Princess of Sunnyvale · 1:05am Oct 23rd, 2016
Once upon a time, there was vast empire known as Eureka, ruled by the alicorn emperor Norton the First. Wise, merciful, and just, Emperor Norton brought prosperity to his ponies and his empire flourished. But even the fairest of rulers accrue enemies, and in the sixty-second year of his rule he was assassinated by agents of the traitorous National Congress, and all of his ponies mourned.
In the wake of his passing, the question arose as to what would become of his empire, for the emperor had never clearly designated a favored heir. Norton had many children, but none could agree to support the others, and they squabbled amongst themselves. Fearing a civil war, the imperial court decided that Eureka would be split, and that each of Emperor Norton’s twelve alicorn daughters should be granted one part of it to rule as their imperial domain.
To Bay Area, the oldest and most powerful of his daughters, went the capital—the legendary City of Angels. To Oak Land, the wisest daughter, went the forests and the ponies who lived within. To Concord went the valleys, and to Mountain View went the hills. The rest of the lands were divided among the lesser known daughters of Norton until finally the imperial court came to little Sunny Vale, the youngest of them all.
She was given a little town near the capital, which she promptly renamed after herself. She was a princess, after all. The Princess of Sunnyvale.
And she did not like her older sisters very much at all.
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“I don’t know when she changed, but I’m telling you, she changed!” Sunny insisted, as she and Oak walked along the broad sidewalk. Sunny’s rule had lasted nearly a century and a half, and in that time much had changed. The streets were paved and filled with cars, and electric lights lit the night. And yet, Sunny herself was still a teenager, having barely aged a year in all that time. She was still short, and her voice still cracked when she yelled, and her sisters still thought they could shut her up with ice cream.
Which, sometimes they could. Not that particular night, but her vanilla bean was delicious. “I bet she’s been replaced by a changeling. That would explain a lot.”
“You’re exaggerating,” Oak said, with a gentle and well-worn sigh. Her own cup of double-chocolate ripple floated alongside her. “Bay Area has always been a little all over the board. She’s just going through another phase.”
“A phase?” Sunny snorted. “A partial lobotomy more like! I remember back when, she’d be all,” Sunnyvale widened her eyes and lifted the pitch of her voice, “‘Heeey you little balls of love and cosmic energy. Wanna go hit up the co-op on the way to the peace rally? I’m passing an edict to save whales from nuclear power!’”
Oak snorted. Sunny ignored it and pressed on. “But now she’s all,” again, the high-pitched and wide-eyed impression returned, “‘The only thing I love more than solid-state enterprise driven cloud solutions is evicting poor people.’ I mean, come on. Does that seem like the same pony to you?”
“Yes,” Oak rolled her eyes. “Because yes, Sunny, I do remember ‘the day.’ Do you? Do you remember the 70s?”
Sunny hesitated. “I mean, yeah. I admit the whole drugs and freeing your mind bit. Kind of fermented. And she had a bit of a… crime problem.”
“She said if I got between her and her cocaine again she’d cut out my eyes.” Oak shook her head, and turned back to her ice cream, a spoonful of it serving to delay the conversation. “That mare was a lunatic 150 years ago and she’s a lunatic now. She gets it from dad. Trust me.”
“All I’m saying is, when we catch up with her, maybe bring up that she’s let the tech thing go to her head?” Sunnyvale said, hurrying a step or two ahead so she could turn back and look Oak in the eye. “That she’s losing a lot of that good old Bay Area charm? You know, the thing that made us like her?”
“We’ll see how it goes.” Oak kept her tone non-committal, her tail flicking. “There she is now.”
Ahead of them was the park they’d chosen for hanging out, and in the middle of the trees and garden space was a brilliant blue alicorn, her crown and regalia made from red-brushed steel. She was levitating a smartphone in front of her, fiddling with its controls, and a smaller unicorn stood behind her and to the left just out of sight.
“Hey, Bay!” Sunny called, trotting up to her sister.
Bay Area kept fiddling with her smartphone. It beeped, once. Her ear twitch. “Oh,” she said after a moment. “Hey. One sec.”
She continued to poke at the screen with her magic while Sunny and Oak waited. Oak didn’t bother watching her sister, instead looking at the park and finishing her ice cream. Sunny instead chose to stare, the seconds ticking on.
“So,” she asked, “what are you doing?”
“Ah…” Bay Area frowned. The phone beeped again. “Filtering my photos from this new startup app I’m trying. They provide selfie-sticks as a service on a subscription model that ensures the stick is never in the photo. It also uses natively intelligent hardware to dramatically improve picture quality and framing.”
“Oh, that’s uh… cool.” Sunny coughed. “Selfie-sticks as a service. Right. Uh… where’s the stick?”
“Right there.” Bay Area nudged the mare beside her forward with her tail, her eyes still on the phone. “Introduce yourself.”
“I’m April,” mumbled the little unicorn. A digital camera was on a strap around her neck, her cutie mark a pair of camera flashes. “Hi.”
“Wait, what?” Sunny almost dropped her cone. “They just pay ponies to follow you around with a camera!? How much is that subscription fee?”
“Five bucks a month,” Bay Area answered, eyes still on her phone.
“How can they possibly afford that?”
“I’m an unpaid intern,” April explained.”But they say I’m gaining valuable experience into the gig economy.”
“What, that-” Sunny gaped. “I think that might actually just be slavery. Like, actual slavery.”
“Relax,” Bay Area said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t get your saddle straps in a twist. This is a strictly temporary situation. Just until we can replace April’s job with some kind of drone.”
Bay Area poked her phone’s touch screen, and April’s camera beeped. Hurriedly, she stepped back and levitated the camera up to her eye, sizing up the photo. The lense clicked. For a moment, silence hung over the gathered group. Then, Bay Area’s phone beeped in turn.
“Ugh,” she frowned. “You got me when I was frowning. It makes me look old.”
She whapped April right between the ears with her smartphone. “One star. Uninstall.”
Emperor Norton! Nice.
Also... wow. Living selfie sticks. That's... horrible, yet I could kinda see it happening.
I remember in the early 2000s when the federal government was all high on contractors, considered them the greatest innovation in employment since child labor laws.
Man, the shiney's worn off that coin.
4267129
In fairness, the government still employs a ton of contractors, particularly in the tech sector. Nearly all of the tech employees working for the Navy, Air Force, NSA, etc are legally contractors.
4267114
At some point, I think this little idea may have crossed the line from over-the-top-parody to just a little uncomfortably close to reality.
After being uninstalled, April picked up her smartphone and navigated to the Gig Economy app. Finding that internships were getting progressively more difficult to come by, Gig Economy Inc had automated the process by which companies could assign work to a faceless army of interns. All April had to do was register and electronically sign a document to get started on her internship.
April's next task was only a mile away. It was for a promising new startup offering to feed and groom pets for owners that were too busy with their work. April sighed, realizing there was no way yet in the app to reject the job without cancelling her internship. The app pointed her to the nearest pet store on route to the customer, and on her way she went. She would find another intern there that would pick up her camera.
4267142
I think CiG meant contract work was formerly considered a net positive for everyone involved.
Oak Land is one to talk about phases. One word: Hyphy.
4267267
"So what do you do?" Somepony asked April weeks later.
"I'm an intern," she explained, "at a company that makes tools that writes code that manages data centers that monitor cloud data."
"Wow!" said the other pony, "What's it all for?"
"Managing interns more efficiently."
...Well, that was a thing I just read. :D
Any particular inspiration, or just your new environment?
Man, that was an incredibly short year!
4267374
One minute you think you have this whole life thing figured out, and the next minute BAM! A whole year has gone by.
4267142 Yeah, but there's a catch. For jobs where the workforce is highly variable, Contractors > Civil Service. For jobs where the workforce is fairly stable... it gets weird.
A well-run contracting operation supporting a civil service agency is more efficient than having ordinary civil service employees running support. A well-run civil service operation supporting a civil service agency is more efficient than having ordinary contractors running support.
I'm in a position where I can see both sides (technically, it's a four-square, but still)
The concept of unpaid intern positions, however, is evil incarnate. Take somebody just out of school with staggering student loan debt and the stench of desperation all around and dangle a job offer in front of them that *only* requires them to work for a full year for the company without pay after moving across the country. At which point, the company *might* offer them a job. Or just toss them back into the street and hire some more free labor for a year, which is more likely, particularly in this economy.
4267315
"Managing interns more efficiently. It's actually pretty cool." April glanced down at her phone. It was always listening, and there were always interns ready to report any missteps that April might make. Sometimes the Monitors let her know when she was doing a good job.
"Oh you're working for Gig. I have some friends working there that really like it." Gig Economy Inc always had some fraction of their interns going about their normal lives advertising their program.
That happened to be April's task right now. "Have you applied?"
"No, but I'm thinking about it."
"You should. You're really smart, you'll probably get in." She wasn't that smart according to the others, which is why Gig had April talk to her.
"You think so?"
"Definitely."
This whole "botnet of humans" thing seems like a pretty good idea.
4267316
The new environment. When I realized I was living in "San Francisco" (because SF dominates the skyline and it's where I do my socializing and it's the big city nearby), but that I'd actually be living in "Sunnyvale" (a town I'd never heard of) I immediately pictured the pouting and underappreciated Princess Sunnyvale who never gets credit for anything because of her stupid big sister.
Selfie-sticks-as-a-service followed.
4267453
Yet another chance for us to get into the Lucrative Oppression Market (tm).
4267507
Ah, thanks. :)
You realize that a lot of people reading this are going to think it's fiction, don't you?
(And I speak as a native son of Emperor Norton, acquaintance of Smilin' Ed, Herb Cain, and Edsel Ford Fong, BTW.)
4267453
What does a DDoS attack look like when you have a botnet of people?
4268493
A flash mob.
Princess Oregon sits on her side of the border and hisses down at Norton's realm periodically. But she'll take the bits.
4268729
"I hate them so much! But, aaaagh, the tourism."
4268769
"But they pay me double for houses!"
Ouch. You forgot the part where April has to live in Stockton with 5 roommates and commute two hours each way to her internship every day.
4267507 Ahh, but it's a great system! All the real work of the tech sector still gets done down in Silicon Valley, but there's an overpriced hipster roach motel up north where anyone dumb enough to think riding a corporate shuttle 90 minutes every day is worth living near the most expensive bars gets filtered out of the south bay, and then usually they end up working on the really meta-apps in SOMA eventually.
I applaud the usage of His Imperial Majesty Norton I. Easily the best proof of California being awesome. A guy comes into town suffering dementia believing himself to be their ruler, and they went along with it. Hell I've heard his funeral was one of the biggest events of a century.
4269077
Also he printed his own money and merchants took it.
4268493
In this case, flooding the market with interns such that the cost of distinguishing net-negative interns from professionals plus the cost of hiring net-negative interns, together, exceeds the value gained from hiring the professionals.
Pretty cool seeing Emperor Norton applied to a pony context. I enjoyed reading this more than I thought I would too. The intern commentary is very on-point, as someone who's had to do some unpaid intern work (and boy, did the unpaid part come as an unpleasant surprise right after I had already committed.
)
I thought of another Sunnyvale before I started reading though.
4269265
He also called for Congress to be dissolved, by force if necessary. Not many who could get away with that.