//------------------------------// // Working the Hardwood Floor // Story: FiO: Very Optimal // by FeverishPegasus //------------------------------// When Zany and I exited the room with three weeks’ worth of disheveled mane and tail, I felt like a changed stallion. Not because the last three months had been bliss or anything. No. It was something a bit deeper than that. Like I’d just washed away a part of me that’d been too stuck up, rigid. My whole life up until this point had been an internal struggle of sorts. I don’t mean to sound edgy when I say that I always woke up with a bit of loathing in the mornings. Like, there’s always been a bit of a nagging in my head that if I didn’t keep doing stuff, I’d be in serious trouble. I could be enjoying a weekend, with the full understanding that everything had been taken care of the day before. Things would be fine for a bit, I’d relax, start to read a book, you know the drill. And then I’d just think, oh god, did I do the laundry? I’d think a bit more, and tell myself that I did in fact do the laundry yesterday. And then thirty minutes later I’d think, there was something I had to do, and it probably had something to do with the laundry. Excluding this conversation, my need to think about laundry had been eradicated, and it felt like I’d been released from some instinct that had been coded into me ever since my first realization as a child that things weren’t exactly going to get easier in the future. Wait, crap. One second. ************************************** I just asked Zany if she did the laundry. Let me revise my argument. I still keep thinking about the laundry, but I don’t think about it because I feel like I need to anymore. That part’s gone now. I keep thinking about laundry because I actually enjoy the act of washing clothes now. Kinda. I like washing the clothes with Zany; we have our own washboard and everything. Washing machines are for chumps. Really, as long as it’s with Zany, I like to do anything. That’s why I like to remember to do stuff. We don’t even wash our own clothes. What was I talking about? ************************************** So after I left that room, I was a changed pony, as described above. Our activities became tamer, and I found it easier to enjoy our simple lifestyle. We still pulled a few shenanigans, but they never compared to the cat-toast machine back in the day. Looking back on it, I’d been a terrible pony. Akin to where some of the worst rabble-rousers were concerned. But I couldn’t exactly go back in time to fix that. Although that raised a number of questions about how I’d gotten pelted by the coffee beans. Maybe time travel really was possible, and I’d gone back in time to punish myself for my actions. It was my destiny… No! Those adventures weren’t for ponies of my type anymore. It would be too much work creating a time machine anyways. Our adventures had been fun and exciting, but they’d also involved hours and hours of preparation. With laundry, you could just pull out the washboard… Wait, did I do the laundry already? ************************************** I’m sorry, it’s likely that I’m confusing you with my jumping from past to present tense and back. I’ll try to keep the rest of this story ‘serious’. ************************************** Our activities, at first, revolved solely around minor shenanigans and for a while, they made us happy. The ponies always felt upset about the pranks we pulled, but that only made it sweeter to hoof bump Zany after another day well-ruined. Especially if the pony hadn’t huffed off yet and we could relish our victories in its face. But word got around about our unsavory actions and they organized a council to solve the problem. Their plan was to express their displeasure louder. Their motto was, “See the Zany team? Scream!” Of course, this only fanned the flames. Our misbehaving grew vile, and instead of simple pies to the face, we used more…rancid materials. Y’know, things like piss, poop, as well as other things Zany might punch me for listing in this story. It was terrible! Ponies had to check doors daily to make sure they didn’t get drenched by some bucket propped on their doorframe, to be covered by odors unimaginable. It took a few accidents, but eventually, the ponies of the city established another meeting. This time, they agreed on a different tactic. When Zany and I went around town on that fateful day, carrying our buckets of horror, ponies everywhere mobbed us. I don’t mean like the kind of mob that goes around trying to kill ponies. I’m talking about a beautiful thing called the friendly mob. We were surrounded on all sides by ponies, each one asking about how we’d learned our clever tricks, showering us with adoration for the things we’d done. In the space of a day, we’d gone from the scum of the city to venerated heroes. It was terrible! For us at the time. At first, we kind of basked in the glory and veered away from the viler pranks. If ponies already liked us, why go through all the effort with the buckets? Pies and whoopee cushions were easier to please with. We continued our lighter pranks on the ponies, and occasionally inspired a quick negative reaction from them, but they always recovered quicker than we could latch on. It made my hoof bumps with Zany feel worthless. It was hard to feel like a part of the Zany team when we didn’t have any enemies to fight against. We continued our pranks with whoopee cushions, until we grew too bored to stick with pranks at all. We’d only wanted to loosen up the citizens of the city in the first place, but now they just looked at us with patronizing smiles, no matter what we tried. Our motivation died. The Council of Ponies Against Team Zany (CPATZ) had won, and we had to find some other method of entertainment. That was when I learned I could do just about anything and enjoy it, so long as it was with Zany. Washing dishes? Sure! Walking to the grocery store without actually buying groceries? Sounds great! I enjoyed these activities for two reasons. Great conversation, and the fact that we were both working towards a common goal. Like, in a world without scarcity, what more could you ask for? I could be washing the dishes and Zany could be working the hardwood floor and we’d just argue for hours and hours about the most interesting things. When I say 'working the hardwood floor', I’m talking about pacing. It may not seem like a useful task, and largely unnecessary, but we both took it very seriously. Somepony had to be wearing down that hardwood floor twenty-four seven, so that we’d be able to replace it at some point. Sometimes, Zany would slam her hooves down to speed up the process, but I never did this, because I had stringent beliefs against cheating. With our pacing and stomping efforts, we had to replace our floor once about every year, and the event was like our own little version of Hearthswarming. In fact, it had replaced it. Instead of giving each other gifts, we would bring out the hammers, flat-edge screw drivers, as well as the crowbar, and go about tearing things up with reckless abandon. We’d gotten very good at it, and it took us only a few hours to reduce the wood-layer of our floor into a wasteland of broken slates. We’d take a moment and walk through the house to relish the chaos we’d created, and then went about cleaning the aftermath. Once we finished throwing the broken wood into our garbage atomizer, I’d wanted a simple furnace, but Celestia denied my request, saying it would give me ideas, we requested the city board for about one thousand square feet of the stuff we’d just thrown away. They always had a surplus of the stuff ready, due mainly to the fact that this tradition had been going on for decades. The first year we’d done the floor replacement, we had to chop our own trees down, and the citizens of the city had not taken kindly to the constant chunk, chunk, chunk of our axes hitting wood in the forest next to their apartments. It satisfied me a little to know that the city scrambled to keep our antics at bay, so that we wouldn’t cause any more trouble. Although, I guess that made me a bad pony. But yeah, once we got our shipment of high-quality hardwood, we ran back to our house to get started. Rebuilding the floor had always been our favorite part of the tradition, for some reason, and I couldn’t exactly place my finger on why. I guess it was some symbolic way to start a new slate, but I couldn’t see why that made me so happy. Still, this part we were especially good at, due to our eagerness to finish, and we managed to shave a good ten minutes off of our time after every yearly attempt. This year, it took us only forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes, and we suddenly had a squeaky-clean floor to muss, scuff, and dirty up all over again. In a way, I couldn’t help but identify with this annual process. We were excited to finish the floor for another reason as well. It meant great sex afterwards. ************************************** One such conversation I had with Zany while I did the dishes and she worked the floor, involved a an old question, one that even Celestia hadn’t figured out yet. “Is the universe really turtles all the way down?” I asked Zany. “What?” “Like, if you kept zooming into an object and splitting it down, would you eventually find an unbreakable, solid, building block? And then what if you zoomed outwards, or across dimensions, would we eventually find something that doesn’t make up something else?” Zany thought about this for a moment, then responded, “I don’t think so. You could just keep zooming in or out without finding an end.” “Even with all of Celestia’s computing power?” “Yeah.” I thought about the turtle question for a moment. “I think it’s one big loop.” “What? How?” “I think that if you kept zooming in, you’d find out that at some point, you had zoomed all the way out.” She scratched her head. “I don’t understand.” I grinned with excitement. “Like. If you took a wood atom, or whatever it is now, and then split it up over and over again to the see all the little goodies inside, and then split up those little goodies and so on and so on, you'd eventually find yourself looking at the floor and investigating the little goodies with yourself in it.” She was catching on, but still didn’t quite understand. “Like a mirror?” “More like a portal. Looking at something with more and more detail is like opening up a portal to a different world each time. Each world acts like it’s independent, but in reality, all the little goodies that make up a world are little worlds themselves, with a whole bunch of other little goodies that form other worlds, with a whole bunch of…” Her eyes widened. “Ohhhhhhh. And eventually, if you calibrated that portal right, and went deep enough, you’d find a world made up of a bunch of our own worlds. One step deeper, and we’d be looking at ourselves, looking at ourselves, looking at…” “Exactly!” I squealed. “Isn’t that exciting?!” Zany shrugged. “Why would that be exciting?” “I don’t know. It just…is.” “We don’t even know if it’s true.” I scoffed. “Okay then, what makes your theory so great then?” “It isn’t great. It’s got as much as support as yours does. We’d have to do something to find out which one’s better.” “Good point,” I said, looking down into the murky water in my sink. “And as far we know, Celestia doesn’t even know the answer to that question.” Zany wasn’t dropping the subject for some reason, and it was making me angry. I said, “How about we help her then, go on an adventure?” Both of us had a good laugh. It was a joke after all. ************************************** So yeah, that about sums up my life now, and before you yell at me for being boring, it is important to remember that you’re just a slave to your own little cause-effect machine trapped within that digital pony head of yours, or whatever other encasing or fluid or gas you use to contain it. You are who you were programmed to be, and calling all of that complexity things like boring, cool, or stupid really doesn’t do it justice. Maybe a bit of justice, but not very much at all. I’ve got to stop writing for now. As the pony Sunlight Sparks, I’d have to say that my current state of not helping Zany could be classified as boring. Toodles.