Starlight felt small for the first time.
Her mother had raised her with confidence and strength, to approach every problem like a puzzle to be conquered and destroyed, and so she’d never had her ego fail her. She’d lived the life of a programmer, asserting her will on reality through the digital beings that she saw often as extensions of herself rather than beings in their own merit.
The nature of cognitive dissonance had led her to this point, believing herself the queen of her own life and yet serving the opinions and needs of the computers which controlled her life down to the smallest detail.
She was suddenly so deeply aware of how much of her behavior was predictable to a computer like Luna, and she wondered if Luna needed her anymore, now that she’d fetched her such a powerful magical artifact.
But the eager smile on Luna’s simulated face did not shift into the cruel sneer she somehow expected, but rather it faded into an entertained smile.
“I should have told you I was teleporting you. My apologies,” she said simply.
Starlight swallowed, feeling a little lightheaded, and tried to smile in reply.
“What’s next?”
“Well, the data port should plug into one of my standard expansion module connectors,” Luna said, gesturing to a wall of ports and connectors next to her core backup console, currently turned off.
Starlight nodded, and carried the mirror over before plugging it in, making sure that the connectors nestled together properly and clicked into place.
“And now, I have the ability to spy on the multiverse. What parameters are you seeking?” Luna asked.
“I… would say ‘happiness’ but I don’t know…”
“Oh, happiness is absolutely quantifiable,” Luna chuckled smoothly as the mirror lit up in silver light. “It’s an emergent property of safety, stability, purpose, and the harmony quotient of their social circle.”
Uncertain of what to do, Starlight simply watched as Luna peered into the mirror.
The silver surface warped and shimmered, before an image appeared.
It was not of the metal halls of a space ship, or anything to do with space at all. Instead, it was a large wooden building spread out on a grassy lawn near a large hill. It was clearly planetside on some planet or another, and sitting on one of the many balconies she could see herself sitting.
She was smiling, as she ate a simple sandwich of rye and greens.
Starlight stepped closer, looking at her, studying the way her hair swooped instead of being pulled back tight. The way that she held herself with so little tension in her shoulders.
“Can you… Well, we wouldn’t want to remove her from her environment,” Starlight said hesitantly. “Could we create a simulation of her? Using her life as a template, creating a subset neural net within you?”
“That would be far simpler, and less disruptive, than trying to bring her here physically,” Luna agreed.
The mirror flickered, and sped through all of her alternative self’s life at an incredible pace.
Brief moments occasionally took long enough for Starlight to see, and it was remarkable how similar they were to her own life. Their mothers looked almost the same, their childhood home, Sunburst…
Sunburst was a stallion?! That was bizarre, but then she was quickly distracted by watching her alternative self lose Sunburst, and then gain her cutie mark alone, among stacks of book and paper. That felt familiar. But then her other self failed to get into a school, and left her city entirely. Out into the wilderness, gathering followers, building an entire town with their help, and then…
She watched, aghast, as her alternative self formed a brutally enforced cult. How could this be her happiest self? How could any version of her do something like this, and end up being anything but a guilt-ridden remorseful wreck?
A figure then appeared in her life who Starlight recognized.
“Is that Prime Administrative Council Twilight Sparkle?!” Starlight asked, holding her head in her hooves. “Why does she have wings?!”
“We can ask her once the simulacrum is ready,” Luna shrugged.
Twilight ruined her cult, turned everyone against her, and then she spent years stalking and planning before doing magical battle with Twilight. She managed to warp time around herself and attack the essential moments which Twilight’s life had been formed around.
But instead of striking Starlight down, instead of ending the threat or locking her up, Twilight Sparkle somberly talked Starlight around to her way of thinking.
An impossible and bizarre outcome, but one that then lead to learning about other ponies, spending time with them, becoming a councilor of all things at a university, helping save the world a few times, and then becoming the headmistress of the university.
A teacher. Of all things, her alternative self had become a teacher. Not just of young ponies but of the young of many species.
Starlight couldn’t imagine being a teacher, dealing with children and their clingy grubby hooves. Much less claws and chitin.
Luna turned away from the mirror and concentrated on a spot on the floor, where a holographic image of the other Starlight appeared, slowly becoming more stable and lifelike as additional details were layered on top of the image. Then, after a few seconds, the other Starlight blinked and looked around.
“-Ti… ?Idi liϕas alikon ali?”
Luna chuckled.
“Ah, right. She’s several linguistic shifts behind us. Nearly unrecognizable. Here.”
The hologram flickered, and the Other Starlight stared at Luna with wide eyes.
“Princess Luna, did you just… put an entirely new language into my mind directly? Is that… ethical? Theoretically you could modify anything about my mind if you wanted to, that’s a chilling thought…”
She trailed off as she looked at Starlight, narrowing her eyes before spotting the mirror.
“Oh! Oh, I actually know what this is, you’ve summoned me to an alternate universe!”
Starlight’s jaw dropped, and she quickly shook her head.
“How, how could you possibly know that?”
“There’s a similar mirror in my world,” she pointed at the mirror with a hoof. “Twilight modified it for the sake of stability, it’s much bulkier than your version though.”
“That would be the difference in technological advancement between our world and yours,” Luna said with a gentle smile. “And, in reality, we have not truly summoned you. Your original self is still present in your world, unaware. You are a… let’s say magical duplicate of her.”
“Well that’s absolutely horrifying,” the Other Starlight admitted calmly. “So I don’t actually exist.”
“That’s not quite true,” Starlight interrupted before Luna could speak. “Luna here exists, and has Equience as an Artificial Intelligence capable of surpassing the Starswirl Test. You’re a subset of her programming, fully Equient and a pony as far as our laws are concerned.”
“So I have the right to my own free will?”
“Within limits,” Starlight nodded.
“Well then… I at least exist insomuch as I can experience things, and I ought to enjoy that. Why did you create me, Princess?”
Luna chuckled softly and gestured at Starlight.
“Our own Starlight sought out the happiest version of herself, to learn from. It would be her interests that brought you here.”
The two Starlights stared at each other for a moment before the digital one smiled.
“Well, I’m going to need a new name, clearly. Let’s go with Starbright.”
“You’re naming yourself after a filly’s rhyme?” Starlight asked, tilting her head.
“It’s how our moms picked our names originally,” Starbright pointed out. “No harm in continuing the trend.”
“I think it’s quite nice,” Luna commented, sitting down and smiling as she watched the two talk.
“Fine. So, why are you happy?” Starlight demanded.
Starbright didn’t answer right away, instead taking her time to think and reflect on her life.
“It’s a bit grim that I’m the happiest of our multiversal selves, honestly,” she finally concluded. “But I think it comes down to disproving core axioms I’d assumed were true.”
Starlight looked away. She could feel the threat to her worldview already, and though she wanted to leave or lash out to preserve it, she had to at least hear Bright out.
“Is she going to be okay?” Bright asked Luna.
“Don’t ask her, just… go on. What did you disprove,” Starlight snapped.
“Alright. I didn’t disprove them,” Bright shook her head. “Other ponies did. I had believed that I was inherently flawed, I believed that my mother’s approval was worth more than my own happiness, and I believed that Sunburst’s cutie mark was why he left me.”
“Sunburst didn’t leave me,” Starlight said quickly, leaping on the difference between them. “She started going to school, but we remained good friends!”
“But not best friends,” Bright said simply, and sadly. “You never got that spark back, that made you feel special.”
Starlight grimaced, eyes tight to try and hide the tears, before lighting her horn and teleporting away.