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Slingshot
When Twilight was decanted from the sleep-pod, the glowing hologram over her tablet had a private-message light next to the clock. She took a few minutes to let her heart beat life back into her veins, moved her hoof through "6:35 AM" to touch it, and a sentence sprang up in the graceful, flowing vectors of Celestial Oblique:
A lifetime ago, she would have grabbed Spike, hopped into the nearest phaeton, and danced on jittery hooftips as her guards sped toward Canterlot. An age ago, she would have teleported there with a thought. Today, though, she left the message languidly unacknowledged—and her overflowing feeds untouched—while she pulled a battered cast-iron kettle from her relics cabinet and filled a tea-ball with subtly pungent leaves from the drying rack by the window.
The eastern horizon gradually lightened as the ancient induction stove heated her water—Twilight had long ago assigned it to the placebo effect, but the tea did taste better if it wasn't flash-boiled before slipping the leaves in, and today deserved the best. She allowed herself a distraction from the tea preparation once it was steeping, and hummed tunelessly to herself as she went through her morning ritual—spinning up her HUD, stepping through the cleanring and lowering her wings into the autopreen. She stared into the cobblestone streets of Ponyville, silent except for the hovering hum of the maintenance drones, as she drew her ion brush slowly through the ethereal gradient of her mane. Then, finally, she reverently lifted the kettle from the stove, floated two porcelain cups to its side, and blinked the vector-shift out of her eyes on the balcony of the Tower of the Sun atop Canterlot Castle, 120.47138 kilometers away.
"Sleep well?" Celestia said without turning around as the clock in the corner of Twilight's eye ticked to 6:55. Her voice had the burr of disuse, though it remained as gentle as ever. Her head was low, and her chest was half-leaning, half-collapsed on the broad stone of the railing. She'd ion-brushed her mane to within a degree of bursting into flames, which had very nearly managed to revive the vivid pastels Twilight remembered from Before.
"Well enough," Twilight said, and poured them both a cup of Darjeeling.
No more was said while they both lifted their cups—Twilight with unwavering field, Celestia with trembling hooves. The fading of the eastern stars, and the sky's shift of hue from deep red toward orange, both proceeded with agonizing slowness. The lightpanels behind them gradually dimmed and then winked out.
7:00 came and went. Twilight set her teacup down and glanced curiously at Celestia. Celestia—her muzzle a universe of weariness—sipped, and let her lips drift into an enigmatic smile.
The first fire of the day finally, finally peeked over the Ponsylvania horizon, impossibly dim and tiny. It crept upward, arc-second by agonizing arc-second, coalescing from a microscopic filament outlining the hills into a tiny lump of light plopped atop them. Twilight's gaze flickered downward to the balcony floor—where weak sunlight was peeking in zebra-stripe patterns through the old stone railing—and then returned to the light on the hills.
"Look at that," Twilight said helplessly.
Celestia gingerly set down her teacup, then pushed herself upright and nodded. "Isn't it beautiful?"
Twilight felt a quiver pass through her horngrip, and the bottom corners of the world behind her HUD began to blur. With infinite precision, she set down the teacup on the railing, and then dabbed at her eyes with a pastern.
Celestia was crying, too—tears openly streaming down her cheeks over a tired smile. Her eyes never left the horizon. The daylight pooled and intensified.
Twilight couldn't help but return that smile, and her own tears spilled out. "I've never seen shadows this long," she whispered.
"You'll get used to it," Celestia said. "Or maybe not. I haven't, yet."
Or this dim, Twilight didn't say. There was no need. That would change day by day.
Instead, she stepped forward to the railing alongside Celestia, draping a wing around her—and then giving up and clamping her hooves around the elder alicorn in a fierce hug. Celestia turned from the railing, legs over her withers to fully embrace her back. They held each other, laughing and sobbing, Twilight nuzzling into Celestia's damp chest and feeling Celestia's tears drip onto her forehead, until there was no more emotion left to drain away.
"I can't believe it," Twilight said. "Finally. How long has it been?"
"It certainly feels like two and a half million years," Celestia said.
Twilight smiled, eyes returning to the slowly rising sun. "You don't look a day over ten thousand."
"Well, you know," Celestia said, "relativity."
A piercing beep sounded from a speaker grill on the side of the tower as their HUD clocks ticked to 7:05. Celestia silenced it with a hoof gesture, then sighed.
"We've five minutes past aphelion," she said. "I'm letting the moment linger—for you, and for everyone. But I shouldn't delay sunrise much longer."
"Yeah," Twilight conceded quietly, then looked back at Celestia with a warm smile. "But thank you."
Celestia, for the first time, lit her horn. Equestria's sun sprang up obligingly—soaring in moments past the thin wedge of light on the horizon, and climbing into the morning sky to bathe the land in brilliance.
The dim and distant flame remained on the horizon below the sun, but its shadows immediately vanished.
Twilight knew exactly where her next stop was—682.0027 kilometers straight-line, or 688.1638 following the curvature of the planet—but she wanted to start catching up on current events, so she hopped on a magtrain north to the Crystal City and started paging through the Hoofweb chat boards while the landscape shot by.
Page after page of topics were nothing but buzz about Hope (as they'd named the new sun). It wasn't news, of course—not to the chat crowds, nor to her. The last time Twilight had been awake, a century ago, she had helped astronomers at the planet's most powerful telescopes first pick out Hope's faint glow from the stellar background radiation. She skimmed some encyclopedia entries for historical photos captured since then. Hope had been visible to the naked eye for decades, and had been the second-brightest object in the sky for years, as they hurtled ever closer toward it through the void.
Hope—being essentially at a fixed point in the starfield as their planet slowly spun at its traditional rate—orbited Equestrian skies in a lazy 24-hour circuit, which in some ways made it already feel more like the sun than Spark (as they'd named the tiny-but-close stellar fragment that Celestia rotated around the planet). Spark had long ago been shifted to a 19.1-hour orbit, which made for miserably abbreviated day-dark cycles, but offered Celestia a nearly optimum tradeoff between acceleration and recuperation. Given the distances involved, they wanted every little edge they could get.
For the past several months, Twilight noted, Celestia had been posting announcements counting down to the morning of the first "official" dual sunrise—the first time that Spark and Hope would crest the horizon near-simultaneously after Hope had finally crossed the Magnitude 12 threshold. That meant it cast about as much light as Luna's old moon—though from a single warm and tiny point rather than a ghostly white disc—and, in a satisfying cosmic coincidence, also meant they had passed to within the embrace of Hope's gravity well, where the final gravitic manipulations were being made to slow Equestria into a circular orbit in the habitable zone.
The current Zebra poet laureate—an old mare who had been named Matumaini at birth, in a fit of retroactively justified optimism—had composed for the occasion an epigram in the millennia-old style of Before:
The most-upvoted response to it had come from a pod maintenance technician by the name of Gyro Gearheart—one of Pinkie Pie's five granddaughters—who had been decanted about a year ago in preparation for the mass awakenings that would be scheduled closer to Hope:
Pinkie herself had asked to be the very last pony to be decanted. "I've only got one party left in me," she had said Before, her breathing labored but her smile never wavering, "and I want to throw it for everyone."
When Twilight ambled out of the train into the gleaming streets of the Crystal City, Flurry's geoloc was—predictably—the control room of the palace's High Tower, upon which was mounted the central interferometer for the Crystal Array. Twilight took a leisurely path there, filling her lungs with the cool northern air and the omnipresent silence, and paused for a long while in the throne room. Radiant, calm Cadance and frail, white-maned Shining Armor were slumbering in pods snuggled side by side, both with a hoof pressed to each other's side of the pod, separated by only the thin film of their sacs as they hurtled through the light-years.
Cadance—though she was one of the very few who could survive the trip awake—had begged not to spend a minute more than she had to without him, and there was no way that Celestia could tell her no. On the other hoof, Flurry—barely decades into adulthood, Before—had leapt at the chance to define herself without the chafing influence of an immortal mother.
Two thousand years of definition.
Twilight wondered, not for the first time, if her brother and stepsister would even slightly recognize the mare their daughter had become.
> oms twi ltnh
A subcutaneous hum and a gentle chirp deep in her ear accompanied the acronyms blinking into the bottom of her HUD. Twilight smiled, tapped her tongue to her palate twice to engage speech-to-text, and subvocalized back as she walked. "Hi, Flurry. I figured I'd take the scenic route here, and give myself a chance to catch up on the way. I see a hundred years hasn't cured you of talking in abbreviations."
Some dots immediately sprang up at the bottom of the display, and it took a number of seconds for them to resolve into words with another chirp:
> Sorry! 8,:D You know the Alicorn of Communication has got to be split-second twenty-four-seven for my zebs on the web, and it's easy to forget to compensate for fogies like you. Get up here, you big goof.
Twilight grinned. Oh m w less than three, she subvocalized back, and after a split-second's vector-shift calculation, was nuzzling her niece in jubilant reunion.
"It must be a big deal that I'm back," Twilight said, focus flicking one last time to her HUD before she set its transparency to 100% and drank in the sparking 3-d webbing effect that blazed through Flurry's ethereal violet mane. "You set your status indicator to 'Busy'."
Flurry laughed and lunged in for another hug. "It's alright. I'm livestreaming this to a generation of zebras who have only ever seen you asleep. Say hi to your fans."
"Hi to your fans," Twilight dad-joked, as she always did when Flurry put her on the spot. "Should I have prepared a speech? I feel obliged to say something momentous. We're here. We're finally here."
"Nah," Flurry said with an easy shrug. "We've had enough of momentous with everypony who's anypony. Even Tia has been pulling herself away from her slingshotting for a few minutes here and there to stand in the room for the biggest parties." She nuzzled Twilight's neck again. "Don't be an alicorn, Twi. Just be you."
Twilight closed her eyes for a moment, trying not to think about the hundred years that had seemingly melted away when she and Flurry had hugged. Just be you, indeed…a legend come to life, hugging a living legend. It was a testament to Flurry's domain that she could give Twilight news like being unexpectedly livecast to the world on Equestria's most important day in generations, and somehow not reduce her to a gibbering wreck.
…In generations. A hundred years. Or an eyeblink of dreamless sleep.
All but three of the world's sentient races—ponies, ungulates, gryphons, dogs, breezies, qilin, seafolk—had crammed into sleep pods when they first realized their world was going to have to flee the Dark. Dragons (too large for the pods) went into deep hibernation, and changelings (unable to use their own pods, and unable to survive for so long without food) went into mass dormancy. Only the zebra, for reasons of their own, had refused to go to sleep—vowing to live and breed and die beneath pitch-black skies and Shard's weakened light, and shepherd the world through its age of slumber. They—and the few experts who had been roused from their slumber for short periods of interstellar navigation, or pod maintenance, or oversight of automated factories and algae farms—literally were Equestria now, and Twilight was being introduced to the children's children of the friends she'd made while last surveying the stars.
Small wonder that so few wanted to wake up until Hope shone for good in the sky.
"Equestria to Twilight," Flurry said, interrupting her train of thought and waving a hoof in front of her eyes. "Not that I don't want to support you being you, but you're getting that faraway maudlin look again."
Twilight shook her muzzle, blinked her eyes back into focus, and glanced around the room, eyes alighting on a wall-display with a diagram of concentric rings. She silently took in its dots and discs before her brain put two and two together. "…Planets?" Her muzzle curled into a grin. "Planets! Hope has planets? We weren't nearly close enough to confirm that when I went to sleep!"
Flurry's eyes lit up. "Oh my stars, Twi, you have no idea! One's even got its full orbit in the inner habitable zone!" She pointed at a side wall, with two blotchy, severely over-magnified pictures of a blue circle, one of which had erratic white patches and one of which had hints of green to one side. "Water! Clouds! Life! It's got to be them."
She paused. Her face fell, and her ears lowered.
"Had to be them," she murmured, and it was the first time Twilight had ever seen Flurry at less than full intensity.
In the times Before, Equestrian was a land of tamed and tameable villains. There were dark hearts. Beings who wanted power. Beings who would ravage and plunder and destroy. But there was also Harmony, and there was Friendship, and when the darkness and the light met head-on, it was like a torch setting new tinder ablaze: the Light could not help but spread, until the world was wholly at peace, allowing the steel spider of technology to spin them all into a single web.
And then Luna started falling into fever dreams, muttering wild and chilling gibberish about the Dark. It wasn't the Nightmare, and it wasn't the Tantabus—they established that quickly. In her more lucid moments, it also terrified her—survivor of the Nightmare, survivor of the Tantabus—beyond words. For the next decade, she alternated her time between the deepest recesses of the Restricted Archives, and huddled trembling in bed.
That was when the rest of Equestria discovered that, one by one and cluster by cluster, faster and faster, the stars were winking out.
Luna vanished one night, and an emergency worldwide hunt began. Twilight deciphered what she could of Luna's final cryptic notes, and the Ahuizotl-Do family used all their archaeological know-how to trace her to some pre-Equestrian ruins in Brayzil, where Luna was found repeatedly muttering a string of numbers like a mantra. By then, half the sky was a few lonely bright points in a sea of utter blackness, and even those brightest and closest stars were beginning to snuff out one by one.
She stirred to consciousness when Twilight and Celestia made their way to her side. "No light, no light," she whispered. "Three four eight one seven zero seven two—"
"We have the numbers," Twilight interrupted, cradling Luna's head and trying to catch the gaze of her rolling eyes. "Six columns of sixteen. What do they mean?"
Luna, blessedly, focused in. "Hope," she whispered. "Coordinates of the guide-star, and distant Hope offering distant shelter." She gathered her hooves underneath her and staggered upright, and for the first time in ten years, she looked regal—a gleam of hard intent in her eyes. "Alphys, brightest of Pegasus, doomed in seventeen years, and us in nine. But if she flings us away—" Luna whirled on Celestia. "Sister, do you understand?"
"No," Celestia said gently, "but I want to."
Luna closed her eyes, pressed her hoof to her forehead, and let out a ragged breath, lower eyelid twitching. "A near-light-speed shockwave from the galactic core," she said, and Twilight's heart dropped into her gut. "It is not evil, sister, and we cannot fight it like evil; it is nothing, shriveling all it passes into cold dust, and we must flee or we too are dust in the wind. There is no rainbow. There is no time. But we have friends, and one chance to reach them. Do you trust me?"
Yes, Celestia said, and yes, a terrified Twilight said, and they set up the Slingshot.
The idea—Luna had said, before they finally coaxed her into the balm of dreamless pod-sleep, and swore to her on everything they held dear that they wouldn't wake her until she could hear the song of a star that wasn't doomed—wasn't hers. It came, she said, from the inhabitants of a planet around the star she called Hope.
Twilight crunched the numbers and realized that Hope was literally a galaxy away, 2.5 million light years distant. She knew Star Swirl had experimented with dimensional magic on the border of literal insanity, but even so, the idea that aliens were breaking the light-speed barrier to advise ponykind on an impending extinction that they wouldn't even be able to observe for a geologic age…was somewhere west of unthinkable. Nevertheless, it was a possible solution for a problem with approximately zero acceptable answers, and the math checked out, so she didn't question it too closely.
Equestria's stellar neighborhood was a three-body system—a C-class sun that had an age ago triggered a subatomic chain reaction converting it into a not-entirely-Euclidean substance known as unicornium; a small, rocky planet of normal matter enriched by countless millennia of unicornium black-body radiation; and a wandering pure-unicornium comet that mages had long ago captured and circularized the orbit of. Unicornium, of course, was amenable to the nonlocal effects generated by applied willpower channelled through enriched horn-matter—efforts which were still called "magic" out of respect to the immense contributions of pre-classical researchers to the field, but which had been thoroughly documented and explained as a sub-branch of physics in the decades after Twilight Sparkle's ascension. The sun and moon, as purely unicornium bodies, were incapable of normal gravitational or energetic interaction with Equestria—but the efforts of sufficiently powerful unicorns, or an alicorn such as Celestia or Luna, could essentially selectively drag aspects of unicornium bodies into three-dimensional space. Every day and every night, they basically grabbed the wandering bodies which otherwise would drift away, and forced normal three-dimensional gravity to apply until they shot around the planet, and then forced them to shine, bathing Equestria in heat and light and the subtler but necessary black-body emanations of the moon.
Luna's idea—the people of Hope's idea—was to slam the moon into the sun at an angle (physical and mental) that would knock a tiny chip of the sun off, a protruding sixth-dimensional piece which hadn't quite converted at the same time as the rest of it and thus (according to some brain-destroying dimensional graphs) was ripe for breakage. Once that was accomplished, the next step was to line the main piece of the sun up with Alphys, turn on gravity but neither light nor heat, and send Equestria (and the mini-sun Shard) slingshotting toward Alphys ahead of the shockwave. It was a tremendous sacrifice—and would leave them with a frail, tiny ball of transdimensional fusion products that would run out of fuel in under 10,000 years—but no alternative plans could accelerate the planet and a heat source fast enough to both escape the Dark.
Even that initial acceleration, technically, wouldn't be enough to save them—at least, not without tidal forces tearing the planet apart long before the Dark could do it in—but Luna pointed out that they could further accelerate mid-trip. If Celestia grabbed Shard and "raised" it to in front of Equestria—leveraging unicornium's unique properties to do so without pushing the planet backward and "slowing down" Equestria in normal three-dimensional space—she could then turn on its gravity and have it pull the system's center of gravity forward. Shard's total acceleration capability that way was barely enough to be felt against the inward pull of the planet's gravity, but over the distances of interstellar space, those tiny nudges added up to a lot. In the eight light-years to Alphys, in fact, they could accelerate to very nearly half the speed of light—just barely sprinting in with the cold breath of the Dark on their tail.
Once there, if they lined everything up carefully, they could slingshot around the star closely enough to alter their trajectory—flinging themselves "up" out of the shockwave's path—by hiding in the light-shadow (and gravity-shadow) of Shard for the brief time they'd be close enough to Alphys to get roasted. It would be an extremely unpleasant hairpin turn, but unpleasant beat the cold and silent alternative.
And once clear of the shockwave, it was just a matter of continuing to accelerate through the void of interstellar space, trying to make enough distance to find a new home—and a new sun—before Shard burned out. The distances between galaxies were impossibly huge, but they had relativity on their side: the closer to the speed of light they got, the more time passed for the outside world for each tick of Equestria's clocks. In fact, if Celestia devoted her full-time attention to Shard manipulation (accelerating them continuously until the halfway point, and then continuously decelerating them back down to zero again so that they didn't blow by their destination in a heartbeat), the 2.5 million light-years to Hope could be covered with an intergalactic banishment of just under two thousand subjective Equestrian years.
The irony, Twilight often noted, could not have possibly been lost on Celestia.
Twilight's third destination was literally as far away as equinely possible (1712.9481 kilometers straight-line, 2690.6130 following the curvature of the planet), which by all rights should have given her all the reading time she needed. But no trains—mag-lev or otherwise—went to the far side of Equestria, and she didn't fancy a flight around the world. She compromised by returning to the comfort of her palace to catch up on current events for several days—and to exchange a languid series of webmails with Celestia and a rapid, disjoint stream of snapchats with Flurry—before teleporting.
If Twilight hadn't known exactly where to go, it would have been impenetrable jungle. The Dragon Lands had historically been cleared to bare rock by generations of fire breath—and being on the far side of the star during the Alphys slingshot, with centrifugal forces flinging loose objects into space and squirting fresh lava through a thousand new volcanoes, hadn't improved its livability—but no amount of past trauma could keep life from squirming its way into the ashes. Literally. Grasses and trees took root in the rich volcanic soils, and once they had achieved a hoofhold, there was nothing awake to hold them back.
The friend she was visiting didn't care, and probably wouldn't for a few centuries yet.
Twilight lit her horn for illumination in the giant, silent cavern, watching for a moment the ponderous rise and fall of the enormous purple chest, and the equally massive sky-blue one curled up alongside it. She looked at their entwined tails, and the foreclaws clasped together in sleep, and thought of Cadance and Shining, and wondered if maybe there was something to the ancient theory that dragons were so long-lived because they understood all the hidden truths that alicorns knew but had simply chosen not to specialize in any.
She walked forward to alongside Spike's muzzle, brushed her hoof to the scales underneath his eye, and then settled in to rest alongside his cheek, feeling the reassuring solidity of his scales.
"We're here, Spike," she said. "We made it." The darkness of the cavern beyond her tiny ring of hornlight swallowed her words, but she felt a muscle deep in his muzzle subtly twitch, and his breathing hitched for a moment, and his next exhalation came out with what might have been a slow-motion huff.
Twilight pressed her cheek to his and smiled. "I can hardly believe it. Nobody can. We're already passing the orbit of Hope's outermost planets, and there's about a month of deceleration left and then a year or so of maneuvering into our final orbital path. It's so strange to have a sun in the sky that nopony has to touch, even if it's barely as bright as the moon yet." She pressed an ear to Spike's muzzle, hearing the faint rumble-hiss of his breathing, and smiled. "Speaking of which, Celestia wants to move Shard a little further from Equestria once we don't have to use it for propulsion any more, and give it to Luna once she wakes back up. We won't need its heat or light any more, but it's still unicornium, and it'll still be able to keep the planet enriched enough for magic for…I don't know. Longer than I'll be alive."
Ember chuffed in sleep, and a brief flare of fire illuminated the contours of the cavern. Twilight blinked the flash out of her eyes and tried to adjust her sense of scale. It had to be half as large as Ponyville.
"Speaking of Celestia," Twilight said, "she's going to sleep herself once we're in orbit. Not pod sleep, alicorn sleep." She looked down and sighed. "She gave this everything she had. And even with the affinity she built up for Shard over her millennia singlehornedly raising it…I don't know how she manages to stay conscious after this long, let alone manipulate it every four and a half hours. I tried to help, but she wouldn't let me…she knew this would happen, and said she wanted somepony she could trust to coax ponykind back to life with both her and Luna indisposed." Twilight laughed humorlessly. "Indisposed. The world is going to wake up, and the alicorns that saved them are going to be asleep. They'll never hear the praises of a generation."
Twilight fell into contemplative silence.
"It's just going to be me, Spike," she said quietly. "Pinkie's got her farewell party, and Applejack might have a few decades left with luck and Granny Smith's genes, but the first generation is almost gone. There's no telling when you'll wake up. Celestia's going to be out for a century or more, and Luna…well, we promised to wake her once we arrived, but I know how she felt about her millennium alone, and I guarantee you she'll want to go right back to bed until she and Celestia can wake up together. And Cadance…Shining Armor is hanging on as best he can, but he doesn't have long, and she's going to be devastated for a long, long time when he goes."
Twilight sighed, body drooping, and rolled a little pebble around on the floor of the cave with the edge of her hoof.
"There's Flurry Heart, of course, but she already lives in another world, and while I love her to death, I can't ever shake the feeling that every time we talk she's just visiting for a little while before sneaking back away again. And I've tried to keep up with the zebra world, I really have, but every time I start getting close my heart starts ripping apart with thoughts of all the sleeping friends I'm forgetting piece by piece. And it'll be great to have them back, but I've seen so many things they haven't." Her voice softened. "That's not fair…we're all going to wake up in a changed world in a few days. Like we've been pulling back on the sling of history for two thousand years, struggling to keep it from firing, and all of a sudden we're launching forward all at once, and there's nothing left to hold onto but each other as we hurtle through the void."
There was a deep rumble as Spike slowly inhaled, and then heat-shimmers silently rose from his nostrils.
Twilight stood, then leaned in and spread her forehooves against his muzzle, hugging him much in the same way one does a barn.
"I love you, little bro," she whispered, then choked back a laughing sob. "And you'd better wake up for Pinkie Pie's party, or she's going to haunt you forever."
In the days to come—as Ponyville's streets slowly filled with pastel and striped bodies alike—Twilight would stare at the ever-increasing hoof traffic and think back often on the rest of that conversation with Flurry Heart about Hope.
"What do you mean, 'had to be' them?" Twilight had asked, already knowing the answer but hoping somehow, desperately, that she was wrong. She stepped forward toward the wall display, touching a hoof to the flat and blurry disc of blue.
"Relativity," Flurry simply said.
Twilight closed her eyes. For all the time that had passed on Equestria—generations upon generations; two thousand years of zebra tending the world and creating history under Flurry's gentle guidance—the speed of light was a cruel, inviolate mistress, and the universe outside had aged further still. They had leaped a 2.5 million light-year gap between galaxies. Ergo, 2.5 million years had passed.
"How old is our society?" Flurry said. "From the first Cutie Mark to the Hoofweb? If it's older than ten thousand years, then Tia's holding out on us. And since the beings of Hope gave their interstellar navigation advice to Luna, they've done that two hundred and fifty times. We're talking the sort of time scale on which mountains wear down into sand."
"You've tried, right?" Twilight said. "Maybe they've matured. Stabilized. It's not inconceivable a civilization could last that long."
"We're well within targeted communication range, and we're carrying a light source literally visible to the naked eye from their planet. They should have noticed us and shot something our way by now. Just in case, we've done passive scanning on every frequency we know about and some we don't. Dead silence. And the dark side of the planet is as dark as the void."
Twilight scanned the planetary diagrams, struggling in the cold grip of logic. "Maybe they just had to move—they've got a moon, and it looks like that fourth planet, the red one, is in the outer habitable zone—"
Flurry shook her head wearily. "We've turned over every rock in the system, Twi. It's silent. I'm sorry."
Twilight bowed her head, staring at her hooves. It seemed so unfair, to owe their lives to faint and distant voices that simple physics decreed she would never meet.
"We'll look, of course," Flurry said quietly. "Statistically, it seems pretty likely that they just got hit by an extinction-level event. A large meteor they couldn't deflect, or an environmental crash, or even a bad war if they were stupid enough to investigate the sort of destructive technology Tia banned Before. But with a planet that green, there's bound to be something which took over, and is working its way back toward sapience one step at a time."
Twilight drew in, and let out, a long breath. "We'll look," she quietly agreed, and pressed her hoof to the blurry image of the blue planet. "It was hope that led us here. The least we can do is keep hold of it until we can share it with everyone we find."
She went out stargazing when Shard set that night. Hope was still a good ten degrees above the horizon, casting long shadows at her hooves.
And it wasn't the only star. In the past hundred years, they'd moved from the empty void of deep space into the middle of Hope's galaxy. Unfamiliar constellations crowded each other throughout the sky, glimmering gemstones, an unbelievable wealth of light in every direction she looked. She could even make out a faint band of stars running through the sky to mark the galactic plane. It was so full of stars that it looked like someone had spilled a glass of milk through the sky.
Maybe Hope was silent, Twilight thought, but it couldn't be the only blue planet around. And they knew how to travel now. What was stopping them from picking up again, if there were other signals—other friends—to be found?
For the first time since Before, a smile of purpose flitted across her muzzle.
"Everyone we find," Twilight whispered. "Everyone."
Come watch the sun rise.
A lifetime ago, she would have grabbed Spike, hopped into the nearest phaeton, and danced on jittery hooftips as her guards sped toward Canterlot. An age ago, she would have teleported there with a thought. Today, though, she left the message languidly unacknowledged—and her overflowing feeds untouched—while she pulled a battered cast-iron kettle from her relics cabinet and filled a tea-ball with subtly pungent leaves from the drying rack by the window.
The eastern horizon gradually lightened as the ancient induction stove heated her water—Twilight had long ago assigned it to the placebo effect, but the tea did taste better if it wasn't flash-boiled before slipping the leaves in, and today deserved the best. She allowed herself a distraction from the tea preparation once it was steeping, and hummed tunelessly to herself as she went through her morning ritual—spinning up her HUD, stepping through the cleanring and lowering her wings into the autopreen. She stared into the cobblestone streets of Ponyville, silent except for the hovering hum of the maintenance drones, as she drew her ion brush slowly through the ethereal gradient of her mane. Then, finally, she reverently lifted the kettle from the stove, floated two porcelain cups to its side, and blinked the vector-shift out of her eyes on the balcony of the Tower of the Sun atop Canterlot Castle, 120.47138 kilometers away.
"Sleep well?" Celestia said without turning around as the clock in the corner of Twilight's eye ticked to 6:55. Her voice had the burr of disuse, though it remained as gentle as ever. Her head was low, and her chest was half-leaning, half-collapsed on the broad stone of the railing. She'd ion-brushed her mane to within a degree of bursting into flames, which had very nearly managed to revive the vivid pastels Twilight remembered from Before.
"Well enough," Twilight said, and poured them both a cup of Darjeeling.
No more was said while they both lifted their cups—Twilight with unwavering field, Celestia with trembling hooves. The fading of the eastern stars, and the sky's shift of hue from deep red toward orange, both proceeded with agonizing slowness. The lightpanels behind them gradually dimmed and then winked out.
7:00 came and went. Twilight set her teacup down and glanced curiously at Celestia. Celestia—her muzzle a universe of weariness—sipped, and let her lips drift into an enigmatic smile.
The first fire of the day finally, finally peeked over the Ponsylvania horizon, impossibly dim and tiny. It crept upward, arc-second by agonizing arc-second, coalescing from a microscopic filament outlining the hills into a tiny lump of light plopped atop them. Twilight's gaze flickered downward to the balcony floor—where weak sunlight was peeking in zebra-stripe patterns through the old stone railing—and then returned to the light on the hills.
"Look at that," Twilight said helplessly.
Celestia gingerly set down her teacup, then pushed herself upright and nodded. "Isn't it beautiful?"
Twilight felt a quiver pass through her horngrip, and the bottom corners of the world behind her HUD began to blur. With infinite precision, she set down the teacup on the railing, and then dabbed at her eyes with a pastern.
Celestia was crying, too—tears openly streaming down her cheeks over a tired smile. Her eyes never left the horizon. The daylight pooled and intensified.
Twilight couldn't help but return that smile, and her own tears spilled out. "I've never seen shadows this long," she whispered.
"You'll get used to it," Celestia said. "Or maybe not. I haven't, yet."
Or this dim, Twilight didn't say. There was no need. That would change day by day.
Instead, she stepped forward to the railing alongside Celestia, draping a wing around her—and then giving up and clamping her hooves around the elder alicorn in a fierce hug. Celestia turned from the railing, legs over her withers to fully embrace her back. They held each other, laughing and sobbing, Twilight nuzzling into Celestia's damp chest and feeling Celestia's tears drip onto her forehead, until there was no more emotion left to drain away.
"I can't believe it," Twilight said. "Finally. How long has it been?"
"It certainly feels like two and a half million years," Celestia said.
Twilight smiled, eyes returning to the slowly rising sun. "You don't look a day over ten thousand."
"Well, you know," Celestia said, "relativity."
A piercing beep sounded from a speaker grill on the side of the tower as their HUD clocks ticked to 7:05. Celestia silenced it with a hoof gesture, then sighed.
"We've five minutes past aphelion," she said. "I'm letting the moment linger—for you, and for everyone. But I shouldn't delay sunrise much longer."
"Yeah," Twilight conceded quietly, then looked back at Celestia with a warm smile. "But thank you."
Celestia, for the first time, lit her horn. Equestria's sun sprang up obligingly—soaring in moments past the thin wedge of light on the horizon, and climbing into the morning sky to bathe the land in brilliance.
The dim and distant flame remained on the horizon below the sun, but its shadows immediately vanished.
Twilight knew exactly where her next stop was—682.0027 kilometers straight-line, or 688.1638 following the curvature of the planet—but she wanted to start catching up on current events, so she hopped on a magtrain north to the Crystal City and started paging through the Hoofweb chat boards while the landscape shot by.
Page after page of topics were nothing but buzz about Hope (as they'd named the new sun). It wasn't news, of course—not to the chat crowds, nor to her. The last time Twilight had been awake, a century ago, she had helped astronomers at the planet's most powerful telescopes first pick out Hope's faint glow from the stellar background radiation. She skimmed some encyclopedia entries for historical photos captured since then. Hope had been visible to the naked eye for decades, and had been the second-brightest object in the sky for years, as they hurtled ever closer toward it through the void.
Hope—being essentially at a fixed point in the starfield as their planet slowly spun at its traditional rate—orbited Equestrian skies in a lazy 24-hour circuit, which in some ways made it already feel more like the sun than Spark (as they'd named the tiny-but-close stellar fragment that Celestia rotated around the planet). Spark had long ago been shifted to a 19.1-hour orbit, which made for miserably abbreviated day-dark cycles, but offered Celestia a nearly optimum tradeoff between acceleration and recuperation. Given the distances involved, they wanted every little edge they could get.
For the past several months, Twilight noted, Celestia had been posting announcements counting down to the morning of the first "official" dual sunrise—the first time that Spark and Hope would crest the horizon near-simultaneously after Hope had finally crossed the Magnitude 12 threshold. That meant it cast about as much light as Luna's old moon—though from a single warm and tiny point rather than a ghostly white disc—and, in a satisfying cosmic coincidence, also meant they had passed to within the embrace of Hope's gravity well, where the final gravitic manipulations were being made to slow Equestria into a circular orbit in the habitable zone.
The current Zebra poet laureate—an old mare who had been named Matumaini at birth, in a fit of retroactively justified optimism—had composed for the occasion an epigram in the millennia-old style of Before:
Today, the flame from Hope's bright spark
Illuminates a sky once dark,
And with her love provides the key
To liberate equinity.
The most-upvoted response to it had come from a pod maintenance technician by the name of Gyro Gearheart—one of Pinkie Pie's five granddaughters—who had been decanted about a year ago in preparation for the mass awakenings that would be scheduled closer to Hope:
I'm looking forward, as sleep ends,
To introduce you to old friends.
Pinkie herself had asked to be the very last pony to be decanted. "I've only got one party left in me," she had said Before, her breathing labored but her smile never wavering, "and I want to throw it for everyone."
When Twilight ambled out of the train into the gleaming streets of the Crystal City, Flurry's geoloc was—predictably—the control room of the palace's High Tower, upon which was mounted the central interferometer for the Crystal Array. Twilight took a leisurely path there, filling her lungs with the cool northern air and the omnipresent silence, and paused for a long while in the throne room. Radiant, calm Cadance and frail, white-maned Shining Armor were slumbering in pods snuggled side by side, both with a hoof pressed to each other's side of the pod, separated by only the thin film of their sacs as they hurtled through the light-years.
Cadance—though she was one of the very few who could survive the trip awake—had begged not to spend a minute more than she had to without him, and there was no way that Celestia could tell her no. On the other hoof, Flurry—barely decades into adulthood, Before—had leapt at the chance to define herself without the chafing influence of an immortal mother.
Two thousand years of definition.
Twilight wondered, not for the first time, if her brother and stepsister would even slightly recognize the mare their daughter had become.
> oms twi ltnh
A subcutaneous hum and a gentle chirp deep in her ear accompanied the acronyms blinking into the bottom of her HUD. Twilight smiled, tapped her tongue to her palate twice to engage speech-to-text, and subvocalized back as she walked. "Hi, Flurry. I figured I'd take the scenic route here, and give myself a chance to catch up on the way. I see a hundred years hasn't cured you of talking in abbreviations."
Some dots immediately sprang up at the bottom of the display, and it took a number of seconds for them to resolve into words with another chirp:
> Sorry! 8,:D You know the Alicorn of Communication has got to be split-second twenty-four-seven for my zebs on the web, and it's easy to forget to compensate for fogies like you. Get up here, you big goof.
Twilight grinned. Oh m w less than three, she subvocalized back, and after a split-second's vector-shift calculation, was nuzzling her niece in jubilant reunion.
"It must be a big deal that I'm back," Twilight said, focus flicking one last time to her HUD before she set its transparency to 100% and drank in the sparking 3-d webbing effect that blazed through Flurry's ethereal violet mane. "You set your status indicator to 'Busy'."
Flurry laughed and lunged in for another hug. "It's alright. I'm livestreaming this to a generation of zebras who have only ever seen you asleep. Say hi to your fans."
"Hi to your fans," Twilight dad-joked, as she always did when Flurry put her on the spot. "Should I have prepared a speech? I feel obliged to say something momentous. We're here. We're finally here."
"Nah," Flurry said with an easy shrug. "We've had enough of momentous with everypony who's anypony. Even Tia has been pulling herself away from her slingshotting for a few minutes here and there to stand in the room for the biggest parties." She nuzzled Twilight's neck again. "Don't be an alicorn, Twi. Just be you."
Twilight closed her eyes for a moment, trying not to think about the hundred years that had seemingly melted away when she and Flurry had hugged. Just be you, indeed…a legend come to life, hugging a living legend. It was a testament to Flurry's domain that she could give Twilight news like being unexpectedly livecast to the world on Equestria's most important day in generations, and somehow not reduce her to a gibbering wreck.
…In generations. A hundred years. Or an eyeblink of dreamless sleep.
All but three of the world's sentient races—ponies, ungulates, gryphons, dogs, breezies, qilin, seafolk—had crammed into sleep pods when they first realized their world was going to have to flee the Dark. Dragons (too large for the pods) went into deep hibernation, and changelings (unable to use their own pods, and unable to survive for so long without food) went into mass dormancy. Only the zebra, for reasons of their own, had refused to go to sleep—vowing to live and breed and die beneath pitch-black skies and Shard's weakened light, and shepherd the world through its age of slumber. They—and the few experts who had been roused from their slumber for short periods of interstellar navigation, or pod maintenance, or oversight of automated factories and algae farms—literally were Equestria now, and Twilight was being introduced to the children's children of the friends she'd made while last surveying the stars.
Small wonder that so few wanted to wake up until Hope shone for good in the sky.
"Equestria to Twilight," Flurry said, interrupting her train of thought and waving a hoof in front of her eyes. "Not that I don't want to support you being you, but you're getting that faraway maudlin look again."
Twilight shook her muzzle, blinked her eyes back into focus, and glanced around the room, eyes alighting on a wall-display with a diagram of concentric rings. She silently took in its dots and discs before her brain put two and two together. "…Planets?" Her muzzle curled into a grin. "Planets! Hope has planets? We weren't nearly close enough to confirm that when I went to sleep!"
Flurry's eyes lit up. "Oh my stars, Twi, you have no idea! One's even got its full orbit in the inner habitable zone!" She pointed at a side wall, with two blotchy, severely over-magnified pictures of a blue circle, one of which had erratic white patches and one of which had hints of green to one side. "Water! Clouds! Life! It's got to be them."
She paused. Her face fell, and her ears lowered.
"Had to be them," she murmured, and it was the first time Twilight had ever seen Flurry at less than full intensity.
In the times Before, Equestrian was a land of tamed and tameable villains. There were dark hearts. Beings who wanted power. Beings who would ravage and plunder and destroy. But there was also Harmony, and there was Friendship, and when the darkness and the light met head-on, it was like a torch setting new tinder ablaze: the Light could not help but spread, until the world was wholly at peace, allowing the steel spider of technology to spin them all into a single web.
And then Luna started falling into fever dreams, muttering wild and chilling gibberish about the Dark. It wasn't the Nightmare, and it wasn't the Tantabus—they established that quickly. In her more lucid moments, it also terrified her—survivor of the Nightmare, survivor of the Tantabus—beyond words. For the next decade, she alternated her time between the deepest recesses of the Restricted Archives, and huddled trembling in bed.
That was when the rest of Equestria discovered that, one by one and cluster by cluster, faster and faster, the stars were winking out.
Luna vanished one night, and an emergency worldwide hunt began. Twilight deciphered what she could of Luna's final cryptic notes, and the Ahuizotl-Do family used all their archaeological know-how to trace her to some pre-Equestrian ruins in Brayzil, where Luna was found repeatedly muttering a string of numbers like a mantra. By then, half the sky was a few lonely bright points in a sea of utter blackness, and even those brightest and closest stars were beginning to snuff out one by one.
She stirred to consciousness when Twilight and Celestia made their way to her side. "No light, no light," she whispered. "Three four eight one seven zero seven two—"
"We have the numbers," Twilight interrupted, cradling Luna's head and trying to catch the gaze of her rolling eyes. "Six columns of sixteen. What do they mean?"
Luna, blessedly, focused in. "Hope," she whispered. "Coordinates of the guide-star, and distant Hope offering distant shelter." She gathered her hooves underneath her and staggered upright, and for the first time in ten years, she looked regal—a gleam of hard intent in her eyes. "Alphys, brightest of Pegasus, doomed in seventeen years, and us in nine. But if she flings us away—" Luna whirled on Celestia. "Sister, do you understand?"
"No," Celestia said gently, "but I want to."
Luna closed her eyes, pressed her hoof to her forehead, and let out a ragged breath, lower eyelid twitching. "A near-light-speed shockwave from the galactic core," she said, and Twilight's heart dropped into her gut. "It is not evil, sister, and we cannot fight it like evil; it is nothing, shriveling all it passes into cold dust, and we must flee or we too are dust in the wind. There is no rainbow. There is no time. But we have friends, and one chance to reach them. Do you trust me?"
Yes, Celestia said, and yes, a terrified Twilight said, and they set up the Slingshot.
The idea—Luna had said, before they finally coaxed her into the balm of dreamless pod-sleep, and swore to her on everything they held dear that they wouldn't wake her until she could hear the song of a star that wasn't doomed—wasn't hers. It came, she said, from the inhabitants of a planet around the star she called Hope.
Twilight crunched the numbers and realized that Hope was literally a galaxy away, 2.5 million light years distant. She knew Star Swirl had experimented with dimensional magic on the border of literal insanity, but even so, the idea that aliens were breaking the light-speed barrier to advise ponykind on an impending extinction that they wouldn't even be able to observe for a geologic age…was somewhere west of unthinkable. Nevertheless, it was a possible solution for a problem with approximately zero acceptable answers, and the math checked out, so she didn't question it too closely.
Equestria's stellar neighborhood was a three-body system—a C-class sun that had an age ago triggered a subatomic chain reaction converting it into a not-entirely-Euclidean substance known as unicornium; a small, rocky planet of normal matter enriched by countless millennia of unicornium black-body radiation; and a wandering pure-unicornium comet that mages had long ago captured and circularized the orbit of. Unicornium, of course, was amenable to the nonlocal effects generated by applied willpower channelled through enriched horn-matter—efforts which were still called "magic" out of respect to the immense contributions of pre-classical researchers to the field, but which had been thoroughly documented and explained as a sub-branch of physics in the decades after Twilight Sparkle's ascension. The sun and moon, as purely unicornium bodies, were incapable of normal gravitational or energetic interaction with Equestria—but the efforts of sufficiently powerful unicorns, or an alicorn such as Celestia or Luna, could essentially selectively drag aspects of unicornium bodies into three-dimensional space. Every day and every night, they basically grabbed the wandering bodies which otherwise would drift away, and forced normal three-dimensional gravity to apply until they shot around the planet, and then forced them to shine, bathing Equestria in heat and light and the subtler but necessary black-body emanations of the moon.
Luna's idea—the people of Hope's idea—was to slam the moon into the sun at an angle (physical and mental) that would knock a tiny chip of the sun off, a protruding sixth-dimensional piece which hadn't quite converted at the same time as the rest of it and thus (according to some brain-destroying dimensional graphs) was ripe for breakage. Once that was accomplished, the next step was to line the main piece of the sun up with Alphys, turn on gravity but neither light nor heat, and send Equestria (and the mini-sun Shard) slingshotting toward Alphys ahead of the shockwave. It was a tremendous sacrifice—and would leave them with a frail, tiny ball of transdimensional fusion products that would run out of fuel in under 10,000 years—but no alternative plans could accelerate the planet and a heat source fast enough to both escape the Dark.
Even that initial acceleration, technically, wouldn't be enough to save them—at least, not without tidal forces tearing the planet apart long before the Dark could do it in—but Luna pointed out that they could further accelerate mid-trip. If Celestia grabbed Shard and "raised" it to in front of Equestria—leveraging unicornium's unique properties to do so without pushing the planet backward and "slowing down" Equestria in normal three-dimensional space—she could then turn on its gravity and have it pull the system's center of gravity forward. Shard's total acceleration capability that way was barely enough to be felt against the inward pull of the planet's gravity, but over the distances of interstellar space, those tiny nudges added up to a lot. In the eight light-years to Alphys, in fact, they could accelerate to very nearly half the speed of light—just barely sprinting in with the cold breath of the Dark on their tail.
Once there, if they lined everything up carefully, they could slingshot around the star closely enough to alter their trajectory—flinging themselves "up" out of the shockwave's path—by hiding in the light-shadow (and gravity-shadow) of Shard for the brief time they'd be close enough to Alphys to get roasted. It would be an extremely unpleasant hairpin turn, but unpleasant beat the cold and silent alternative.
And once clear of the shockwave, it was just a matter of continuing to accelerate through the void of interstellar space, trying to make enough distance to find a new home—and a new sun—before Shard burned out. The distances between galaxies were impossibly huge, but they had relativity on their side: the closer to the speed of light they got, the more time passed for the outside world for each tick of Equestria's clocks. In fact, if Celestia devoted her full-time attention to Shard manipulation (accelerating them continuously until the halfway point, and then continuously decelerating them back down to zero again so that they didn't blow by their destination in a heartbeat), the 2.5 million light-years to Hope could be covered with an intergalactic banishment of just under two thousand subjective Equestrian years.
The irony, Twilight often noted, could not have possibly been lost on Celestia.
Twilight's third destination was literally as far away as equinely possible (1712.9481 kilometers straight-line, 2690.6130 following the curvature of the planet), which by all rights should have given her all the reading time she needed. But no trains—mag-lev or otherwise—went to the far side of Equestria, and she didn't fancy a flight around the world. She compromised by returning to the comfort of her palace to catch up on current events for several days—and to exchange a languid series of webmails with Celestia and a rapid, disjoint stream of snapchats with Flurry—before teleporting.
If Twilight hadn't known exactly where to go, it would have been impenetrable jungle. The Dragon Lands had historically been cleared to bare rock by generations of fire breath—and being on the far side of the star during the Alphys slingshot, with centrifugal forces flinging loose objects into space and squirting fresh lava through a thousand new volcanoes, hadn't improved its livability—but no amount of past trauma could keep life from squirming its way into the ashes. Literally. Grasses and trees took root in the rich volcanic soils, and once they had achieved a hoofhold, there was nothing awake to hold them back.
The friend she was visiting didn't care, and probably wouldn't for a few centuries yet.
Twilight lit her horn for illumination in the giant, silent cavern, watching for a moment the ponderous rise and fall of the enormous purple chest, and the equally massive sky-blue one curled up alongside it. She looked at their entwined tails, and the foreclaws clasped together in sleep, and thought of Cadance and Shining, and wondered if maybe there was something to the ancient theory that dragons were so long-lived because they understood all the hidden truths that alicorns knew but had simply chosen not to specialize in any.
She walked forward to alongside Spike's muzzle, brushed her hoof to the scales underneath his eye, and then settled in to rest alongside his cheek, feeling the reassuring solidity of his scales.
"We're here, Spike," she said. "We made it." The darkness of the cavern beyond her tiny ring of hornlight swallowed her words, but she felt a muscle deep in his muzzle subtly twitch, and his breathing hitched for a moment, and his next exhalation came out with what might have been a slow-motion huff.
Twilight pressed her cheek to his and smiled. "I can hardly believe it. Nobody can. We're already passing the orbit of Hope's outermost planets, and there's about a month of deceleration left and then a year or so of maneuvering into our final orbital path. It's so strange to have a sun in the sky that nopony has to touch, even if it's barely as bright as the moon yet." She pressed an ear to Spike's muzzle, hearing the faint rumble-hiss of his breathing, and smiled. "Speaking of which, Celestia wants to move Shard a little further from Equestria once we don't have to use it for propulsion any more, and give it to Luna once she wakes back up. We won't need its heat or light any more, but it's still unicornium, and it'll still be able to keep the planet enriched enough for magic for…I don't know. Longer than I'll be alive."
Ember chuffed in sleep, and a brief flare of fire illuminated the contours of the cavern. Twilight blinked the flash out of her eyes and tried to adjust her sense of scale. It had to be half as large as Ponyville.
"Speaking of Celestia," Twilight said, "she's going to sleep herself once we're in orbit. Not pod sleep, alicorn sleep." She looked down and sighed. "She gave this everything she had. And even with the affinity she built up for Shard over her millennia singlehornedly raising it…I don't know how she manages to stay conscious after this long, let alone manipulate it every four and a half hours. I tried to help, but she wouldn't let me…she knew this would happen, and said she wanted somepony she could trust to coax ponykind back to life with both her and Luna indisposed." Twilight laughed humorlessly. "Indisposed. The world is going to wake up, and the alicorns that saved them are going to be asleep. They'll never hear the praises of a generation."
Twilight fell into contemplative silence.
"It's just going to be me, Spike," she said quietly. "Pinkie's got her farewell party, and Applejack might have a few decades left with luck and Granny Smith's genes, but the first generation is almost gone. There's no telling when you'll wake up. Celestia's going to be out for a century or more, and Luna…well, we promised to wake her once we arrived, but I know how she felt about her millennium alone, and I guarantee you she'll want to go right back to bed until she and Celestia can wake up together. And Cadance…Shining Armor is hanging on as best he can, but he doesn't have long, and she's going to be devastated for a long, long time when he goes."
Twilight sighed, body drooping, and rolled a little pebble around on the floor of the cave with the edge of her hoof.
"There's Flurry Heart, of course, but she already lives in another world, and while I love her to death, I can't ever shake the feeling that every time we talk she's just visiting for a little while before sneaking back away again. And I've tried to keep up with the zebra world, I really have, but every time I start getting close my heart starts ripping apart with thoughts of all the sleeping friends I'm forgetting piece by piece. And it'll be great to have them back, but I've seen so many things they haven't." Her voice softened. "That's not fair…we're all going to wake up in a changed world in a few days. Like we've been pulling back on the sling of history for two thousand years, struggling to keep it from firing, and all of a sudden we're launching forward all at once, and there's nothing left to hold onto but each other as we hurtle through the void."
There was a deep rumble as Spike slowly inhaled, and then heat-shimmers silently rose from his nostrils.
Twilight stood, then leaned in and spread her forehooves against his muzzle, hugging him much in the same way one does a barn.
"I love you, little bro," she whispered, then choked back a laughing sob. "And you'd better wake up for Pinkie Pie's party, or she's going to haunt you forever."
In the days to come—as Ponyville's streets slowly filled with pastel and striped bodies alike—Twilight would stare at the ever-increasing hoof traffic and think back often on the rest of that conversation with Flurry Heart about Hope.
"What do you mean, 'had to be' them?" Twilight had asked, already knowing the answer but hoping somehow, desperately, that she was wrong. She stepped forward toward the wall display, touching a hoof to the flat and blurry disc of blue.
"Relativity," Flurry simply said.
Twilight closed her eyes. For all the time that had passed on Equestria—generations upon generations; two thousand years of zebra tending the world and creating history under Flurry's gentle guidance—the speed of light was a cruel, inviolate mistress, and the universe outside had aged further still. They had leaped a 2.5 million light-year gap between galaxies. Ergo, 2.5 million years had passed.
"How old is our society?" Flurry said. "From the first Cutie Mark to the Hoofweb? If it's older than ten thousand years, then Tia's holding out on us. And since the beings of Hope gave their interstellar navigation advice to Luna, they've done that two hundred and fifty times. We're talking the sort of time scale on which mountains wear down into sand."
"You've tried, right?" Twilight said. "Maybe they've matured. Stabilized. It's not inconceivable a civilization could last that long."
"We're well within targeted communication range, and we're carrying a light source literally visible to the naked eye from their planet. They should have noticed us and shot something our way by now. Just in case, we've done passive scanning on every frequency we know about and some we don't. Dead silence. And the dark side of the planet is as dark as the void."
Twilight scanned the planetary diagrams, struggling in the cold grip of logic. "Maybe they just had to move—they've got a moon, and it looks like that fourth planet, the red one, is in the outer habitable zone—"
Flurry shook her head wearily. "We've turned over every rock in the system, Twi. It's silent. I'm sorry."
Twilight bowed her head, staring at her hooves. It seemed so unfair, to owe their lives to faint and distant voices that simple physics decreed she would never meet.
"We'll look, of course," Flurry said quietly. "Statistically, it seems pretty likely that they just got hit by an extinction-level event. A large meteor they couldn't deflect, or an environmental crash, or even a bad war if they were stupid enough to investigate the sort of destructive technology Tia banned Before. But with a planet that green, there's bound to be something which took over, and is working its way back toward sapience one step at a time."
Twilight drew in, and let out, a long breath. "We'll look," she quietly agreed, and pressed her hoof to the blurry image of the blue planet. "It was hope that led us here. The least we can do is keep hold of it until we can share it with everyone we find."
She went out stargazing when Shard set that night. Hope was still a good ten degrees above the horizon, casting long shadows at her hooves.
And it wasn't the only star. In the past hundred years, they'd moved from the empty void of deep space into the middle of Hope's galaxy. Unfamiliar constellations crowded each other throughout the sky, glimmering gemstones, an unbelievable wealth of light in every direction she looked. She could even make out a faint band of stars running through the sky to mark the galactic plane. It was so full of stars that it looked like someone had spilled a glass of milk through the sky.
Maybe Hope was silent, Twilight thought, but it couldn't be the only blue planet around. And they knew how to travel now. What was stopping them from picking up again, if there were other signals—other friends—to be found?
For the first time since Before, a smile of purpose flitted across her muzzle.
"Everyone we find," Twilight whispered. "Everyone."
MLP with a hard sci-fi bent. That's... not a combination I expected to read for a contest like this.
It might just be me, but a lot of the science seemed a bit inaccessible, and when it's the foundation for literally everything about the story (the premise, the action itself even), that can be a problem. Again, perhaps I'm just a dummy, but the section in the middle where the narration explains Luna's plan to save the world felt difficult to follow.
But on the other hand, Twilight's inner monologue was well handled; her interactions with the other characters (especially Flurry) were charming and heartwarming, and the specifics of this universe's rules and technology showed considerable thought. I was a little worried that it'd go all hopeless cosmic-horror-story by the end, and that "Hope" would just prove to be incredibly ironic, but that didn't happen, and you managed to end on an uplifting, if bittersweet, note.
Even if this story's a bit outside my ken, I liked it enough to give it my mark of approval.
It might just be me, but a lot of the science seemed a bit inaccessible, and when it's the foundation for literally everything about the story (the premise, the action itself even), that can be a problem. Again, perhaps I'm just a dummy, but the section in the middle where the narration explains Luna's plan to save the world felt difficult to follow.
But on the other hand, Twilight's inner monologue was well handled; her interactions with the other characters (especially Flurry) were charming and heartwarming, and the specifics of this universe's rules and technology showed considerable thought. I was a little worried that it'd go all hopeless cosmic-horror-story by the end, and that "Hope" would just prove to be incredibly ironic, but that didn't happen, and you managed to end on an uplifting, if bittersweet, note.
Even if this story's a bit outside my ken, I liked it enough to give it my mark of approval.
There isn’t nearly enough sci-fi in this fandom, and this was a beautiful effort to rectify that lack. A wonderfully balanced blend of hope and melancholy. Thank you for it.
>>Posh
In brief:
• A shockwave was rippling out from the galactic core, wiping out just about everything. Luna was nearly driven mad by the sound of countless stars crying out and being silenced.
• Equestria's sun and moon break physics as we understand it, so they could crack a bit off of the sun and use it to drag the planet away at a gradual but constant acceleration.
• A slingshot around a star that hadn't yet been wiped out by the shockwave sent them in the direction of another galaxy, dodging the shockwave entirely. Specifically, it sent them to the Milky Way and our sun.
>>Posh
In brief:
• A shockwave was rippling out from the galactic core, wiping out just about everything. Luna was nearly driven mad by the sound of countless stars crying out and being silenced.
• Equestria's sun and moon break physics as we understand it, so they could crack a bit off of the sun and use it to drag the planet away at a gradual but constant acceleration.
• A slingshot around a star that hadn't yet been wiped out by the shockwave sent them in the direction of another galaxy, dodging the shockwave entirely. Specifically, it sent them to the Milky Way and our sun.
Okay, so, the technobabble at the beginning was really distracting. I felt like I was being introduced to a new gadget every 5 words, and was going "how much of this should I really be paying attention to?
Then we got past that and the rest of the story was amazing.
I love the world building here. I love the characterizations of the three characters with speaking roles, and the characters without speaking roles. I love the problem they're trying to escape. I love their solution to it and the problems that creates. Really, the more I read, the more I wanted to keep reading (I actually had to sneak peeks at it during work cause I didn't finish on my lunch break yesterday). And, well, that's the highest praise I can give.
I admit I was a bit disappointed in the less-than-happy ending. I really wanted to see the people who had actually come up with the plan. But... I can't say it wasn't fitting.
Good job. Just... just good job.
Verdict: Fantastic.
Then we got past that and the rest of the story was amazing.
I love the world building here. I love the characterizations of the three characters with speaking roles, and the characters without speaking roles. I love the problem they're trying to escape. I love their solution to it and the problems that creates. Really, the more I read, the more I wanted to keep reading (I actually had to sneak peeks at it during work cause I didn't finish on my lunch break yesterday). And, well, that's the highest praise I can give.
I admit I was a bit disappointed in the less-than-happy ending. I really wanted to see the people who had actually come up with the plan. But... I can't say it wasn't fitting.
Good job. Just... just good job.
Verdict: Fantastic.
This would easily be at the top of my slate if it were on my slate. I really like how social facts and relationships are woven in among the technical ones, like the poetry and the observations about Flurry & Cadence. I like it when a few words convey vast amounts of information, like how "The most-upvoted response" tells us the previous poem was posted on an interactive network like the Web which measures upvotes like Reddit, and that upvotes are salient, indicating a culture of egalitarian democracy.
The story used the words 'literal' / 'literally' 6 times, which is about 5 times too many.
Helping the changelings survive is problematic, though that's not your fault; the setting leaves you stuck having to say something about them. I realize my belief that saving the changelings is like saving the timber wolves is a minority viewpoint.
Matumaini ('hope'): It's chic to use a Swahili word, but only in an online publication, where Google is close at hand. In print, it would be as much of a dick move as using an untranslated Latin phrase.
... am I missing something? Just under 1000 = ironic. Just under 2000 = ???
It's admirable how that big wall o' text infodump has 3 different points, at the start, in the middle, and at the end, where it connects to something else--the existence of the aliens at the start, new head-canon about Equestria in the middle, and Luna's banishment at the end. It's admirable that the author had enough restraint to hold off on the infodump this long.
Not a minor quibble: The impact of the last line is broken because it doesn't grammatically fit with the sentences before. I figured out that it meant "We'll make friends with everyone we find," but to do so I had to stop and re-read the last several sentences a few times, try to think of possible interpretations, and finally decide that must be the interpretation even though it didn't make any sense grammatically. That killed the dramatic impact. When it comes to central story points or dramatic moments, whenever possible, & when not deliberately handing out puzzle pieces, make things clear, not just clear enough that the reader can figure it out. (Unless the impact comes from the delayed realization.) I put that in italics because a lot of authors argue with me on that point. Requiring extra cognitive effort to parse sentences or resolve pronouns is far more destructive than authors realize, especially in sentences that are supposed to have emotional impact. It's like telling a joke this way:
Why did the chicken cross the road?
It demarcated the boundary between where it wanted to be and where it was.
By the time you figure out what it means, the joke is dead.
>>Bugle There's no technobabble here. This is hard SF.
Hard SF quibbles:
"Canterlot Castle, 120.47138 kilometers away" -- 0.00008 km = 8 cm. This is more precise than the measurement can be meaningfully defined. To be that precise, you have to answer questions like: Are you taking the nearest point of the castle, the nearest point of its bounding convex surface, the nearest point of a simplified polygon representation (to eliminate irregularities in its surface), the nearest point on the surface of the land, its center of mass, etc.? Are you measuring to the nearest point on Twilight, to Twilight's center of mass? Are you measuring at the moment she begins thinking the proposition, the moment she stops, or are you taking a path integral over Twilight's center of mass throughout that thought? Etc. The implication of such a precise measurement is that Twilight is now an artificial intelligence, as only an AI could make use of such precision. Either that, or their user interface technology is both highly advanced and stupid.
"If Celestia grabbed Shard and "raised" it to in front of Equestria—leveraging unicornium's unique properties to do so without pushing the planet backward and "slowing down" Equestria in normal three-dimensional space—she could then turn on its gravity and have it pull the system's center of gravity forward."
-- This allows you to build a free energy pump. In other words, it breaks the universe. It would be better not to mention this speed-up method.
The story used the words 'literal' / 'literally' 6 times, which is about 5 times too many.
Helping the changelings survive is problematic, though that's not your fault; the setting leaves you stuck having to say something about them. I realize my belief that saving the changelings is like saving the timber wolves is a minority viewpoint.
Matumaini ('hope'): It's chic to use a Swahili word, but only in an online publication, where Google is close at hand. In print, it would be as much of a dick move as using an untranslated Latin phrase.
the 2.5 million light-years to Hope could be covered with an intergalactic banishment of just under two thousand subjective Equestrian years.
The irony, Twilight often noted, could not have possibly been lost on Celestia.
... am I missing something? Just under 1000 = ironic. Just under 2000 = ???
It's admirable how that big wall o' text infodump has 3 different points, at the start, in the middle, and at the end, where it connects to something else--the existence of the aliens at the start, new head-canon about Equestria in the middle, and Luna's banishment at the end. It's admirable that the author had enough restraint to hold off on the infodump this long.
Not a minor quibble: The impact of the last line is broken because it doesn't grammatically fit with the sentences before. I figured out that it meant "We'll make friends with everyone we find," but to do so I had to stop and re-read the last several sentences a few times, try to think of possible interpretations, and finally decide that must be the interpretation even though it didn't make any sense grammatically. That killed the dramatic impact. When it comes to central story points or dramatic moments, whenever possible, & when not deliberately handing out puzzle pieces, make things clear, not just clear enough that the reader can figure it out. (Unless the impact comes from the delayed realization.) I put that in italics because a lot of authors argue with me on that point. Requiring extra cognitive effort to parse sentences or resolve pronouns is far more destructive than authors realize, especially in sentences that are supposed to have emotional impact. It's like telling a joke this way:
Why did the chicken cross the road?
It demarcated the boundary between where it wanted to be and where it was.
By the time you figure out what it means, the joke is dead.
>>Bugle There's no technobabble here. This is hard SF.
Hard SF quibbles:
"Canterlot Castle, 120.47138 kilometers away" -- 0.00008 km = 8 cm. This is more precise than the measurement can be meaningfully defined. To be that precise, you have to answer questions like: Are you taking the nearest point of the castle, the nearest point of its bounding convex surface, the nearest point of a simplified polygon representation (to eliminate irregularities in its surface), the nearest point on the surface of the land, its center of mass, etc.? Are you measuring to the nearest point on Twilight, to Twilight's center of mass? Are you measuring at the moment she begins thinking the proposition, the moment she stops, or are you taking a path integral over Twilight's center of mass throughout that thought? Etc. The implication of such a precise measurement is that Twilight is now an artificial intelligence, as only an AI could make use of such precision. Either that, or their user interface technology is both highly advanced and stupid.
"If Celestia grabbed Shard and "raised" it to in front of Equestria—leveraging unicornium's unique properties to do so without pushing the planet backward and "slowing down" Equestria in normal three-dimensional space—she could then turn on its gravity and have it pull the system's center of gravity forward."
-- This allows you to build a free energy pump. In other words, it breaks the universe. It would be better not to mention this speed-up method.
This story is fantastic, and I will be disappointed if it does not medal.
My only nitpick is that I don't understand how they were able to avoid the shockwave. Did they just get out of its range?
>>Bad Horse
I was under the impression that Twilight isn't an AI, but she does have a lot of cybernetic add-ons of some sort, and her brain at the very least interfaces directly with a computer.
That's only because you don't understand how the "magic" part of physics works. As far as we can tell, the magic in the show already seems to create free energy.
My only nitpick is that I don't understand how they were able to avoid the shockwave. Did they just get out of its range?
>>Bad Horse
The implication of such a precise measurement is that Twilight is now an artificial intelligence, as only an AI could make use of such precision. Either that, or their user interface technology is both highly advanced and stupid.
I was under the impression that Twilight isn't an AI, but she does have a lot of cybernetic add-ons of some sort, and her brain at the very least interfaces directly with a computer.
This allows you to build a free energy pump. In other words, it breaks the universe. It would be better not to mention this speed-up method.
That's only because you don't understand how the "magic" part of physics works. As far as we can tell, the magic in the show already seems to create free energy.
Okay, I absolutely loved this one. But let's start off with a negative.
First, way too much jargon in the opening few paragraphs. We get it, it's the future! We don't have to see a fancy phrase for every bathroom gadget. Also, how do you blink "vector shift" out of your eyes? I thought that was some weird term for sleep-pod induced eye crud until later, when I realized it was a teleport. Super precise numbers are also amiss. Precision is important when it matters, not when it's not. All our computers can go dozens of decimal places on every calculation, but we code our software to round that down to only a few digits, as the rest is unimportant. The narrator and/or Twilight should know to do the same.
It smooths out after that, and the story does a great job of leading us forward with curious reveals about the time, place, and situation. The dark sky, the shard of a sun, aged celestia... all these things are wonderfully exciting hooks. The visuals could use a bit of work though. The long shadows, and the shadows being "dimmer" are hard to visualize. Knowing what comes later, I can re-read it and it makes no sense, but be careful about description of things new to the reader, and that you don't assume they know more than they can at a give point.
I have very few complaints all through the bulk of the story. It's really a fantastic read, and I love so many of the little details. That the Zebras stayed awake, and thus evolved is awesome. Flurry heart being some weird cyber-punk media princess is fantastic as well. The pacing also kind of echos the slow-waking of the world itself.
The explanations of how they moved the planet are fun as well, though, as someone who also wrote stories about moving Equestria into a natural solar orbit by manipulating the moon and gravity... I think I probably "got it" too quickly. My main gripe there is just that you spent too much time on the details, trying to get every corner of it, rather than giving broader strokes the reader can fill in. Well, that and after all the made up terms and words in the opening, you still called something "Unicornium" :-P I mean, I think it was pretty clever to use a shard of it as a planetary scale Mach-Lorentz thruster, but... I already GOT that from the basic description. The details didn't improve the story (only left me more to nitpick) and I suspect may be lost entirely as jargon on someone less into hard sci-fi.
But then we come to my final issue. You tease and reveal the world slowly, and it makes it great. Then there's some flash back, which explains away the rest. The problem is the story doesn't go forward from there. They arrive, and instead of finding out the last mystery, of how the aliens of Hope were able to see into the past/future far enough to give a message 2.5 million light years away... That's set up through out the story as the big mystery, yet it's never resolved. Instead, it's just an empty planet.
Yes, I do realize that it's subtely hinted that this is the Milky Way galaxy, and perhaps this is a long-abandoned Earth, but subtle hints like that don't make up for not giving a proper resolution to a central question.
All that said, I still enjoyed this immensely, and I criticize because when I see good things I want them to be even better. This is the top of my slate, and as such, brings me to my last complaint. I now realize I'm going to lose this contest. :-)
First, way too much jargon in the opening few paragraphs. We get it, it's the future! We don't have to see a fancy phrase for every bathroom gadget. Also, how do you blink "vector shift" out of your eyes? I thought that was some weird term for sleep-pod induced eye crud until later, when I realized it was a teleport. Super precise numbers are also amiss. Precision is important when it matters, not when it's not. All our computers can go dozens of decimal places on every calculation, but we code our software to round that down to only a few digits, as the rest is unimportant. The narrator and/or Twilight should know to do the same.
It smooths out after that, and the story does a great job of leading us forward with curious reveals about the time, place, and situation. The dark sky, the shard of a sun, aged celestia... all these things are wonderfully exciting hooks. The visuals could use a bit of work though. The long shadows, and the shadows being "dimmer" are hard to visualize. Knowing what comes later, I can re-read it and it makes no sense, but be careful about description of things new to the reader, and that you don't assume they know more than they can at a give point.
I have very few complaints all through the bulk of the story. It's really a fantastic read, and I love so many of the little details. That the Zebras stayed awake, and thus evolved is awesome. Flurry heart being some weird cyber-punk media princess is fantastic as well. The pacing also kind of echos the slow-waking of the world itself.
The explanations of how they moved the planet are fun as well, though, as someone who also wrote stories about moving Equestria into a natural solar orbit by manipulating the moon and gravity... I think I probably "got it" too quickly. My main gripe there is just that you spent too much time on the details, trying to get every corner of it, rather than giving broader strokes the reader can fill in. Well, that and after all the made up terms and words in the opening, you still called something "Unicornium" :-P I mean, I think it was pretty clever to use a shard of it as a planetary scale Mach-Lorentz thruster, but... I already GOT that from the basic description. The details didn't improve the story (only left me more to nitpick) and I suspect may be lost entirely as jargon on someone less into hard sci-fi.
But then we come to my final issue. You tease and reveal the world slowly, and it makes it great. Then there's some flash back, which explains away the rest. The problem is the story doesn't go forward from there. They arrive, and instead of finding out the last mystery, of how the aliens of Hope were able to see into the past/future far enough to give a message 2.5 million light years away... That's set up through out the story as the big mystery, yet it's never resolved. Instead, it's just an empty planet.
Yes, I do realize that it's subtely hinted that this is the Milky Way galaxy, and perhaps this is a long-abandoned Earth, but subtle hints like that don't make up for not giving a proper resolution to a central question.
All that said, I still enjoyed this immensely, and I criticize because when I see good things I want them to be even better. This is the top of my slate, and as such, brings me to my last complaint. I now realize I'm going to lose this contest. :-)
This is smashing. The story is not unheard of (very close to the thesis developed by Van Vogt in The Pawns of Ā about humans fleeing a galactic doom in a fleet of spacecraft while in hibernation; I can also detect tinges of Scott’s Prometheus or maybe Clarke’s 2001), but it’s exquisitely executed. Truly, you've pulled off a story which should be an inspiration to most of us here (and especially me). Top notch.
Some nitpicks though:
At the beginning :
That sentence was a bit jarring, because to me, the “it” refers to the heart, not the hologram!
You like agonising, eh?
What do you mean by "aphelion"? Aphelion is traditionally reserved for the Sun, while apogee is for the Earth (apoapsis is the generic term, maybe you should've used this one in this context?) but what I don't reckon is the implied relation between the motion along the orbit and the sunrise, which is determined by the planet's rotation alone.
The technobabble is subdued and was fine, but I found myself skimming over the passage describing the slingshot. It is a bit bloated, as if you had decided to indulge in a very long-winded and convoluted screed to reconcile Albert Einstein with Lauren Faust. It just waylays the reader and finally doesn't add much. You should cut through it or drizzle droplets of it all around rather than corralling all the physics in one big chunk.
But other than that, it’s simply fantastic. It’s a clear winner. Out and away.
Congrats on another gold, Horizon.
Some nitpicks though:
At the beginning :
She took a few minutes to let her heart beat life back into her veins, moved her hoof through "6:35 AM" to touch it,…
That sentence was a bit jarring, because to me, the “it” refers to the heart, not the hologram!
with agonizing slowness
arc-second by agonizing arc-second
You like agonising, eh?
"We've five minutes past aphelion," she said. "I'm letting the moment linger—for you, and for everyone. But I shouldn't delay sunrise much longer."
What do you mean by "aphelion"? Aphelion is traditionally reserved for the Sun, while apogee is for the Earth (apoapsis is the generic term, maybe you should've used this one in this context?) but what I don't reckon is the implied relation between the motion along the orbit and the sunrise, which is determined by the planet's rotation alone.
The technobabble is subdued and was fine, but I found myself skimming over the passage describing the slingshot. It is a bit bloated, as if you had decided to indulge in a very long-winded and convoluted screed to reconcile Albert Einstein with Lauren Faust. It just waylays the reader and finally doesn't add much. You should cut through it or drizzle droplets of it all around rather than corralling all the physics in one big chunk.
But other than that, it’s simply fantastic. It’s a clear winner. Out and away.
Congrats on another gold, Horizon.
Well this was a fun read. Not often you get a hard sci-fi story in the pony-verse, though that there's any at all is always a bit of a surprise. Reminds me to get on with my Honor Harrington crossover one of these days. But, I digress.
Slightshot is a story of Equestria fleeing an indescribable extinction event. Yes, the planet. Its an audacious plan for an audacious story and there's a wonderful blend of modern and ancient in the story where Equestria has almost vanished in an attempt to escape its fate. The few surviving characters from the show are all ancient relics or so far changed by the journey to be unrecognizable. Hope and tragedy play off each other throughout in a very touching tale of a journey through the stars. I've a few complaints, the technobabble takes itself far, far too seriously and Bad Horse pointed out the immersion breaking excessive accuracy, but these are fairly minor.
It's just a shame nothing happens.
Sorry, that was definitely a shock value line there. In all seriousness though, Slingshot runs headfirst into the hard sci-fi trap of a wonderful world that consumes the text at the expense of the story. The plot line is, Twilight wakes up, visits her friends (mostly still asleep) and doesn't find aliens. In the meantime we're introduced to this wonderful world filled with the aftereffects of agonizing choices, but nothing really happens in the time we're there beyond the arrival, which is a fairly minor event in the grand scheme of things and one Twilight has zero control over or impact on (within the time-frame of the story).
Again, I love this world and it is a great backdrop for an epic, but that epic isn't on the screen. It's alluded to, hinted at and tantalisingly close at some points, but not there. Give me Luna's struggle to communicate the end the world. Give me Twilight vainly trying to avert a problem friendship can't fix. Heck, give me the zebra trying to understand their long lost kin. Not just the backdrop.
This all probably sounds really negative to you, author. Don't take it that way. This story definitely deserves a medal for the background alone, there's just so much more potential.
Slightshot is a story of Equestria fleeing an indescribable extinction event. Yes, the planet. Its an audacious plan for an audacious story and there's a wonderful blend of modern and ancient in the story where Equestria has almost vanished in an attempt to escape its fate. The few surviving characters from the show are all ancient relics or so far changed by the journey to be unrecognizable. Hope and tragedy play off each other throughout in a very touching tale of a journey through the stars. I've a few complaints, the technobabble takes itself far, far too seriously and Bad Horse pointed out the immersion breaking excessive accuracy, but these are fairly minor.
It's just a shame nothing happens.
Sorry, that was definitely a shock value line there. In all seriousness though, Slingshot runs headfirst into the hard sci-fi trap of a wonderful world that consumes the text at the expense of the story. The plot line is, Twilight wakes up, visits her friends (mostly still asleep) and doesn't find aliens. In the meantime we're introduced to this wonderful world filled with the aftereffects of agonizing choices, but nothing really happens in the time we're there beyond the arrival, which is a fairly minor event in the grand scheme of things and one Twilight has zero control over or impact on (within the time-frame of the story).
Again, I love this world and it is a great backdrop for an epic, but that epic isn't on the screen. It's alluded to, hinted at and tantalisingly close at some points, but not there. Give me Luna's struggle to communicate the end the world. Give me Twilight vainly trying to avert a problem friendship can't fix. Heck, give me the zebra trying to understand their long lost kin. Not just the backdrop.
This all probably sounds really negative to you, author. Don't take it that way. This story definitely deserves a medal for the background alone, there's just so much more potential.
>>Bad Horse
Xepher reminded me the word I was looking for wa "Jargon" I didn't have it at the tip of my tongue, so went for the closest thing I could think of (which wound up being wrong).
Xepher reminded me the word I was looking for wa "Jargon" I didn't have it at the tip of my tongue, so went for the closest thing I could think of (which wound up being wrong).
Entry Number 13, File Code Name Slingshot
This story didn't seem to fit with me. I get it that it is on a whole idle of sci-fy and heavily on travel in the galaxy deal, and with the fact that Twilight and her Immortal status along with the other princesses. But it just didn't settle with me compared to the other stories that I have read. Don't get me wrong it was an interesting read, just didn't suit me is all.
This story didn't seem to fit with me. I get it that it is on a whole idle of sci-fy and heavily on travel in the galaxy deal, and with the fact that Twilight and her Immortal status along with the other princesses. But it just didn't settle with me compared to the other stories that I have read. Don't get me wrong it was an interesting read, just didn't suit me is all.
E! - Slingshot - Fun, fun story. Not on my slate, but still well worth the read.
Note: The drive is much like Alan Dean Foster's Kurita-Kinoshita drive (KK drive) done up to planetary scale, which is cool squared.
Note: The drive is much like Alan Dean Foster's Kurita-Kinoshita drive (KK drive) done up to planetary scale, which is cool squared.
What I liked: the interactions between Twilight and the rest of the characters, as imagined in this future world and the worldbuilding concerning where these characters are and what they're doing now. It was detailed and immersive. It drew me in for the most part.
What I didn't like: the technobabble in the beginning and the lengthy, hard-to-follow explanation of the slingshot. The passion for the science is clear, but as a layman, it almost completely lost me. I agree with >>billymorph on the lack of plot. It bothered me quite a bit, considering most of the story alluded to has already happened.
That's all I can say, really. I don't think I can elaborate, considering that I'm far from the target audience here.
What I didn't like: the technobabble in the beginning and the lengthy, hard-to-follow explanation of the slingshot. The passion for the science is clear, but as a layman, it almost completely lost me. I agree with >>billymorph on the lack of plot. It bothered me quite a bit, considering most of the story alluded to has already happened.
That's all I can say, really. I don't think I can elaborate, considering that I'm far from the target audience here.
Post by
QuillScratch
, deleted
>>horizon
I couldn't be happier to be wrong about Solitude's medal chances, and I couldn't be happier to be right about Bonitatem's placement. Great jobs, Posh and Fahrenheit! Very well-deserved gold and silvers.
I'm also grateful that despite its flaws, everyone mostly enjoyed Slingshot. I'm still stunned at how it fell together so quickly.
Slingshot - The Retrospective
The direct inspiration for this story was my Hugo Awards reading; I've been going through the novels for my ballot, and had recently finished Neal Stephenson's Seveneves. That story is hard SF about some force blowing up the moon, and humanity's scramble to assemble a space colony on short notice that will allow the human race to survive in orbit for 5000 years before returning to the ruined Earth's surface. So of course I had a whimsy about writing pony hard SF about surviving some sort of existential astronomical threat -- except pretty much any apocalypse scenario you can name can be foiled by the canonical ability of alicorns to move the sun and moon, not to mention that that ability breaks physics so hard you guys. So I quickly realized that the answer wasn't to dance around the cheap OP-ness of celestial manipulation, but to invent a disaster so extreme that it was the only solution. Hence the ring shockwave from the galactic core (which is, er, sort of scientifically indefensible as space explosions are spherical), and the need to flee it using the violation of physics as a free energy source for gravitational acceleration. Various story elements slotted themselves into place as I wrote it: Luna going crazy from the screams of the stars, the use of stars for initial momentum and the trajectory change, the pseudoscience of unicornium (gah, still hate that name) and the higher-dimensional handwave of the free energy, the cosmic billiards of sacrificing the moon to obtain a chunk of sun, etc. The extrapolation of various characters into the future was relatively easy from there, though I'm kind of proud of my Alicorn of Communication.
I intended the first scene as an Immortality Angst head-fake, with it being apparently obvious that Celestia was dying along with the sun getting really weak, until suddenly the actual sun rises and what the hell horizon, and then the weird clues that they were happy suddenly seem meaningful, and I get to spend the rest of the story backfilling context. (The scene with Twilight and Spike, by contrast, was intended as actual Immortality Angst, as an ironic echo, and I'm surprised nobody commented on that.) I intended the opening as deliberately buzzword-happy, as my fastest way of setting expectations and establishing that This Is Science Fiction in a Writeoff context, but that seems to have backfired some; I'll tone it way down.
The science here is a combination of Actual Math and vague hoofwaving, though I'm trying in editing to steer it toward more of the former. Our nearest galaxy actually is 2.5 million light-years away, and I heavily abused the Relativistic Starship Calculator for my numbers; time dilation actually would make for a 2000-year trip if they were able to accelerate/decelerate at 0.01 G the whole way.
Hoofwavey things that I am sciencing more in my edits:
- To get Shard close enough for a constant 0.01G acceleration (which is to say, a constant 0.02G acceleration half the time when Shard is in front of Equestria), the tidal forces on the planet would be cranked up by a factor of over 1000x -- high tides would go from five feet high to a towering mile-high wall of water. :twilightoops: So in the revised story, they are also freezing the oceans solid before they start their trip, which also gives me a convenient excuse to explain Discord's absence (he volunteered, and sacrificed himself in the process of channeling that much energy).
- Slingshotting around Alphys, sadly, makes no mathematical sense; by the time they get there, they're already going fast enough that the speed boost of the gravity assist is infinitesemal, and the trajectory change requires either A) that they slow down so dramatically that the wave overtakes them, or B) that they get so close that the G-forces wrack the planet into dust. So I'm going to let the initial boost from their sun and the ongoing assist carry the title. The trajectory change is easy enough to accomplish simply by having Shard pull them sideways instead of forward for a while.
- I can't come up with a plausible enough reason to have a ring-wave from the galactic core disaster, so it's just a 3-d shockwave now made up of cosmic rays moving at 0.9c, and the solution is no longer dodging it but simply going faster than it. It only takes a decade or two, at those accelerations, to reach 0.9c, so accelerating straight away from the galactic core until they're at that speed, and then continuing to accelerate from there in any outward direction, will keep them alive. By the time the shockwave reaches Hope's galaxy, it should be survivable, because it deteriorates with the cube of distance (giving them a reduction in magnitude of about 10^6 of the energy delivered). And even if not, due to the time-dilation differences, they've bought themselves thousands upon thousands of years to work out another escape route.
- Actual travel at such massive fractions of the speed of light is ridiculously deadly, which fortunately Equestrian mages are uniquely suited to deal with (setting up a particle deflector shield in front of their path which teleports stray matter behind the planet before they hit it).
I'm also trying to make the science friendlier, including seeing if I can deliver it as a lecture/speech rather than exposition, though I don't know how much it's desirable to tone it down given the genre. In hard SF, showing your work (the science porn) is more or less the point.
A few specific responses:
>>billymorph
I'm expanding the section with Luna and bringing it more into present-time narrative from its current place as backdrop, which hopefully should help the "nothing happens" effect some, and I'll try to nudge it into a more active story in general.
>>Bad Horse
The absurd specificity wasn't meant to refer to the distance to Canterlot Castle as a whole, but as the actual distance she teleported in between her old location and her new location on Celestia's balcony. I've clarified this as best I can in my edits, but I intended it as a point of characterization of Twilight, who I think really would calculate it down to such a ludicrous number of significant digits.
And yes, the gravity assist is free energy; that's the only way to accelerate to such massive fractions of c. Given that I'm working with canon insisting that they can do it, I'm trying to handwave it and work with it.
>>FanOfMostEverything
Good eye, as the first to mention the hinted true identity of Hope.
>>Xepher
I'm definitely considering an epilogue with a clearer resolution of the meeting-the-aliens-or-not plotline. Maybe a message left for future generations on the Moon? Finding a Pioneer plaque or something? I'm not quite sure yet of the balance I'd want to strike with that.
Anyway, congratulations everyone on another good Writeoff round, and see you in a few weeks. ^.^
I couldn't be happier to be wrong about Solitude's medal chances, and I couldn't be happier to be right about Bonitatem's placement. Great jobs, Posh and Fahrenheit! Very well-deserved gold and silvers.
I'm also grateful that despite its flaws, everyone mostly enjoyed Slingshot. I'm still stunned at how it fell together so quickly.
Slingshot - The Retrospective
The direct inspiration for this story was my Hugo Awards reading; I've been going through the novels for my ballot, and had recently finished Neal Stephenson's Seveneves. That story is hard SF about some force blowing up the moon, and humanity's scramble to assemble a space colony on short notice that will allow the human race to survive in orbit for 5000 years before returning to the ruined Earth's surface. So of course I had a whimsy about writing pony hard SF about surviving some sort of existential astronomical threat -- except pretty much any apocalypse scenario you can name can be foiled by the canonical ability of alicorns to move the sun and moon, not to mention that that ability breaks physics so hard you guys. So I quickly realized that the answer wasn't to dance around the cheap OP-ness of celestial manipulation, but to invent a disaster so extreme that it was the only solution. Hence the ring shockwave from the galactic core (which is, er, sort of scientifically indefensible as space explosions are spherical), and the need to flee it using the violation of physics as a free energy source for gravitational acceleration. Various story elements slotted themselves into place as I wrote it: Luna going crazy from the screams of the stars, the use of stars for initial momentum and the trajectory change, the pseudoscience of unicornium (gah, still hate that name) and the higher-dimensional handwave of the free energy, the cosmic billiards of sacrificing the moon to obtain a chunk of sun, etc. The extrapolation of various characters into the future was relatively easy from there, though I'm kind of proud of my Alicorn of Communication.
I intended the first scene as an Immortality Angst head-fake, with it being apparently obvious that Celestia was dying along with the sun getting really weak, until suddenly the actual sun rises and what the hell horizon, and then the weird clues that they were happy suddenly seem meaningful, and I get to spend the rest of the story backfilling context. (The scene with Twilight and Spike, by contrast, was intended as actual Immortality Angst, as an ironic echo, and I'm surprised nobody commented on that.) I intended the opening as deliberately buzzword-happy, as my fastest way of setting expectations and establishing that This Is Science Fiction in a Writeoff context, but that seems to have backfired some; I'll tone it way down.
The science here is a combination of Actual Math and vague hoofwaving, though I'm trying in editing to steer it toward more of the former. Our nearest galaxy actually is 2.5 million light-years away, and I heavily abused the Relativistic Starship Calculator for my numbers; time dilation actually would make for a 2000-year trip if they were able to accelerate/decelerate at 0.01 G the whole way.
Hoofwavey things that I am sciencing more in my edits:
- To get Shard close enough for a constant 0.01G acceleration (which is to say, a constant 0.02G acceleration half the time when Shard is in front of Equestria), the tidal forces on the planet would be cranked up by a factor of over 1000x -- high tides would go from five feet high to a towering mile-high wall of water. :twilightoops: So in the revised story, they are also freezing the oceans solid before they start their trip, which also gives me a convenient excuse to explain Discord's absence (he volunteered, and sacrificed himself in the process of channeling that much energy).
- Slingshotting around Alphys, sadly, makes no mathematical sense; by the time they get there, they're already going fast enough that the speed boost of the gravity assist is infinitesemal, and the trajectory change requires either A) that they slow down so dramatically that the wave overtakes them, or B) that they get so close that the G-forces wrack the planet into dust. So I'm going to let the initial boost from their sun and the ongoing assist carry the title. The trajectory change is easy enough to accomplish simply by having Shard pull them sideways instead of forward for a while.
- I can't come up with a plausible enough reason to have a ring-wave from the galactic core disaster, so it's just a 3-d shockwave now made up of cosmic rays moving at 0.9c, and the solution is no longer dodging it but simply going faster than it. It only takes a decade or two, at those accelerations, to reach 0.9c, so accelerating straight away from the galactic core until they're at that speed, and then continuing to accelerate from there in any outward direction, will keep them alive. By the time the shockwave reaches Hope's galaxy, it should be survivable, because it deteriorates with the cube of distance (giving them a reduction in magnitude of about 10^6 of the energy delivered). And even if not, due to the time-dilation differences, they've bought themselves thousands upon thousands of years to work out another escape route.
- Actual travel at such massive fractions of the speed of light is ridiculously deadly, which fortunately Equestrian mages are uniquely suited to deal with (setting up a particle deflector shield in front of their path which teleports stray matter behind the planet before they hit it).
I'm also trying to make the science friendlier, including seeing if I can deliver it as a lecture/speech rather than exposition, though I don't know how much it's desirable to tone it down given the genre. In hard SF, showing your work (the science porn) is more or less the point.
A few specific responses:
>>billymorph
I'm expanding the section with Luna and bringing it more into present-time narrative from its current place as backdrop, which hopefully should help the "nothing happens" effect some, and I'll try to nudge it into a more active story in general.
>>Bad Horse
The absurd specificity wasn't meant to refer to the distance to Canterlot Castle as a whole, but as the actual distance she teleported in between her old location and her new location on Celestia's balcony. I've clarified this as best I can in my edits, but I intended it as a point of characterization of Twilight, who I think really would calculate it down to such a ludicrous number of significant digits.
And yes, the gravity assist is free energy; that's the only way to accelerate to such massive fractions of c. Given that I'm working with canon insisting that they can do it, I'm trying to handwave it and work with it.
>>FanOfMostEverything
Good eye, as the first to mention the hinted true identity of Hope.
>>Xepher
I'm definitely considering an epilogue with a clearer resolution of the meeting-the-aliens-or-not plotline. Maybe a message left for future generations on the Moon? Finding a Pioneer plaque or something? I'm not quite sure yet of the balance I'd want to strike with that.
Anyway, congratulations everyone on another good Writeoff round, and see you in a few weeks. ^.^
>>horizon Slingshot was second on my slate, but I fully expected it to take the gold. I'm as surprised that it didn't as I am that Bonnie did.
I want to write a post on that, speaking of, but I'm still kind of floored, so give me a few hours to gather my thoughts. For now, two things.
One, let me publicly apologize to Zoey for "literally breaking [her] heart into multiple peices [sic]"
And two, let me shamelessly self promote! I posted the story with some minor edits and alterations to FIMfiction (just editing and formatting stuff, along with a slightly reworded line or two here and there), so if you wanna take a look, leave a comment, plug it to your friends and neighbors and clergy, then by all means do so. Here's the link.
I want to write a post on that, speaking of, but I'm still kind of floored, so give me a few hours to gather my thoughts. For now, two things.
One, let me publicly apologize to Zoey for "literally breaking [her] heart into multiple peices [sic]"
And two, let me shamelessly self promote! I posted the story with some minor edits and alterations to FIMfiction (just editing and formatting stuff, along with a slightly reworded line or two here and there), so if you wanna take a look, leave a comment, plug it to your friends and neighbors and clergy, then by all means do so. Here's the link.
>>horizon
A few comment-things:
1. Put Discord into hibernation or something rather than killing him. Like 'The strain of holding the oceans frozen for 2000 years has him in sympathetic stasis' or something.
2. I have no idea if it's even viable - but the idea that the signals Luna gets aren't even intentional but one of our 'Hi, universe!" signals we went out would be an interesting take on it; thus, humanity saves Equestria completely by accident.
3. If it's intentional, it feels a lot like that Nicolas Cage Knowing movie, especially with Luna repeating number strings.
4. Definitely agree you want to add in a 'Here's what happened' ending for humanity. I am partial to them going the Stargate-Ancients route if you go more 'They saved them on purpose', and thus no Earth they find messages left for Ponykind to pick up their legacy.
...And you can totally then create Pony SG-1. Wait 100 years for Celestia & Luna to wake up. Twilight is Daniel Jackson, Luna Teal'c, Celestia O'Neill, and Cadance Carter. Flurry can be the base commander or something!
A few comment-things:
1. Put Discord into hibernation or something rather than killing him. Like 'The strain of holding the oceans frozen for 2000 years has him in sympathetic stasis' or something.
2. I have no idea if it's even viable - but the idea that the signals Luna gets aren't even intentional but one of our 'Hi, universe!" signals we went out would be an interesting take on it; thus, humanity saves Equestria completely by accident.
3. If it's intentional, it feels a lot like that Nicolas Cage Knowing movie, especially with Luna repeating number strings.
4. Definitely agree you want to add in a 'Here's what happened' ending for humanity. I am partial to them going the Stargate-Ancients route if you go more 'They saved them on purpose', and thus no Earth they find messages left for Ponykind to pick up their legacy.
...And you can totally then create Pony SG-1. Wait 100 years for Celestia & Luna to wake up. Twilight is Daniel Jackson, Luna Teal'c, Celestia O'Neill, and Cadance Carter. Flurry can be the base commander or something!