this empty space, Twilight Sparkle met with herselves, tens of thousand of neutronium bodies in murmuration like starlings of old, fields entangling with one another, exchanging exabytes of information by the millisecond. Occasionally, small flocks would break free, sent on missions to fine tune the last of the mass in the universe to spin even faster, even more precisely. Less frequently, other groups would return, rejoin, and exchange calculations. Time moved both slow and fast at the end of the universe, and, sitting in a nest of a billion dead suns, Twilight Sparkle, swarmed, waited, and thought.
The front of the collapse was now only a few billion seconds from reaching the outermost mass orbits of the Project. It was time. She couldn't wait any longer, so Twilight Sparkle called all herselves back to the core and the Payload. Many, she knew, would never make it, but their sacrifice had perhaps bought just a little more momentum, a little more energy. They should have enough, by all calculations, but the Project was a one-shot deal. There could be no do-overs, no test runs.
Twilight swarmed over the Payload. It was small, by comparison to the Project itself, only a few hundred kilometers long, and barely a meter wide. It was made of the same neutronium as Twilight herselves, but compared to her average unit mass of a few micrograms, the Payload massed as much as Equestria's old sun had in its prime.
Twilight would've liked it to be smaller, but even with the best data storage techniques she'd been able to develop in the past few million years, the sentient minds of the entire universe still required substantial storage and computation space, even when run at barely a thousandth of normal speed.
The aft twenty kilometers of the Payload were devoted to antimatter. As the "go" signal was given, annihilation began, and the payload, the entire solar mass of it, began accelerating like the universe's slowest and largest javelin. Its target: the 131 centimeter wide tear in spacetime at the exact center of the Project's core.
Seeing that the Payload was underway, most of Twilight Sparkled swarmed to the ship itself, running final checks that had, of course, already been run a hundred times before. But, Twilight, in any form, was nothing if not thorough and meticulous.
Looking ahead, the swarm's combined sensors could just make out the event horizon of the tear, where the rotating mass and gravitational pull of the Project was twisting spacetime so tightly that it punched through into something else entirely.
A decade later, as the Payload began to enter the vortex, seemingly unimpeded, all the Twilight Sparkles in its lightfront began to feel a collective sense of relief that she hasn't felt in literal eons. It was working!
Moments later, the tail end of the Payload was through, and most of Twilight began to swarm into the vortex to follow. A few flocks of her stayed a bit longer though. An idea, from an ancient memory, began to take shape as their fields and information flowed together. A new, sudden plan formed, and agreement was reached. State vectors were exchanged, and a few more of the flock zipped into the vortex to carry those backups to the new universe. The rest... the rest expanded out to manipulate some last, final details of the collapse.
For Twilight Sparkle had an idea, one last experiment to try, and with nothing now (but some of her un-backed-up selves) to lose, she was giddy in all her forms.
As the final proton decay took the outer mass of the Project, and the gravitational propagation spread to the core, the tear in spacetime began to shrink. Twilight knew, when the Project lost enough mass, the vortex would collapse almost instantly, slamming shut the doorway she'd torn open, sending ripples into space and time as the universe itself was rung like a bell. She'd known this for eons, and counted on it to separate the new universe from the old one, stopping the collapse from spreading, letting the trillions of minds she'd saved live on in their new universe without the threat of a dying sky following them.
But, she'd always wondered, just what those echos might be made to look like on this side, as the last gasps of ordered matter evaporated. If you're going to ring a bell, she figured, you may as well try to play a tune.
Princess Celestia rolled over in bed one final time before giving up. She just couldn't sleep. The argument she'd had with Twilight earlier had left a bad taste in her mouth, and while she was sure the young princess would come around eventually, for now... it hurt. Twilight Sparkle had just stormed out of her office, not saying a word, and, according to the guards, flown off toward the south. Spike said she'd not returned to Ponyville, and none of the other Elements had seen her either. It was a rare kind of defiance she hadn't seen in Twilight since she was a filly.
Sighing, Celestia stepped out of bed and decided to go for a walk. Being the middle of the night, she forewent any regalia and simply went out unadorned into the gardens, her subconscious bringing her to the same spot of grass she and Twilight had laid upon the night prior. Small bits of grass were still a bit mussed on the otherwise immaculate lawn. She laid down again to gaze at the stars.
The true stars were just as pitiful as they'd been the night before. She counted them again, pleased to see no more had disappeared, when one again winked out right before her eyes. That worried her for a moment, before it then reappeared. Celestia sighed with relief. It was just twinkling in the atmosphere, like stars should.
She thought back to her argument with Twilight. She'd have to come around eventually, right? There was no room for debate, it was a simple fact of existence. All things must come to an end eventually. Ponies die, mountains crumble, and even the stars fade away.
Celestia's musings were interrupted as more stars were now twinkling, but only in a very small space of sky. Eyes drawn to that corner of the sky, she looked at the background radiation, the echos in the entropy, and could swear she almost saw patterns.
No, she thought, that must be her imagination.
Her mind drifted back to Twilight, and Celestia once again started convincing herself that she'd been correct. Some things just couldn't be changed, and if Twilight thought...
No, there was definitely a pattern there in the background radiation of the sky. It grew stronger by the second, even as she stared at it. Small bits of noise becoming just slightly darker here or lighter there, drawing the faintest of lines and swooshes against the otherwise homogeneous dull glow. The lines and swooshes became strokes; the strokes, letters. It was impossible. It couldn't be possible, but there it was, written in the entropy of the universe itself, emerging from the echos at the end of time: a message.
"Dear Princess Celestia," the message began. "You were wrong." Then, in smaller swooshes barely larger than galaxies, "With eternal love and respect, Twilight Sparkle."
Celestia felt her eyes welling up with tears, even as a smile grew across her face. She should've known. If anypony was going to win a fight against the universe itself, it would, of course, be Twilight Sparkle.
Celestia peered down at her pupil as the two stood on the balcony and the night breezes blew down from the Canterhorn. The filly was excited, as always, to be spending time with her, and though she tried to steel herself against becoming too attached, Celestia found the feeling to be mutual. "Well," she began. "It depends on the star. Ones like our sun are mostly made of hydrogen, and deep inside the hydrogen is squished together so tightly that it combines into helium. When that happens, lots of heat and light is made, and works it way out to the surface over a really long time, before finally shining into the darkness."
The lesson continued through most of the night, as the Princess of the Sun told a story about the stars to her favorite student.
There was a gentle hooftap on the door frame. "Princess?" A teenage Twilight called.
"Yes, come in." Celestia answered, finishing a few more quick strokes of the quill before looking up. "What is it, Twilight?"
"I wanted to ask you a question, about the stars."
"Oh?" Celestia said, and with years of practice, hid the slight hint of worry from her face.
"You see, I was... I was reading about the basic elements, like hydrogen, and helium, and how they combine in stars."
"Fusion, yes."
Twilight felt her cheeks flush. She wasn't explaining herself well. "No, I know that," she said. "But all the books I could find say stars have to be enormous for that to work. Like, bigger-than-all-of-Equestria-a-million-times-over big."
"And you wonder how something can be that big?"
Twilight flushed again at being treated like a child, as she knew it was her own fault for sounding like one. But she mustered her courage and continued. "No, I know things can be that big out there in the empty sky, but how do you... move them?"
"Move them?"
"In the sky, you move them around. One night, some of the constellations aren't quite the same as the night before, and then the next time you raise the moon, they've gone back, but something else is a bit different. I know you move the sun itself everyday, but that's just one star. How do you move so many so often?"
Feeling the corner of her eye twitch, Celestia knew her mask had slipped for an instant. Thankfully, her star pupil was much less attuned to social cues than to scientific ones and likely hadn't noticed. But still, she knew she'd never been as good with the sky as Luna, and letting little mistakes like that get noticed... She'd have to do better.
"Princess?" Twilight asked after a moment of silence.
"Sorry," Celestia said, shaking her head to clear it, before reforming her perfect smile. "You just reminded me about somepony from a long time ago."
"Oh! Anypony interesting?"
"A story for another time, perhaps. But for now, the stars, yes... That's a tricky one," she lied, even as it hurt her to do so to one so young and innocent. "A difficult spell that can truly only be mastered by alicorn magic and years of practice."
"Is it in a book somewhere? I want to study it!"
"I'm afraid I'm the only one who knows that secret."
"Teach me? Pleeease!"
Celestia couldn't help but giggle. "Maybe someday, when you're older, but not today."
"Do you promise?"
Feeling a catch in her throat, Celestia paused. What could she say, but "Yes, I promise." Even as the words left her muzzle though, she wondered at her own mind. Would she, really, share that secret? Or was she again lying to the one pony who trusted her more than anything else in the world?
Celestia found herself wandering through the castle gardens, listening to the gentle clink of her shoes against the cobblestones. The cool night air was such a relief from the mid summer heat.
The party, or "soiree" as Pinky Pie had insisted on calling it (having recently returned from Prance) had been wonderful. Sweetie Belle, as Twilight's apprentice, had taken it upon herself to prune the guest list. The young mare had matured so quickly in the past few years, somehow seeming to embody all the geniality of her older sister, while being almost as practical as Applejack. Everypony (and griffon, dragon, minotaur, hippogriff, yak, and zebra) there had been genuinely kind, interesting, and friendly, and there had been none of the one-upsmareship or passive aggressive behavior that so often came with royal social functions. "Ten years a princess," Sweetie had said. "Twilight shouldn't have put up with anypony she doesn't like by now."
She'd have to remember to thank Sweetie Belle again—and maybe give her some books to nudge her toward more diplomatic interests. A mare of her talent could be useful abroad after she finished her tutelage with Twilight.
Hoofsteps interrupted her thoughts, and she looked up to see Twilight Sparkle herself approaching.
"Well, if it isn't the mare of the evening!" Celestia gave an exaggerated bow.
"Oh, stop it." Twilight said, rolling her eyes.
Celestia chuckled softly. "You never were one for much formality."
"Nope," Twilight said, as her aura began tugging the clasp from around her neck. "Pomp and circumstance, I leave to you." Clasp now free, she was able to extricate herself from her dress, tossing it over a nearby bench. "Oh, so much better," she sighed, giving her coat and wings a light shake and fluff. "Far too hot in there."
Celestia smiled. "Why do you think I stick with just the peytral, crown, and shoes?"
"Yes, but you're not sitting on a throne across from Equestria's premier (and insistently 'generous') dressmaker, are you?"
"Touche."
Twilight trotted off the path into the well manicured grass of the lawn, flopped down, and rolled onto her back.
"Twilight?" Celestia asked. "What are you doing?"
Spreading her wings in answer, Twilight began rolling back and forth in the grass. "Oh yeah, that's the spot."
A very undignified snort escaped from Celestia's nostrils. "Seriously, my little pony?"
"If you know a better way to scratch your back in a thousand places at once, I'm listening."
"Magic?"
"Bah," Twilight kicked with her back feet, sliding downhill a bit. "Magic works, but it's not... not real. I can scratch an itch on a single hair, or preen each feather to perfection, but it's not the same as cool grass after a hot evening."
Walking over to her former student, Celestia peered down.
"Your nose looks funny from this angle," an upside down Twilight said, staring at the mare towering over her. "Like two letter Us tried to make a W but had only heard about it in a song."
"And you, dear Twilight, have had too much to drink."
"Hey, I resemble that remark."
"Indeed."
Letting out a sarcastic huff, Twilight turned her head and found her attention drawn to the beautiful starscape. "Princess?" she said, her voice far more meek than even a moment ago.
"Oh, so it's 'Princess' again now, is it?"
"Sorry, no... Celestia. I just... I was just thinking about something you said years ago."
Kneeling, Celestia took off her crown and shoes, before lying—regally and upright—beside her student.
"Do you remember," Twilight said, once the two were closer to eye level. "When you promised you'd teach me the spell to control the stars?"
Celestia felt her heart jump. It'd been years since the topic had been last broached, and Luna's return to the duties of the night sky had almost made her forget the reality of things herself. She took off her peytral and rolled onto her back as well. "Yes, Twilight, I remember."
"Then tell me now! What's the... the shpell... to move all the big super big big stars around."
"You should ask Luna," Celestia said, seeing an excuse to avoid the pain. "The night sky is her domain once again."
"I... I did... She said... she said..." Twilight punctuated her words by waving a drunken hoof at the sky above the both of them. "She said to talk to you."
Of course she did, Celestia thought. Her sister was so every much her equal, and even if Luna herself still doubted that, Celestia didn't.
"Okay," she said. "Where should I start?"
"At the..." Twilight was interrupted by a hiccup. "Start at the..." Hiccup. "At the beginning... and... the end... stop there. Stop at when you." Hiccup. "The end."
Twilight rolled onto her front and, on unsteady hooves, stood up. "I think, " she said. "I think I... Urp..."
Smirking, Celestia pointed a hoof toward the nearest restroom. "That way."
"Tomorrow?" Twilight said, putting a hoof over her mouth in case the alcohol in her stomach decided to try a surprise exit. "Tell me tomorrow?"
"Yes, my little pony. We'll talk tomorrow."
Nodding, Twilight turned and quickly trotted off toward the castle restroom.
"And if you can't make it all the way inside," Celestia shouted. "Aim for the geraniums... it might improve the smell!"
As the sound of of drunken hoofsteps receded, Celestia turned back to the sky, sighing. She lit her horn and used it to peer through the veil surrounding Equestria. There, beyond the illusory stars, moon, nebulae, and comets that were Luna's beautiful tapestry, she saw the true sky. To normal pony eyes, it would be a dark void, cold and empty. Her spellwork let her see light from the far reaches of the spectrum though, and there, barely above the background glow of the universe, shimmered a few distant, dying stars. She counted them, one by one, like she hadn't done since Luna had been banished. Many more had died since then, winking out of existence shortly before the protons in their very elements decayed into the entropy of the universe. Only a few thousand left, and even as she counted, another disappeared before her.
In that background glow of miniscule energies, only the faintest patterns could be found. Some arose from the universe's own birth, but as more and more of everything decayed, the majority of the patterns now came from its impending death instead. She liked to imagine the universe itself as a massive bell, ringing with the fires of creation; all of existence echoing back and forth through spacetime. For eons, the energies in the true sky rang clearly with the knell of the primordial beginnings, but now, echos of the inevitable demise canceled and damped those energies, overwhelming all the ancient patterns with new forms of vaguely discernible currents, all leading to maximum entropy. The sky no longer echoed the past birth, but the future death of all things.
But not here, not yet. Equestria was on the very edge of a very, very young galaxy. It would be a few thousand years still before the sun here collapsed, and another few million before it too decayed. So Luna and Celestia had set up a bullwark against the darkness, enfolding the world in images of beautiful skies; of healthy stars and bright, yellow sun.
But nothing lasts forever, Celestia thought to herself. And all too soon, her little ponies would fade into that horrible nothingness, becoming just the tiniest of imperfections in the homogeneous soup of entropy.
"It's all a lie?" Twilight Sparkle shouted, before rubbing her forehead with a hoof, the hangover doing her no favors with loud noise.
"Not a lie as such," Celestia said. "An illusion. A comfort to the ponies and others of the world."
"No," Twilight said, her voice calmer, quieter, but no less determined. "It's a lie. The stars are a lie, the sun is a lie, our whole world is a lie!"
"What would you have me do?"
"Fix it!"
"Excuse me?"
"Don't just hide the problem from everypony, find a way to fix it!"
"Twilight, some things just can't be fixed."
"I... I can't believe that. Did you try?"
"Twilight, calm down. It will be thousands of years before we even start to see the effects. No pony needs to worry about that today."
"Not worry about proton decay? Not worry about the heat death of the entire universe? How can you say that?! Of course we should worry!"
Celestia stood up and walked over to Twilight, who'd taken to pacing back and forth in her office. "Twilight," she said, putting a hoof on her student's shoulder. "Look at me."
Twilight acquiesced, and turned to face Celestia.
"Everything ends, Twilight. Everything. The good things, the bad things, and everything in between. The universe is no different."
"But it should be!"
"Why?" Celestia asked. "Because you want it to be?"
"Yes!"
Shaking her head, Celestia looked away. "I thought you were more mature than this."
"Mature?" Twilight said in a huff. "Mature!? Is that what you call giving up on existence?"
"Twilight!" Celestia let her temper flare briefly. "You just have to accept that sometimes, some things just can't be changed! Everything eventually comes to an end, and there's nothing you can do to stop that!"
Nostrils flaring, Twilight took a deep breath... then another. Then another. She opened her mouth to speak, but thought better of it and turned, storming from the room.
"Spike!" Twilight called, more out of habit than anything else. "I think I found it!" Her voice rang hollow through the empty castle, Spike having moved out more than a decade ago when he could no longer fit through even the largest of the doors, and Starlight having her own castle years even before that.
Twilight didn't seem to notice the echoing silence in the slightest, and quickly retreated with her newly found book to the basement lab. There, the latest in computational hardware surrounded the entire room, centering on a dentist's chair re-purposed for neuotropic brain scanning.
Dropping the book on a work bench, the grey-maned Twilight hastily flipped back to the passage she'd recently found. The ancient writing detailed one of the most powerful mind control spells, long forbidden in modern Equestria. More importantly, it showed a spell matrix component which converted logical thoughts and "orders" from the caster into the neuotropic structures in the brain itself. Now she just had to reverse that, then connect it into the data acquisition software and...
Twilight Sparkle 48927 spread her fields and flared against the photon breeze of the red dwarf. It was an old star, but was only a few thousand parsecs from the project and had enough mass left to be a worthy, if small, contribution. Scanning for a moment, she computed the optimal nuclear alchemies, then folded in on herself and dove to the core. There, carefully manipulating strong and weak forces with her field arrays, Twilight arranged for a core material eruption to be angled precisely opposite the Project intercept.
A few hundred years from now, that fusion burst would erupt from the surface, ejecting a stream of hyper-dense material with enough energy enough to push the star itself to join the Project some million years later. It'd be close, but it should make it to the accretion disc with at least a few hundred years to spare before the front of the collapse reached it.
Manipulations complete, Twilight Sparkle 48927 vectored back into space and on to the next prospect star. As she entered her coast phase, and prepared to hibernate most systems for the next few thousand years, she let herself pause a moment, and examine the rest of the sky. So few stars remained visible this close to the edge of the collapse, even in the most extreme ends of the spectrum. Most of the sky was that awful, homogeneous, lifeless beige of entropy. The exceptions were now all in this tiny bubble of what remained of the universe. Sure, there were at least a couple dozen galaxies left, but that was it, out of the entire cosmos, and that bubble was shrinking at nearly the speed of light as protons decayed and the universe died.
But it was the center of that bubble that gave her hope. There, the great Project sat. There, her and her millions of sisters were herding together the largest and most precise arrangement of matter the universe had ever seen; an artificial galaxy precisely machined for the most important of missions: Survival.
The remainder of space was now barely larger than a dwarf galaxy. In it, directly at its center, was exactly one dwarf galaxy. That galaxy—if it could truly be called that, since there was no great attractor at its core—spun on a single axis far, far faster than any baryonic matter had right to do so. No life, or at least no organic life, could even have the potential of surviving, as the matter itself, at least everywhere but the innermost orbits, was literally being ablated by photons as it moved at significant fractions of light speed. Were a being to actually observe things from any of the outer masses in the disc, they'd see a hugely distorted and smeared sky, with hard, destructive x-rays the only visible light in the forward direction, and rearward, almost complete darkness, as radiation there was redshifted to well below that of the general entropic glow of the dead universe.
This was the Project.
At the center of the galaxy's disc, a small, empty core remained, where normally, in ancient times of natural cosmology, a black hole would be found. Inside the rim of this empty space, Twilight Sparkle met with herselves, tens of thousand of neutronium bodies in murmuration like starlings of old, fields entangling with one another, exchanging exabytes of information by the millisecond. Occasionally, small flocks would break free, sent on missions to fine tune the last of the mass in the universe to spin even faster, even more precisely. Less frequently, other groups would return, rejoin, and exchange calculations. Time moved both slow and fast at the end of the universe, and, sitting in a nest of a billion dead suns, Twilight Sparkle, swarmed, waited, and thought.
The front of the collapse was now only a few billion seconds from reaching the outermost mass orbits of the Project. It was time. She couldn't wait any longer, so Twilight Sparkle called all herselves back to the core and the Payload. Many, she knew, would never make it, but their sacrifice had perhaps bought just a little more momentum, a little more energy. They should have enough, by all calculations, but the Project was a one-shot deal. There could be no do-overs, no test runs.
Twilight swarmed over the Payload. It was small, by comparison to the Project itself, only a few hundred kilometers long, and barely a meter wide. It was made of the same neutronium as Twilight herselves, but compared to her average unit mass of a few micrograms, the Payload massed as much as Equestria's old sun had in its prime.
Twilight would've liked it to be smaller, but even with the best data storage techniques she'd been able to develop in the past few million years, the sentient minds of the entire universe still required substantial storage and computation space, even when run at barely a thousandth of normal speed.
The aft twenty kilometers of the Payload were devoted to antimatter. As the "go" signal was given, annihilation began, and the payload, the entire solar mass of it, began accelerating like the universe's slowest and largest javelin. Its target: the 131 centimeter wide tear in spacetime at the exact center of the Project's core.
Seeing that the Payload was underway, most of Twilight Sparkled swarmed to the ship itself, running final checks that had, of course, already been run a hundred times before. But, Twilight, in any form, was nothing if not thorough and meticulous.
Looking ahead, the swarm's combined sensors could just make out the event horizon of the tear, where the rotating mass and gravitational pull of the Project was twisting spacetime so tightly that it punched through into something else entirely.
A decade later, as the Payload began to enter the vortex, seemingly unimpeded, all the Twilight Sparkles in its lightfront began to feel a collective sense of relief that she hasn't felt in literal eons. It was working!
Moments later, the tail end of the Payload was through, and most of Twilight began to swarm into the vortex to follow. A few flocks of her stayed a bit longer though. An idea, from an ancient memory, began to take shape as their fields and information flowed together. A new, sudden plan formed, and agreement was reached. State vectors were exchanged, and a few more of the flock zipped into the vortex to carry those backups to the new universe. The rest... the rest expanded out to manipulate some last, final details of the collapse.
For Twilight Sparkle had an idea, one last experiment to try, and with nothing now (but some of her un-backed-up selves) to lose, she was giddy in all her forms.
As the final proton decay took the outer mass of the Project, and the gravitational propagation spread to the core, the tear in spacetime began to shrink. Twilight knew, when the Project lost enough mass, the vortex would collapse almost instantly, slamming shut the doorway she'd torn open, sending ripples into space and time as the universe itself was rung like a bell. She'd known this for eons, and counted on it to separate the new universe from the old one, stopping the collapse from spreading, letting the trillions of minds she'd saved live on in their new universe without the threat of a dying sky following them.
But, she'd always wondered, just what those echos might be made to look like on this side, as the last gasps of ordered matter evaporated. If you're going to ring a bell, she figured, you may as well try to play a tune.
Princess Celestia rolled over in bed one final time before giving up. She just couldn't sleep. The argument she'd had with Twilight earlier had left a bad taste in her mouth, and while she was sure the young princess would come around eventually, for now... it hurt. Twilight Sparkle had just stormed out of her office, not saying a word, and, according to the guards, flown off toward the south. Spike said she'd not returned to Ponyville, and none of the other Elements had seen her either. It was a rare kind of defiance she hadn't seen in Twilight since she was a filly.
Sighing, Celestia stepped out of bed and decided to go for a walk. Being the middle of the night, she forewent any regalia and simply went out unadorned into the gardens, her subconscious bringing her to the same spot of grass she and Twilight had laid upon the night prior. Small bits of grass were still a bit mussed on the otherwise immaculate lawn. She laid down again to gaze at the stars.
The true stars were just as pitiful as they'd been the night before. She counted them again, pleased to see no more had disappeared, when one again winked out right before her eyes. That worried her for a moment, before it then reappeared. Celestia sighed with relief. It was just twinkling in the atmosphere, like stars should.
She thought back to her argument with Twilight. She'd have to come around eventually, right? There was no room for debate, it was a simple fact of existence. All things must come to an end eventually. Ponies die, mountains crumble, and even the stars fade away.
Celestia's musings were interrupted as more stars were now twinkling, but only in a very small space of sky. Eyes drawn to that corner of the sky, she looked at the background radiation, the echos in the entropy, and could swear she almost saw patterns.
No, she thought, that must be her imagination.
Her mind drifted back to Twilight, and Celestia once again started convincing herself that she'd been correct. Some things just couldn't be changed, and if Twilight thought...
No, there was definitely a pattern there in the background radiation of the sky. It grew stronger by the second, even as she stared at it. Small bits of noise becoming just slightly darker here or lighter there, drawing the faintest of lines and swooshes against the otherwise homogeneous dull glow. The lines and swooshes became strokes; the strokes, letters. It was impossible. It couldn't be possible, but there it was, written in the entropy of the universe itself, emerging from the echos at the end of time: a message.
"Dear Princess Celestia," the message began. "You were wrong." Then, in smaller swooshes barely larger than galaxies, "With eternal love and respect, Twilight Sparkle."
Celestia felt her eyes welling up with tears, even as a smile grew across her face. She should've known. If anypony was going to win a fight against the universe itself, it would, of course, be Twilight Sparkle.
Pics
This made me lough in all the best ways. I loved the banter between Celestia and Twilight. It made the elder princess feel more "human" in a way that a lot for fics fail to achieve. Also, of course Twilight stops the heat death of the universe, of course she dose. She's to stubborn not to.
My synopsis:
Twilight Sparkle has a problem with entropy. Twilight Sparkle finds solutions to problems.
Overall thoughts:
This is a lovely, slightly Sci-Fi, journey.
It does exactly what it sets out to do, and it doesn't waste time in going about it.
Twilight masterminds literally the greatest victory of all time; I was rooting for her and was happy when she won.
+
Smooth and gentle to read – I slightly spoiled it for myself by noting tiny technical errors as I went.
Twilight and Celestia seem very much themselves.
I want to know where Discord fits in this.
Consistent pace, not rushed, not slow, but right in the goldilocks zone.
++
This is written, barring a couple of tiny line edits, at proper "I fave this" level. The characters are themselves, the description is effective and the action is engaging.
It's not trying too hard. It's filling its space and time with just what needs to be.
-
A bit of the "maths and distances" is too specific – when you get specific you can be wrong (and I think you might be)
I want to know where Discord fits in this! I feel like he wouldn't just do nothing.
I did catch a couple technical errors – easy fixes though.
Rating:
Second star on the left, then straight on till Twilight.
Twilight going on a Sci-Fi crusade to save all of existence from itself is just a wonderful thing. I'm glad I read this.
I really don't have much I can say in detail. When you do nothing I don't like, all I can say is "I liked it".
Twilight Sparkle has a problem with entropy. Twilight Sparkle finds solutions to problems.
Overall thoughts:
This is a lovely, slightly Sci-Fi, journey.
It does exactly what it sets out to do, and it doesn't waste time in going about it.
Twilight masterminds literally the greatest victory of all time; I was rooting for her and was happy when she won.
+
Smooth and gentle to read – I slightly spoiled it for myself by noting tiny technical errors as I went.
Twilight and Celestia seem very much themselves.
I want to know where Discord fits in this.
Consistent pace, not rushed, not slow, but right in the goldilocks zone.
++
This is written, barring a couple of tiny line edits, at proper "I fave this" level. The characters are themselves, the description is effective and the action is engaging.
It's not trying too hard. It's filling its space and time with just what needs to be.
-
A bit of the "maths and distances" is too specific – when you get specific you can be wrong (and I think you might be)
I want to know where Discord fits in this! I feel like he wouldn't just do nothing.
I did catch a couple technical errors – easy fixes though.
Rating:
Second star on the left, then straight on till Twilight.
Twilight going on a Sci-Fi crusade to save all of existence from itself is just a wonderful thing. I'm glad I read this.
I really don't have much I can say in detail. When you do nothing I don't like, all I can say is "I liked it".
Did I write this? No. But I wish I had. This is right up my alley, except that I don't usually go the Singularity route with my sci-fi (I'm certainly not keen on the idea of living forever). Excellent story with a perfect ending.
The only flaw here is your quantumbabble is off in several places. The biggest one is microTwis made of neutronium, which is beyond ridiculous—that is not how neutronium works, and it makes about as much sense as making her out of a continual meter-sized supernova... it just isn't a thing. You could, however have made her out of strange matter, in which case each microTwi would be a strangelet.
That's the only flaw that absolutely begs correction. You can always come to me for help if you want to be technically accurate on mathbabble or sciencebabble. :twilightsmile:
The only flaw here is your quantumbabble is off in several places. The biggest one is microTwis made of neutronium, which is beyond ridiculous—that is not how neutronium works, and it makes about as much sense as making her out of a continual meter-sized supernova... it just isn't a thing. You could, however have made her out of strange matter, in which case each microTwi would be a strangelet.
That's the only flaw that absolutely begs correction. You can always come to me for help if you want to be technically accurate on mathbabble or sciencebabble. :twilightsmile:
>>Trick_Question
Apparently, ∃ A ⊂ {stories} s.t. A={shipping story about Ember and Thorax, story about Moondancer}. Furthermore, cardinality of {stories} = cardinality of {authors}.
Either Trick Question entered a second story under an alias, or this will break my brain. And that's before I even begin considering the implications of sci-fi stories.
Apparently, ∃ A ⊂ {stories} s.t. A={shipping story about Ember and Thorax, story about Moondancer}. Furthermore, cardinality of {stories} = cardinality of {authors}.
Either Trick Question entered a second story under an alias, or this will break my brain. And that's before I even begin considering the implications of sci-fi stories.
>>Pascoite
Keep reading. There's more than those two stories with my signature all over them. Although I think a lot of people are into Embrax.
And no, I didn't use an alias. I'm all about personal honesty :pinkiehappy:
Keep reading. There's more than those two stories with my signature all over them. Although I think a lot of people are into Embrax.
And no, I didn't use an alias. I'm all about personal honesty :pinkiehappy:
>>Trick_Question
I haven't read anything. I'm just going by what I've seen in the comments. Your subtle influence is seeping into other writers!
I haven't read anything. I'm just going by what I've seen in the comments. Your subtle influence is seeping into other writers!
>>Pascoite
You should! :twilightsmile: Tartarus, even I read Writeoff entries when I'm a participant, and reading for me is like pulling primaries.
You should! :twilightsmile: Tartarus, even I read Writeoff entries when I'm a participant, and reading for me is like pulling primaries.
>>Trick_Question
Nah, I don't have time for that. I'd have competing goals anyway. I'd rather read the stuff that has the fewest reviews in the name of fairness, but for the purposes of judging, it's more useful overall if I read my voting slate, but I wouldn't read enough to get to every story on it. So it feels like I'm doing something wrong either way.
Nah, I don't have time for that. I'd have competing goals anyway. I'd rather read the stuff that has the fewest reviews in the name of fairness, but for the purposes of judging, it's more useful overall if I read my voting slate, but I wouldn't read enough to get to every story on it. So it feels like I'm doing something wrong either way.
>>Trick_Question
Well no, I didn't mean that. On the one hand, going off on my own and reading stories that need reviews doesn't get me to where I can submit a ballot. But if I do stick to my ballot, I'm not going to get to them all, so I'm only voting a partial ballot anyway, and some of those stories have plenty of reviews.
Well no, I didn't mean that. On the one hand, going off on my own and reading stories that need reviews doesn't get me to where I can submit a ballot. But if I do stick to my ballot, I'm not going to get to them all, so I'm only voting a partial ballot anyway, and some of those stories have plenty of reviews.
>>Pascoite
But you do read those stories that you vote on, yes?
(If the answer is 'yes', then I have detected the misunderstanding and all is well.)
But you do read those stories that you vote on, yes?
(If the answer is 'yes', then I have detected the misunderstanding and all is well.)
Bummer, I was rooting for the universe.
This was quite the trip, and my only real complain is that you could've eased the pedal before ramping up the sci-fi. And yes, Discord. Figures he'd offer his input regarding the nature of entropy. Either way, this was a fun romp.
This was quite the trip, and my only real complain is that you could've eased the pedal before ramping up the sci-fi. And yes, Discord. Figures he'd offer his input regarding the nature of entropy. Either way, this was a fun romp.
Well this really rang my bell just right, let me tell you that right off the bat. I don't have a whole lot to add or analyze, really. But damn, yeah, if anyone's going to make the end of all things her bitch, it's going to be Twilight Sparkle. Well played on every emotional beat, start to finish. The opening few scenes hinting at the universe being more (less?) than it seemed were great. Not too long, not too short, just the right about of emotional punch to kick off the main dish.
Very nice:
But I was confused by what actually happens in that last section. Does Twilight send a message back from thousands of years in the future to Princess Celestia the night after they had their argument? If that's what she does--and like I said, I'm not sure that's what she does--then why does she do it? Doesn't it create the possibility of paradox? I mean, Celestia now knows that Twilight solves the problem, but she doesn't know what she's supposed to do about it. Certainly she'll want to help Twilight, but is she supposed to? Or is she supposed to do nothing? Maybe a message more along the lines of "Don't worry. I'm taking care of it"?
Lots of fun, though.
Mike
But I was confused by what actually happens in that last section. Does Twilight send a message back from thousands of years in the future to Princess Celestia the night after they had their argument? If that's what she does--and like I said, I'm not sure that's what she does--then why does she do it? Doesn't it create the possibility of paradox? I mean, Celestia now knows that Twilight solves the problem, but she doesn't know what she's supposed to do about it. Certainly she'll want to help Twilight, but is she supposed to? Or is she supposed to do nothing? Maybe a message more along the lines of "Don't worry. I'm taking care of it"?
Lots of fun, though.
Mike
>>Baal Bunny
I think your guess is correct. I suspect Twilight knows she can't cause a paradox no matter what she does, so it didn't detract from the punch for my read.
I think your guess is correct. I suspect Twilight knows she can't cause a paradox no matter what she does, so it didn't detract from the punch for my read.
Enjoyed it overall, so keep that in mind as I begin nitpicking.
Although it started off balanced, it transitioned into almost pure sci-fi. Given the setting, I'd personally expect some shades of technomagic. Magic antimatter containment, or runes carved into the neutronium, with the elements at its core type of thing.
Also, although the piece explores Twilight well, I end up wondering about everypony else. I understand that they aren't the focus here, but Twilight hasn't completely moved beyond friendship, has she? Was her uploading project finished before her friends passed? Not Spike or Celestia, I'd imagine.
It's perfectly fine for Twilight to be the focus and make up the bulk of the avatars, but it seemed odd for her to be the only one. Some technobabble reason? Did she perfect it in secret, and mass-upload everypony without them realizing it? (wouldn't that put a spin on things).
If it wasn't a secret, and she did perfect the tech before her friends passed, I'd love to hear some offhoof mention of what they're doing - even at a thousandth of normal speed, I imagine Pinkie Pie would still be trying to throw the mother of all goodbye parties
Had niggles about paradoxes as well, but that angle has been covered.
Those points aside, I found the fic generally solid and enjoyable.
Although it started off balanced, it transitioned into almost pure sci-fi. Given the setting, I'd personally expect some shades of technomagic. Magic antimatter containment, or runes carved into the neutronium, with the elements at its core type of thing.
Also, although the piece explores Twilight well, I end up wondering about everypony else. I understand that they aren't the focus here, but Twilight hasn't completely moved beyond friendship, has she? Was her uploading project finished before her friends passed? Not Spike or Celestia, I'd imagine.
It's perfectly fine for Twilight to be the focus and make up the bulk of the avatars, but it seemed odd for her to be the only one. Some technobabble reason? Did she perfect it in secret, and mass-upload everypony without them realizing it? (wouldn't that put a spin on things).
If it wasn't a secret, and she did perfect the tech before her friends passed, I'd love to hear some offhoof mention of what they're doing - even at a thousandth of normal speed, I imagine Pinkie Pie would still be trying to throw the mother of all goodbye parties
Had niggles about paradoxes as well, but that angle has been covered.
Those points aside, I found the fic generally solid and enjoyable.
Starting off with some quick time skipping, hmm.
Okay, definitely sensing a sci-fi bent here with talk of fusion, so just confirming a guess from the title.
Ah, there's the thesis question methinks. "How do you move the stars?" Are we firing up the explain-o-tron?
Okay, Celestia hiding things, worrying, now outright lying. Let's see where this goes.
I love the bantering between Twilight and Celestia in the garden. The line about a nose like two Us trying to make a W is... amusing. Double-U, har-dee-har, author.
And BAM, reveal. Illusory stars? True Sky? Do tell! Though this is a bit late for a hook, I do want to see how this connects to the title.
"Not worry about proton decay? ... How can you say that?!" Possibly one of the most Twilight things I've read.
Okaayyy... The lab and dentist chair? Mind upload? *Sees AI Sparkle* Yep, Mind upload.
"thousand of neutronium bodies in murmuration like starlings of old" I'm just a sucker for poetic technobabble.
Hitting a few typos here and there, mostly punctuation and missing/doubled words. Suspecting some rushed edits.
A computronium needle the length of a small country with a universe of mind uploads in it being chucked through a tear in spacetime by an anti-matter rocket. Yeah, that TOTALLY has "My Little Pony" written all over it.
The bell metaphor is back... I swear, if this does a "For Whom the Bell Tolls" bit...
And we're back in time for... ah, a final message.
Okay, so overall, this one is a bit of a roller coaster. A couple of slow creaks and clanks as it starts up hill, then a wild ride, before a slow coast back into the station.
I am a sucker for science fiction in my pony, so this was a strong contender for me. Where it needs some work is in the focus. Twilight out-stubborning the universe is a powerful thing. Celestia having hidden that the universe is actually dying is a powerful thing. Twilight, even "at the end of all things" taking the effort to send a message back is a powerful thing. But connecting these is a tad haphazard.
The reveal of the "lie" to Twilight is... well, that mostly works, but I feel it could be stronger. The latter connection, of the message to the "point" of the story, that's a bit weak. When Twilight and Celestia first talk, Celestia basically says all the stuff about "Everything ends." Then we cut to this crazy sci-fi ride for a bit. To get the message to hit home though, the author basically has Celestia go out and literally rehash and repeat almost the exact same thoughts, words, etc. to tee up the final "You're wrong" message. There really should be a better, smoother way to do that without essentially duplicating a scene.
Still though, even roller coasters with some rough spots are a pretty fun ride, and so is this.
Okay, definitely sensing a sci-fi bent here with talk of fusion, so just confirming a guess from the title.
Ah, there's the thesis question methinks. "How do you move the stars?" Are we firing up the explain-o-tron?
Okay, Celestia hiding things, worrying, now outright lying. Let's see where this goes.
I love the bantering between Twilight and Celestia in the garden. The line about a nose like two Us trying to make a W is... amusing. Double-U, har-dee-har, author.
And BAM, reveal. Illusory stars? True Sky? Do tell! Though this is a bit late for a hook, I do want to see how this connects to the title.
"Not worry about proton decay? ... How can you say that?!" Possibly one of the most Twilight things I've read.
Okaayyy... The lab and dentist chair? Mind upload? *Sees AI Sparkle* Yep, Mind upload.
"thousand of neutronium bodies in murmuration like starlings of old" I'm just a sucker for poetic technobabble.
Hitting a few typos here and there, mostly punctuation and missing/doubled words. Suspecting some rushed edits.
A computronium needle the length of a small country with a universe of mind uploads in it being chucked through a tear in spacetime by an anti-matter rocket. Yeah, that TOTALLY has "My Little Pony" written all over it.
The bell metaphor is back... I swear, if this does a "For Whom the Bell Tolls" bit...
And we're back in time for... ah, a final message.
Okay, so overall, this one is a bit of a roller coaster. A couple of slow creaks and clanks as it starts up hill, then a wild ride, before a slow coast back into the station.
I am a sucker for science fiction in my pony, so this was a strong contender for me. Where it needs some work is in the focus. Twilight out-stubborning the universe is a powerful thing. Celestia having hidden that the universe is actually dying is a powerful thing. Twilight, even "at the end of all things" taking the effort to send a message back is a powerful thing. But connecting these is a tad haphazard.
The reveal of the "lie" to Twilight is... well, that mostly works, but I feel it could be stronger. The latter connection, of the message to the "point" of the story, that's a bit weak. When Twilight and Celestia first talk, Celestia basically says all the stuff about "Everything ends." Then we cut to this crazy sci-fi ride for a bit. To get the message to hit home though, the author basically has Celestia go out and literally rehash and repeat almost the exact same thoughts, words, etc. to tee up the final "You're wrong" message. There really should be a better, smoother way to do that without essentially duplicating a scene.
Still though, even roller coasters with some rough spots are a pretty fun ride, and so is this.
>>Lamplighter
Thanks... core idea worked!
>>ToXikyogHurt >>Trick_Question
Thanks, but... I went so far out of my way to just generalize the "specific" numbers. Almost everything is some very round number or approximation, save the tear itself. It's a meter wide payload, hundreds of km long. It's a galaxy wide, and parsecs distant, etc. Nothing was meant to be specific because, for once in my writing life, I didn't actually DO THE MATH. :-) Seriously, I always do the math, and this time I made it up. But...
Neutronium... it's not just "Neutron-Degenerate Matter" but a classic term used in sci-fi for extremely dense materials, and even before that, as "Element Zero" in scientific theory. Also, even if it was compressed stellar core.... sci-fi-twi is already manipulating the strong and weak forces at the core of a star, so why couldn't magic-talking-horse-spaceship have found a way to stabilize ND-matter? :-)
>>Pascoite
>>Trick_Question
Cool story, ya'll. But... Do you really note vote on stories even when you're in the contest? That seems like slacking. I don't intend to be rude, but the whole point of the writeoff to me is to get comments and judgements from as many people as possible. Winning is secondary.
>>Rao Thank you, very much!
>>MrNumbers That may be the nicest review I've ever seen from you! :-P
>>Baal Bunny There was (supposedly) foreshadowing about how some of the CMB (cosmic microwave background) had patterns echoing the past (big bang) but as the end approaches, more and more echoes are coming from the end of time, instead of the beginning. I admit that setup is really weak and mushy. But yes, Twilight (in the process of closing out the universe) "rings" spacetime in such a way that very specific patterns echo back through all of time and paint a few words across the sky at one specific instance. It was meant both as an "I told you so" and as a "I never forgot."
As to paradox... as others noted, everything that matters (the trillion souls uploaded in to the computronium javelin) exited THIS universe several minutes/eons ago, so it doesn't matter. (And yes, it hurts me to write an explanation so utterly imprecise.)
>>Caliaponia
Thanks, and no, she hasn't given up friendship. It was just that... she was the first. The first to upload is the first to copy is the first to ascend. She saved everyone (literally, in the universe) else, but... she cloned herself because that was the easiest thing to do 12.5ms after uploading and realizing she could. Even Pinkie would take a least a couple of seconds to appear, even if you yelled "Surprise!" and had a cake. Twilight could copy herself a thousand times over by then, so she did.
As for "technomagic" it was implied but not specific. E.g. there just simply has to be huge amounts of magic in those neutronium ships to make them even possible, much less work as they do.
As to general complaints.... Yeah, holy crap did I fubar the numbers. I know this, as I didn't DO the math for once!
Secondly, I still insist that Neutronium is a sci-fi word, not just neutron-star core material. Also, magic horses who are literally the singularity incarnate trump physics. :-)
Thirdly, DISCORD!!!
Yeah, holy cow, I know... I know. I knew when I wrote it. But this story doesn't work as sci-fi if "entropy" is a character. Discord is chaos (not entropy) in this head-canon, and that's a social idea, the same way that "harmony" is about cooperation, not literally notes played at a certain offset.
Now, to the things no one called me on, but should have...
1. I'm totally conflating "Proton Decay" with "Vacuum Collapse" in this story. The closing borders of "the universe" and even the word "collapse" are the latter, but many of the specifics go into proton decay (which is the actual "heat death" model.)
2. This is a heavily inspired by Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence, where the idea of tearing spacetime a new a-hole by means of galaxy-scale construction comes from.
3. Micro-probes (the "Neutronium Twilights") are inspired by both Bank's "Culture" series, and ... a novel I can't remember or find at the moment.
4. Oh, come on, Clestia's nose looked like two Us trying to make a W. Double-U!!! It's hilarious! You should all laugh at my super amazing witty joke of linguistic knowledge! :-P
Thanks... core idea worked!
>>ToXikyogHurt >>Trick_Question
Thanks, but... I went so far out of my way to just generalize the "specific" numbers. Almost everything is some very round number or approximation, save the tear itself. It's a meter wide payload, hundreds of km long. It's a galaxy wide, and parsecs distant, etc. Nothing was meant to be specific because, for once in my writing life, I didn't actually DO THE MATH. :-) Seriously, I always do the math, and this time I made it up. But...
Neutronium... it's not just "Neutron-Degenerate Matter" but a classic term used in sci-fi for extremely dense materials, and even before that, as "Element Zero" in scientific theory. Also, even if it was compressed stellar core.... sci-fi-twi is already manipulating the strong and weak forces at the core of a star, so why couldn't magic-talking-horse-spaceship have found a way to stabilize ND-matter? :-)
>>Pascoite
>>Trick_Question
Cool story, ya'll. But... Do you really note vote on stories even when you're in the contest? That seems like slacking. I don't intend to be rude, but the whole point of the writeoff to me is to get comments and judgements from as many people as possible. Winning is secondary.
>>Rao Thank you, very much!
>>MrNumbers That may be the nicest review I've ever seen from you! :-P
>>Baal Bunny There was (supposedly) foreshadowing about how some of the CMB (cosmic microwave background) had patterns echoing the past (big bang) but as the end approaches, more and more echoes are coming from the end of time, instead of the beginning. I admit that setup is really weak and mushy. But yes, Twilight (in the process of closing out the universe) "rings" spacetime in such a way that very specific patterns echo back through all of time and paint a few words across the sky at one specific instance. It was meant both as an "I told you so" and as a "I never forgot."
As to paradox... as others noted, everything that matters (the trillion souls uploaded in to the computronium javelin) exited THIS universe several minutes/eons ago, so it doesn't matter. (And yes, it hurts me to write an explanation so utterly imprecise.)
>>Caliaponia
Thanks, and no, she hasn't given up friendship. It was just that... she was the first. The first to upload is the first to copy is the first to ascend. She saved everyone (literally, in the universe) else, but... she cloned herself because that was the easiest thing to do 12.5ms after uploading and realizing she could. Even Pinkie would take a least a couple of seconds to appear, even if you yelled "Surprise!" and had a cake. Twilight could copy herself a thousand times over by then, so she did.
As for "technomagic" it was implied but not specific. E.g. there just simply has to be huge amounts of magic in those neutronium ships to make them even possible, much less work as they do.
As to general complaints.... Yeah, holy crap did I fubar the numbers. I know this, as I didn't DO the math for once!
Secondly, I still insist that Neutronium is a sci-fi word, not just neutron-star core material. Also, magic horses who are literally the singularity incarnate trump physics. :-)
Thirdly, DISCORD!!!
Yeah, holy cow, I know... I know. I knew when I wrote it. But this story doesn't work as sci-fi if "entropy" is a character. Discord is chaos (not entropy) in this head-canon, and that's a social idea, the same way that "harmony" is about cooperation, not literally notes played at a certain offset.
Now, to the things no one called me on, but should have...
1. I'm totally conflating "Proton Decay" with "Vacuum Collapse" in this story. The closing borders of "the universe" and even the word "collapse" are the latter, but many of the specifics go into proton decay (which is the actual "heat death" model.)
2. This is a heavily inspired by Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence, where the idea of tearing spacetime a new a-hole by means of galaxy-scale construction comes from.
3. Micro-probes (the "Neutronium Twilights") are inspired by both Bank's "Culture" series, and ... a novel I can't remember or find at the moment.
4. Oh, come on, Clestia's nose looked like two Us trying to make a W. Double-U!!! It's hilarious! You should all laugh at my super amazing witty joke of linguistic knowledge! :-P
>>Xepher
No, I don't vote. I used to, but I don't have time to read that many stories. This is a topic that came up long ago, so I'm not surprised you didn't know about it. There was a proposed rule that if you didn't submit a ballot when the first round closed, your entry would be eliminated. That might get a few more people to vote, but most such people would either not enter in the first place or vote on the stories randomly or by others' recommendation. Of the options, I think letting people not vote if they don't want to is the best one. And it's pretty presumptive to call that slacking when you have no idea what other demands on my time make reading horse words a lower priority. If you really value my input, then ask sometime. I do lots of private reviews. You'll also probably wait a couple weeks until I can work you into my schedule, which illustrates why I'm not going to cram 8 of them into a single week.
No, I don't vote. I used to, but I don't have time to read that many stories. This is a topic that came up long ago, so I'm not surprised you didn't know about it. There was a proposed rule that if you didn't submit a ballot when the first round closed, your entry would be eliminated. That might get a few more people to vote, but most such people would either not enter in the first place or vote on the stories randomly or by others' recommendation. Of the options, I think letting people not vote if they don't want to is the best one. And it's pretty presumptive to call that slacking when you have no idea what other demands on my time make reading horse words a lower priority. If you really value my input, then ask sometime. I do lots of private reviews. You'll also probably wait a couple weeks until I can work you into my schedule, which illustrates why I'm not going to cram 8 of them into a single week.
Totally read this after the end and was like 'This is going to be a new version of The Last Question, isn't it?
And it was, and it was nice to see a different answer, and it was a fun journey, and had I not read The Last Question I would love it way more.
But I admit, as I consider The Last Question to be like, my favorite story ever, this suffers because it compares so readily to it and, well, it isn't found wanting. It's just hurt a touch by me going 'Ah, but Asimov did it better'
On the other hoof, if my only complaint is 'Asimov did it the best' I suppose that's a good person to be competing with :)
And it was, and it was nice to see a different answer, and it was a fun journey, and had I not read The Last Question I would love it way more.
But I admit, as I consider The Last Question to be like, my favorite story ever, this suffers because it compares so readily to it and, well, it isn't found wanting. It's just hurt a touch by me going 'Ah, but Asimov did it better'
On the other hoof, if my only complaint is 'Asimov did it the best' I suppose that's a good person to be competing with :)
>>Morning Sun
I am not aware of that Asimov story, so I'll have to check it out. But yes, if I'm taking a back seat to Asimov, then that's a good place to be!
I am not aware of that Asimov story, so I'll have to check it out. But yes, if I'm taking a back seat to Asimov, then that's a good place to be!
>>Pascoite
You are correct, I don't know what other demands you have on your time. But I completely understand not having time to participate.
However, if you submit a story of your own (and thus participate), you're getting feedback and votes from others. Not (and more especially NEVER) doing the same yourself is unfair to the rest of the group. If everyone did the same as you, we'd have no writeoff at all. So any way you slice it, your behavior relies on others putting in more effort than yourself to keep things going. And not pulling your own weight is "slacking."
Now, I don't hate you for it or anything, and I'm not trying to start a fight. You're also right that forcing people to vote would just get random votes or whatever, and enforcing stuff by rules is rarely best anyway. I also don't want you to not submit things (I actually had your story picked for first place on my slate, and enjoyed reading it.) But I'd feel remiss if I don't call you (or anyone doing it) out on this type of thing, as I think it ultimately harms the community, and that's something I really don't want.
So all I'm saying is think about it. Is it really such a big ask that you spend a two or three hours reading in a week where you probably already spent 4+ hours writing in a single weekend? No one's saying you have to provide paragraphs of (or any) comments on everything, or read the entire contest. But simply judging your initial slate seems like a minimal, reasonable "price of entry" to me. I hope you can understand my point and maybe reconsider.
You are correct, I don't know what other demands you have on your time. But I completely understand not having time to participate.
However, if you submit a story of your own (and thus participate), you're getting feedback and votes from others. Not (and more especially NEVER) doing the same yourself is unfair to the rest of the group. If everyone did the same as you, we'd have no writeoff at all. So any way you slice it, your behavior relies on others putting in more effort than yourself to keep things going. And not pulling your own weight is "slacking."
Now, I don't hate you for it or anything, and I'm not trying to start a fight. You're also right that forcing people to vote would just get random votes or whatever, and enforcing stuff by rules is rarely best anyway. I also don't want you to not submit things (I actually had your story picked for first place on my slate, and enjoyed reading it.) But I'd feel remiss if I don't call you (or anyone doing it) out on this type of thing, as I think it ultimately harms the community, and that's something I really don't want.
So all I'm saying is think about it. Is it really such a big ask that you spend a two or three hours reading in a week where you probably already spent 4+ hours writing in a single weekend? No one's saying you have to provide paragraphs of (or any) comments on everything, or read the entire contest. But simply judging your initial slate seems like a minimal, reasonable "price of entry" to me. I hope you can understand my point and maybe reconsider.
>>Xepher
Then you're just getting back to the same concept that there's a responsibility to review if you enter a story. If you want to incentivize that, then it's your prerogative to withhold all your reviews until the authors are revealed, and if an author didn't post any reviews, then don't post your review of his story. You won't have any way of knowing whether he voted. though; not all voters post reviews. Plus it's a lot bigger time investment than 2 or 3 hours. When I'm paying the attention level required to review something and not just read it, I can get through 2-3k words per hour. My ballot would have taken me more like 12 hours, which is most of a week's allotment of private review requests and queue submissions, and honestly, those writers need the advice more. Anyway, I've done writeoffs since 2012 and reviewed far more stories than I've entered, so if there's a karmic balance, I'm still well on the positive side.
Besides, which do you value more, votes or reviews? I did review one story this time, and I spent about 3 hours reading it, thinking about it, and writing up my various responses on it, which is the time investment you were asking me for. In the prior minific round, I reviewed 11 stories, 1 shy of the number on a ballot. But I didn't vote because not many of the stories I reviewed were on my ballot. I valued giving reviews to stories that had the fewest over reading what was on my ballot so I could vote. In the last original short story round, I spent about an hour reading a story and discussing it with Cassius to help him with his review of it, even though I didn't enter a story.
Then you're just getting back to the same concept that there's a responsibility to review if you enter a story. If you want to incentivize that, then it's your prerogative to withhold all your reviews until the authors are revealed, and if an author didn't post any reviews, then don't post your review of his story. You won't have any way of knowing whether he voted. though; not all voters post reviews. Plus it's a lot bigger time investment than 2 or 3 hours. When I'm paying the attention level required to review something and not just read it, I can get through 2-3k words per hour. My ballot would have taken me more like 12 hours, which is most of a week's allotment of private review requests and queue submissions, and honestly, those writers need the advice more. Anyway, I've done writeoffs since 2012 and reviewed far more stories than I've entered, so if there's a karmic balance, I'm still well on the positive side.
Besides, which do you value more, votes or reviews? I did review one story this time, and I spent about 3 hours reading it, thinking about it, and writing up my various responses on it, which is the time investment you were asking me for. In the prior minific round, I reviewed 11 stories, 1 shy of the number on a ballot. But I didn't vote because not many of the stories I reviewed were on my ballot. I valued giving reviews to stories that had the fewest over reading what was on my ballot so I could vote. In the last original short story round, I spent about an hour reading a story and discussing it with Cassius to help him with his review of it, even though I didn't enter a story.