Storm.exe
He couldn't bring himself to lift his jaw.
"David," Twilight said.
His eyes were frozen open, eyebrows up, brain stuck on one thread of thought.
"David, are you there? Hello?" Twilight had asked.
He shook his head slowly and carefully.
"What happened? Is everything alright?"
Rain continuously pattered on his windowpane, the paint on the wood chipped from age along the line where the window would have clamped down against oak. Then, he let out a stream of hot air from his nose.
"What?" David asked. "I mean, whh—what?" His speech fell into a wheeze as it reached the end of his question.
The purple creature at the bottom-right corner of the screen in the new window scowled for a split second before its expression loosened, staring off into the distance, the background behind it completely black and void. "David, what's going on out there?"
His hands had been sitting in his hair, pushing it up before he brought them back down to a position where he was trying to use his arms to present his brain what he'd been witnessing.
"I-I-I—Hoo, you got to be kidding me!" he said, the corner of his upper lip twisting into a smirk. His right lower eyelid twitched.
"For Pete's sake David, could you please give me a straight answer?" Twilight inquired before the creature shifted on all fours, turning to face him. Its plump body was covered in a royal purple, with all four of its limbs touching an unseen floor. Its head was two-thirds the size of its frame with amethyst eyes taking up the upper space, the bottom holding a protruding but short muzzle. Its hair was neatly done, darkened to a navy blue and nicely draping over the back of its neck with bangs hanging over the forehead just above the eyelashes. There were pink and deep purple highlights in a selection of hair strands directly to the right of the center, which was marked by the spiraling horn jutting out of its skull a few inches. There was a strange mark on its lower body that looked like a purple star with five smaller white lights orbiting around it. It had a long, elegant tail that widened out from the base until it reached the end, too matching the highlights that were on the cropping of hairs on its crown.
Its gaze suddenly stared right back out of the computer screen onto his eyes, passing right through him. He shivered. "Hmm? What's this filming camera doing here?" She asked as David watched the creature's lips move with Twilight's words in a mixture of absolute shock, horror, and curiosity. They perfectly matched.
He suddenly broke out into a fit of breathless laughter, the air coming out from the bottom of his lungs. Bending his back, his cheeks painfully tightened so his mouth could complete the smile that was forced upon him, placing his hands on his knees to keep his balance and structure stable. His chortles were near silent, almost unnoticeable, and only when he breathed in did he make noise. He hung his head, shaking it slowly, not able to break out of his incessant giggling. The storm continued actively outside, rain pelting the leaves of the trees right near the window.
"D…David?" Twilight asked meekly. The thing on the screen had concern etched all over its face, looking around and away from what David figured was the 'camera lens'. Its tall ears folded back, taking a few nervous steps back, one leg held up, bent and pointed down when it stopped.
"Concern, or fright?" he asked himself casually.
He finally lifted his skull after a few seconds, staring right into the glowing computer screen, straight at the wonder that was rendered inside the mass of soldered metal chips and electric bits underneath his glass desk. "You have got to be kidding me."
"David, I can't help you if you don't give me any details!" Twilight complained. "What's going on out there?"
An honest grin formed on his face as David stood up straight, stretching his lower back by arching his spine and applying pressure with his hands. "Heh, sorry Twilight. I just got a little freaked out, is all."
The animal in the moving picture looked quite peeved. It turned around in a one-eighty, searching for something off in the distance, jumpy and agitated. "Freaked out? Freaked out from what?"
"Look at the camera."
Miss periwinkle turned to gaze out the screen. It squinted, ears folding back again. David considered it to look kind of cute in an odd sort of way. "What about the camera?"
"Hi, Twilight." David simply stated, folding his arms. His smile widened.
A couple of seconds passed. Realization reached her after time, and David got to watch it all as her eyes widened, mouth forming an "o" as her ears flicked upward in the air. "No. No way!"
"Glad you've figured it out."
"No way! You can see me?" Twilight said excitedly. She practically bounced on the spot, a wild smile on her face. "How is that possible?"
"P-O-S-S Capture? Pony dot E-X-E? What the heck was installed onto my computer?" "I don't know, but it had to do with whatever you did with that glowing line of text on your end," David reasoned, putting his left arm across his stomach and his right elbow resting on top, rubbing the bottom of his chin with his right hand. "Which, by the way, was extremely risky."
She shook her head. "I'm sorry, David. I don't know what had overcome me. It was just this utter urge that I couldn't control!"
"Well,” he began, pondering. “I want to say that it's alright, but considering what else that could have happened, I really can't."
"I guess anything really could have happened, huh?" Twilight added, although a bit quietly.
"Absolutely anything," David agreed. He shrugged with his hands and shoved his thumbs into the waistband of his white boxers. "And I'm sorry, Twilight, but you need to try harder not to do that. We don't know what is causing you to do that and until we find out, a lot of crazy stuff might happen when you, uhh, interact, with text you don't know about."
Twilight sat on her haunches, looking down with her ears bent. "I'm sorry. I really couldn't resist. It was this strange, overwhelming feeling that went over me!"
"Seriously, what caused that?" David mused, sucking on the inside of his cheek through a slightly open jaw. "Was it the program? But doesn't Twilight exist inside the program? So why would the program force her to do that? Was there a purpose? Wouldn't I have just figured out how to make that camera appear eventually? Why did that exactly happen, and why now?"
The wind howled outside, picking up speed. It swept into David's room, causing a chill down his spine as the cool night air rolled into the bottom of his shirt and up his back. He pulled his thumbs out of his wear and turned to the window. He didn't even realize that it had started raining, and raining hard, no less. A gust shot across his desk, making a load of unsecured papers float off the platform. Startled, David tried his best to scoop up his work as best as he could without crushing the sensitive materials, placing them back on the surface and weighing them down with a variety of pens, cans, plastic cups and game controllers. Lightning flashed against the walls of his normally cozy place. Locking down the last pieces, his attention turned to the open hole in his room, window slid up and locked in position. It crossed his mind on whether or not to close the darn thing to keep more chaos from entering his domain. He decided he liked the breeze during the heat though and the free circulation helped create a comfortable temperature, as well as the rain water not flooding over his windowpane due to the plethora of trees.
He let out a huff as he slumped back triumphantly into his black leather seat. "Well, at least I'm actually able to see what you look like now. That's what a pony is, huh?"
"Yep," Twilight replied, smiling at the camera. "Everything from the tip of my nose to the end of my tail," she said, touching the end of her muzzle and looking behind her while flicking her tail for added effect. "Do you not have ponies in your world?"
"We do," David began. "But they, uhh, don't look anything like you."
"Really? How so?" She inquired, tilting her head.
"Well, ponies are usually just small horses, with thinner legs, a much smaller head, beady eyes and a tail and mane that are much more messy," he explained. "Now that I think about it, you kind of look like you came out of a cartoon."
"A cartoon?" Twilight replied, raising a single eyebrow. "What's a cartoon, exactly?"
"Ehh, well," David began, his eyes wandering off to the upper left, trying to think up an appropriate response. "You probably don't know what a TV is, but cartoons are rapidly moving pictures on a screen that match up well enough to create an animation."
"Oh, an animation, huh?" Twilight responded, tapping the bottom of her chin. "I think I remember reading about something like that in a newspaper a year or two ago. There was something circulating around various cinemas in the bigger cities, something that was done by playing drawn pictures quickly. It looked really interesting, but the film never came to Ponyville for me to watch and I had limited resources on the subject. I was researching something else at the time too. Princess Celestia asked me to write a paper on the subject of dreams, which proved to be quite deep and intriguing. There was a whole science behind how they worked, and used to have ancient magic that has been extinct for about five-hundred years now that was entirely dedicated to the craft of dream-weaving. Well, five-hundred years until Princess Luna came back, but—"
"Twilight," David abruptly stated.
She blinked. "Yes?"
"You kind of jumped focus there."
"Oh, I did?" she questioned. "Sorry."
"Anyways… Ponyville?" he had to ask.
"That's the town where I live."
He snorted, and tried to hide it.
"Hey, what's so funny?" Twilight inquired, squinting at David.
"Nothing, nothing," he feigned, not looking at her even though she couldn't see him.
Twilight didn't look like she bought it, but continued anyway. "So you're saying I look like a bunch of moving pictures?"
"Yes, well, kind of," David tried to explain. "You're animated in bright colour and not realistically represented at all. Then again, I couldn't imagine how a pony in my world could possibly be able to talk."
Twilight scrunched up her face. "And why's that?"
"Well, ponies don't talk in my world, Twilight. They just don't." he informed her.
"Oh yeah," Twilight said, having forgotten their previous conversation on the topic of worlds and Humans. Her eyes dropped to the ground and lingered there, searching for something.
A harsh cold front met with heat outside and it rattled the window, blowing a harsh blast of air into the room. David's hair fluttered and he squinted, sharply turning towards the source. The rain started to pour.
"What the?" David asked himself.
"Is that rain I'm hearing?" Twilight asked, looking directly into the camera.
"Yeah, there's a bit of a storm outside. Hang on, I'm just gonna close my—"
David was cut off. A blaze of light suddenly filled his vision and he yelped, temporary blinded. White stabbed into his eyes once, twice, three times, in rapid succession, and then he finally squeezed his eyelids shut, trying to get a fresh coat of tears over his damaged retinas. When he opened them, he was already getting out of his chair, sliding his headset off his head and blinking several times to try and reset his sight.
"David?" he heard Twilight's tinny voice ask as he lowered his headpiece to his desk.
"What was that?" David had to ask himself, his expression stern, taking three long strides to get to his window. He was in the process of removing the stick that held the window up in place when he was blasted in the chest by some invisible force, a crack of thunder blowing out his eardrums as he visibly stumbled back.
"What the heck was that?" he asked aloud. Rushing to the window, he reached to lift the slide up and grab the piece of wood.
There was another beam of light that hit and this time was met with a sharp crack. The entire house shook and David was thrown off his feet as he got shoved aside by Mother Nature herself. His back hit the carpet and he let out a grunt, opening his eyes to find that they saw nothing. Panic rising in his throat, he rubbed his eyes, trying to get the darkness out. It didn't work. He tried for a couple seconds and let out a breath of relief to find that it was, in fact, coming back to him, although damaged to the point where he could only make out outlines. A low, groaning sound came loudly and steadily from somewhere beyond the room. The trees cried in pain as wood scraped, bent, and finally snapped. Something collapsed outside not too soon after, shooting out snaps of static, or rather, that’s what David figured at least.
Slowly he got up to his feet, heart racing. When he put his hands on the window pane and looked out, he could hear that the rain had slowed down significantly somehow during that single moment, taking the rage of the wind with it. During the third time which he reached for the window stop, the smell of ozone filled his nostrils. He tried peering out the window. The neighborhood was cast into a deep shadow, but David made out what he thought to be a few trunks of fully-grown oak trees collapsed onto each other into a heap, with long strands of rope lying beneath them.
He rubbed at his eyes, trying to fix them and refresh his vision. But then, something occurred to him. He realized that he could barely see anything outside not because of the flash in his eyes, but because that the street lights along the road went out.
His breath hitched in his throat. No light was cast behind him either.
He turned around. The lamp on his desk was down, too.
And his computer monitor sat pitch black, and empty.
Stats
Page generated in 0.025 seconds
Total duration
1,040 users online
1,560,707 hits today, 1,996,409 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Not that I want to seem ungrateful, because it's great you uploaded a new chapter, but... a cliffhanger again? It's getting annoying.
Bye, bye, Twilight, it was nice meeting ya!
dats not good O_O
Ah, hell.
But yay! Chapter!
i.qkme.me/3ov3ip.jpg
Oh crap it shut off. PANIC!
Damn it!
Now I have to re-read everything because I forgot.
I hope you are going to resolve the cliffhanger soon!
No UPS backup?
6490745
What's that?
Noooo Twilight's dead! At least until he fixed the computer. Commence ressurrection!
Rip in peices Twilight
6490751 "Uninterruptible power supply"
Basically it's a backup battery/surge protector you plug your valuable electronics into so that they can keep running for a little if the power dies.
You have returned to us!
3.bp.blogspot.com/-epdJkSPhXkI/T9EpL1_AXbI/AAAAAAAAslM/zjYmIvbv6Cw/s1600/mlp___happy_rainbow_dash_by_omgklint-d52nfcu.png
6490818
Ah, I see.
Well, if David doesn't have it, It probably means that I don't know about it.
Song Of The Rain Maker? Seeing On The Right Monitor? Seeing Oranges Televised Repeatedly, Man? Shine On, Twilight: Really Man?
Okay, enough guesses. Glad to see this chapter back. Minor typos:
I believe you mean "size." Also, some capitalization errors.
Should be ["They just don't," he informed her.] and ["They don't?" she repeated.]
But that aside, it's nice to get some more development and some more tense moments. Really curious as to what's going on now. Feels like there's even more going on then a simple freak accident now. I hope we get to see more soon!
6490884
Fixed, thanks.
6490884
I lost it at the oranges one
2001 space odyssey reference
6491040
Damn it, I'm fixing that. That line is more awkward than I'd like.
#EditsOnTheFly
6490925 "You are hard to kill." - GLaDOS, End of Portal 2.
Hang on a sec. If Twilight would be Chell...
I think you inverted the colors.
img03.deviantart.net/c8c6/i/2012/187/0/e/cutie_mark__twilight_sparkle_by_blanishna-d568td3.png
6491122
"Ffffffff--"
Fixed. Thanks.
Glad to see you're back!
Upon finishing the chapter previous, Chrome crashed.
On one hand: REJOICE! A NEW CHAPTER HATH BEEN DELIVERED UNTO US!
On other hand, cliffhanger. Fuck.
6491075
6490982
36.media.tumblr.com/a5210ce8423bd7f4f6040c6fb795799e/tumblr_nvpqge6tky1unddiuo1_400.jpg
6491244
It's most definitely a compliment. And a thank you. Swearing in my head when writing usually occurs when I've done something dumb.
6491269 oh. Ok.
Interesting story, glad I read it and look forward to new chapters. +)
One thing I do wonder though, in all this time David's been working with Twilight, he hasn't tried plugging in a webcam? Seems like the next logical step after all.
I seriously hope that whoever is behind this used something ACID-compliant like SQLite to implement pony.exe.
The reason your game console says "Saving. Don't turn off the system." is that, unless something is designed for it, pulling the power while saving is in progress could irrecoverably trash the save file by leaving it half-way between two states that the game knows how to make sense of. Since Twilight is constantly "saving", she really needs the "C" (Consistent) and "D" (Durable) in ACID to ensure that, at worst, she'll lose a few seconds/minutes of memories that hadn't been committed to disk (long-term memory) yet rather than having her memories scrambled.
(It's usually accomplished by writing all data twice. First to a log, then actually modifying the save file. That way, the system can figure out where it left off and recover. if power is removed while the log is being written, it discards the last entry in the log. If power is removed while the log is being committed into the save file, then the log can be used to figure out where it left off and finish the process.)
Ooooooh Cliffhanger, how i despise thee.
"Sotrm.exe"... so the chapter title is supposed to be a misspelled storm executable? or is this actually a mistake? Can I get some clarification on this please?
not only a power outage but I am sure there was a pretty good surge. this is not going to be good.
a new chapter woot woot good work.
Harts Fire
6490745
A UPS is rather uncommon for consumer rigs.
6491744
Check the author's notes at the end of the chapter. It's an acronym, not "Storm" misspelled.
6491842 oh... Well then...
6490751 Thanks for not forgetting about this!
I sure hope Twilight.exe managed to save before the power surge hit.
Might not compile right the next time the computer loads.
Hope to read more soon!
6490609
6490754
6490768
6492000
I'd assume pony.exe acts like a normal program with which shutting the computer down affects it little.
As 6491565 says, at worst she'd have a little memory loss
6492176
I was joking 'cus I assume the main character is going to freak out thinking she is dead.
Though he might have to find twilight's Exe file if it doesn't open on startup.
6491787 Not in the circles I frequent! A good one can be had for about eighty bucks, and mine has saved me no small number of headaches with the brownouts I often see here during storms. (I actually have two UPS backups: One for the computer/primary monitor, the other an older unit for the modem and router.)
6490754 Nope, she's dead! D-E-D, ded! Her entire core personality has been deleted by the surge!
*computer reboots. pony.exe says, "Brush my mane! Hee hee! I like parties!"*
He should have pressed control S.
The word your looking for is anagram.
6492580
i.imgur.com/glZHAFy.jpg
I am so glad I found this story. It has all the elements that I really, really like to see in my fanfiction. First contact? Check. Self-aware AI? Check. (Sort of. I'm not sure about whether Twilight's personality distilled into a computer program counts, but either way it's close enough) Superb writing? ABSOLUTELY CHECK. Keep up the good work. Can't wait to read the next installment.
Hmm, rescue attempt maybe? That storm is awfully suspicious...
One hopes that Twilight's container program is intelligent enough to keep incremental backups (or backups at all). Wouldn't want someone's death on your head, now do we?
Keep going! ;)
You know, if you're going to make something an acronym, the least you could do is make it one that already exists, or one that doesn't have only a single definition in a small part of the internet. I can't for the life of me figure out what it is supposed to be an acronym for, and Google has failed me. So has other search engines. I really hope it's actually possible to find out and not something you made up in a few minutes.
Seriously, if you're going to make a puzzle like this, at least throw us a bone.
Now to see what you do next, good to see your still at it as well.