Catalyst 2.0: File One

>you stand still as you can.  Straight up, in the nude- though, when had that ever been a problem for ponies?  You lower your head softly as the clamp comes down, applying a pressure to your neck with an efficient, plastic grind.  It wraps around your throat, locking into place and making it hard to breath despite the gel-cushioned inner grips.
>You feel the ports on the back of your neck being plugged into.  Like an injection, a sharp, quick whirr spears the jacks into your body.  They remain, cold, stiff, and numb.  Your head buzzes, and your ears ring.
>The world empties.  Your eyes see only black.  You ears hear only cold, empty silence.  When you try to speak, you feel yourself saying the words- you hear nothing.
>Then, through a much lower quality input, everything comes back into view.  You can see the pixels, filtering everything through a jagged, grainy feed.  You ears suffer the same fault of hardware, and when Twilight speaks from behind her console, it takes a great deal of effort to even understand what she's saying through the crackling noise.
>She had to prohibit your perception, she said.  It was to fully incorporate you into the old sensory files, she said.  It was the best route to detail, she said.
>You saw a console feed pick up on the right side of your vision.
>sys: run Defrag.exe
>Caution! Proprietary format!  Proceed?
>Y/n?
>Don't be afraid, she said.
>Yeah, right.
–
>You rustle where you stand. The harnesses around you are tight.  They are cold.  They are safe.
>As the ship encounters it's first set of chop, your body tries to balance.  You try to remain calm.  A gentle ache pricks at the front of your neck.  Your AR places a monitor, a sort of segmented bar that loses two notches.
>20cc's administered.  Resetting...
>You go numbly warm.  You feel dizzy for a moment, and it fades as the heat drains into your body from your throat.  You stand taller, feeling stronger and less ill, realizing you had slouched.  You couldn't do that in these harnesses; they could hurt if you hit a harder bump in the air.
>Across from you, there was something you felt was important.  You'd been told she was, but you hadn't met her.  Even as you boarded, she had just regarded you with a snort.  Then, she'd filtered out the sound of the humming ship by pushing music into her AR hearing.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_1T0YibRVg )
>A griffon.  Part of the “Sky Hunters” personal security group, you'd read her file repeatedly.  It was mostly to understand whom you were dealing with- primarily, whom you were trusting.
>Her AR augment was in the chest.  It was one of the earlier integrations; hers had been implanted during her time during the Changeling Purge.  It was a direct physical connection, without the potential for a wireless link.  Her weapon harnesses were connected via thick cables, a plate of segmented black armor atop them for extra protection.
>She ran on the old firmware, specifically because she'd actually seen when the changelings had started to “fuck with what they found out they could hijack.”

>She was a veteran of the old alliance.  In fact, she was one of the first.  Changelings had problems adapting to griffon's, with their dual biology.  It was impossible for all but the best of them to take a griffon's shape, and for that, ponies had allied with them in the last few years of the war.
>Then, after their resources had been expended and so many griffons killed, the purge ended.  And the ponies cried out when Celestia tried to honor her end of the bargain.  The part that had ponies helping the griffons revitalize what they knew the griffons would, and did lose during the fights.
>It left them a husk of their old glory.  All for the sake of helping in good faith.
>And the ponies? Well, they'd only started responding when they had a better position.  When they had regained superiority.
>Thus, the Sky Hunters had come to be.  Trading violent favors for DigiBits and materials for their war-emptied homes.  As you watched her humming in tune to her music, you knew.
>This “Gilda,” veteran of the purge and decorated member of the Sky Hunters, had every goddamn right to be just a little jaded.  Especially with your track record.
>Being so involved previously, however, let her know when things were more important than a few angry glances and old hatreds.  That's the only reason you felt even remotely comfortable around her, with what you were trying to do.
>When your mind tried to recall what that was, the world froze. It distorted, cracking in perfect, checkerboard squares, and the audio of her humming hung.
>File fragmentation: 97%, cleaning up...

>The world resumed.  You listened to her as she recited the song she was listening to.
>”Don't tell me that some power can corrupt a pony- you haven't had enough to know what it's like!”
>She danced where she was, opening one eye.  A flurry of twangs came, metal, hollow plinks that tapped the hull of the ship like rain.  Bullets.  So, that's why she hadn't flown here on her own wings.
>”You're only angry cause you wish you were in my position- now nod yer head cause you know that I'm right!
>ALL RIGHT!”
>An alert noise came, and red klaxons lit up the interior of the ship.  You felt yourself sink, your stomach lurching into your throat as the ship descended to dodge.
>40cc's administered, resetting...
>She tapped her head to the sound only she could hear.
>”Well I used to fly for somethin, but forgot what that could be!
>There's a lot of us, inside you, maybe you're afraid to see.  Well I used to fly for somethin', now I'm on my claws and knees.”
>There was a loud boom from outside, far to your right.  A ping came on your AR, acknowledging the death of a secondary squad.  The klaxons disappeared.  It had not been auto-guided; it had, however, been some kind of heavy slug that was magnetically accelerated.  There was a sound as if your driver was going across a dirt road; the cloud of leftovers from the obliterated ship.
>With that sharp, polished beak, she smiled. She gestured with her head.  You looked to the poster pasted on the inside of the ship. It was a torso shot of the matriarch you knew as Celestia, monochrome, and undetailed.
>”Traded in my god for this one,”
>You felt yourself land.  The timer at the top ticked off, and the harnesses released you and retreated to the ceiling.  Gilda grinned and shook her head.
>”And she signs her name with a capital C!”

>Her helmet folded over her head, leaving you with an elongated pyramid, flat panels lit by tiny, blue lights at intervals. Input cameras and microphones, filtering damaging noise and light.  She pressed herself back to the wall, and motioned for you to do the same.
>The doors opened.
>A pseudo-pony, clad in black, was facing away from the ship.  He was fitted with a light weapon harness,  dispersion points upon it venting super-heated air in visible cones of dissipating steam.  Across from you, you saw another ship, which had scorch marks littering the door. It had landed atop another pony like him.  The only reason you could tell was because there was a bloody smear, the legs peeking out from below the cockpit of the ship.
>He began to turn, having glanced back to look through his own helm. Gilda was atop him before either he, or you could respond.  Her war talons extended forward as she stood over him, the pony on his stomach.  She dug the three, softly vibrating blades into the side of his throat, and made a sideways swipe.  You saw meat, blood, and a section of sliced, silvery vertabrae sling away.
>40cc's administered, lethal dosage to chassis approaching...
>Please try to calm down...
>Resetting...

>She didn't stop.  She gave two more quick swipes, then unfolded her helmet to pluck his head from the ground. She tossed it aside, strings of meat and glistening gristle slinging with it.  Her tongue came out, cleaning off the beak before the helmet reclined over her head.
>You look up, calm as could be.  It hadn't surprised you- the drugs were working swimmingly on the chassis.   Above you and far away, there is a thin, sharp, shimmering tower.  It is made of crystal, opaque and so bright it is nearly white, reflecting the sun with colors that seem to be distorted by petroleum oil.
>That faceless, eyeless helm turned back to you.
>”Welcome to your home away from home, freakshow.”
–

>You inhale, deeply, tasting recycled air.  Breathing hard, shivering, your lips fold back over your teeth.  A dense, sharp ring in your ears brings the room back into hollow, crisp focus.
>Your AR vision shows a bio-monitor.  It is flashing a bloody red, your heart rate barely within the limits Twilight had placed.  You feel the pressure at your neck weaken, as you are released.
>You stumble forward, your eyes feeling as if they'd been dipped in burning pitch.  You can't close them.  Your mouth is open wide as you breath, and you can't close it.  You drool slightly.
“Twilight, what the FUCK?”
>She's quickly shuffling through screens, looking back and forth between each one. “I'm sorry! The files are fragmented, there shouldn't be ANY way that it could be that... Strong!”
>You flop onto your haunches.  You finally blink, perceiving your eyelids as sandpaper.  Your eyes start to water, and through them, you look at your lifted forehooves.
>”By Celestia, your body is reacting to the drugs.”
“You said there wouldn't be any drugs!”
>”Not here! In the memory!  Your body reacted to them here and now, even though you were only experiencing them in the file!” She threw screens to either side of herself violently, and they moved to sudden, digitally perfect stop.  “What were they... Oh hell.  Calm down- Calm, down.” She held up both hooves, as if she would push you down from afar.
“Right.  Calm.  It's not real, it's old, it's not happening.”
>”That's right. You're safe, you're okay.”
>You put your hooves to your head.
“FUCK! It did happen! It WAS real!”
>”But it's not happening NOW!  Keep yourself out of it.  You're here, you're fine, it didn't follow you.”
>You try to recall what happened next.  What you did. What you said to that griffon, if anything.

>Something clawed at you from inside.  That harsh, rippling, burning buzz began.  Your ears started to feel as if they would bleed.
>Through slitted eyes, you continued trying to remember.  The ring only intensified, and you started to scream. It was low in volume at first, inaudible. So you screamed louder, to try and bypass the noise and be able to hear yourself. To hear reality.
>You could see Twilight. She scrambled between fuzzy, flickering screens.  Lights within the room shut down completely; you were reaching out with your uplink, trying to touch something you knew you could feel.  You were focused on a local LAN ping, if for nothing more than to shunt to a place where your nerves did not exist.
>You couldn't hear her, but you could see what she was saying. “Stop!” she cried.  “We'll get it later, don't try to remember! You're only safe when you're in the defrag machine!”
>The screens all turned blue, an error screen appearing.  Linked through the LAN, you were screaming into it like an undrugged patient having a limb amputated.  It responded to the pain, unable to understand the data, while still trying to translate it.  It had failed.
>Twilight motioned downward with both her forehooves, once for each slow breath. “The drugs you were on were fear inhibitors.  Your programming is sending the sensation replication to your body- you've got withdrawls.  Calm.  Down.”

>You clutched at yourself with your forelegs, pulling that shrieking pain back into your head.  Your eyelids fluttered as your eyes rolled back.  You swallowed hard, taking one long, hard, frozen breath.
>You looked down when you could, sweating, trembling.  You could hear again.  You could see again.  The systems began to reboot around you, one by one, as the digital pain drained away.  Unable to stand any longer, your entire body tingles as if your flesh had fallen asleep.
>”I'm so sorry!” she squealed.  She continued to repeat the words, forgetting to breath.  She rushed over, circling you, prodding when she could.
>You look up at her from the wonderfully cold floor, your throat glazed with sour bile.  Your skin still felt as if it were singed,  and you rubbed your cheek sleepily into the ground.  You breath nauseous air, steaming up the metal, before she starts to shake you.
>You'd pried one last thing free from the fragment. Like an aching organ finally being pulled out of your body, you wrenched the memory chunk out through a tunnel of jagged barbs. Half of the still image was tinted crimson, the only clarity within the red being that of a nearly flat-lined AR bio monitor, barely visible against the blood. It was your own.
>Gilda was screaming.  She was pulling you from the ground, her helmet withdrawn.  She was angry, but her eyes were wet.

>Through the side that was vivid, the one open eye, you see them in the distance.  The beauty of the crystalline tower, the shimmer of a dulled sun sparkling through it. Black shadows, with paper thin, veined membranes caught in the moment as they blurred to give their owners flight.  Shafts of light, so bright they could not have been willingly looked upon, burned through grotesque holes in their figures.
>Above them was a single, dark cloud. Far too low to be part of the sky, the glitter of an equine form hovered beneath. The darkness seemed to rise from the four-legged body like steam, as if the very air around it were polluted by it's smoldering existence.  A pair of green slits gazed out from tip of the figure, the dark cloud punctured by bullets fired from the sides of your vision.  When you saw how it's fangs were caught in a curve, you realized.
>She was laughing.
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