The Taxman Cometh
By Alaborn
Standard disclaimer: This is a not for profit fan work. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is copyright Hasbro, Inc. I make no claim to any copyrighted material mentioned herein.
Chapter 1: The Investigation
Saturday, December 8, 2018
Ponyville, Principality of Equestria
No sooner had I finished my last bite of oatmeal, and lowered my spoon with my magic into the now-empty bowl, than my earth pony marefriend cleared the bowl from the table.
“You need to hurry, Stony,” Rose Trellis said to me. “Do you have everything you need?”
“Yes, my saddlebags are packed,” I replied.
“Don’t forget to take the garbage with you.” She picked up a small metal pail with her mouth and set it at my hooves. “And don’t forget to go grocery shopping while you’re there.”
“Of course.”
“I made a shopping list, so you won’t forget,” Rose said. She tucked a folded piece of paper into the small pocket on the front of my saddlebags.
“Yes, dear,” I replied, a hint of exasperation in my voice. I’d only forgotten something on the grocery list twice. Maybe three times. Well, I definitely got it right more often than not.
I lifted my saddlebags onto my back, and cinched the strap tight with my magic. I bent my head to check my work, and once I was sure everything was secure, I raised my head. Rose met me with a nuzzle and a quick peck on the lips.
“Have fun, and don’t forget to catch up with your friends!” she said.
“I will,” I said.
A lot of ponies travel on the weekend. Quite a few ponies live with their families in Ponyville, but work during the week in Cloudsdale or Canterlot. Friday night and Saturday morning see a lot of ponies move, by wing, by train, or by carriage. But my method of travel was something rather different.
I glanced at the clock hanging on the wall. The second hand counted down the last minute of the hour. Princess Twilight Sparkle was always punctual, so I made sure to be ready. I took the pail in my mouth—this wasn’t a situation where I wanted to use magic—and waited. And when the clock showed five seconds before 8:00 AM, I reared.
Five seconds later, right on time, a violet plane of energy appeared in front of me. I fell forward, right through the portal.
Years of experience in making this transition enabled me to stay conscious as I made the transition between worlds. The magic of the portal normally leaves an inexperienced traveler unconscious for a few minutes, but I have no problem staying aware the whole time. Strangely, despite the powerful translocation and transformation magic at use here, I never feel a thing.
I stumbled out of the portal, righting myself before I lost my footing. I planted my feet and got used to the feeling of balancing on two legs again. The pail hanging from my mouth made my teeth ache, so I grabbed it with my hands and set it down. I then took off my saddlebags, which transformed into an ordinary backpack.
During the week, I’m a unicorn named Stone Arch, a civil engineer working on building roads all around Equestria. But almost every weekend, I return to my native universe, becoming once again the human named Jason Sedmak. The portal dumps me out in the middle of my apartment in Indianapolis. I had read about workers with crazy long commutes, but none of them are quite as far as mine.
I have been living this double life for six years now, a secret I’ve had to keep from family and friends, on both sides of the portal. It’s a program under the direct control of Princess Celestia, though most of the actual organization and spell casting is in the hooves of Princess Twilight Sparkle. I know that there are a few other humans doing the same thing as me, but I don’t know who they are, or how many; I suspect there are fewer than twenty of us. Very few people know about my other self, one of them being my marefriend.
My phone buzzed; now that I was back on Earth, a week’s worth of notifications came through. I take my phone with me to Equestria because it’s sufficiently advanced that it doesn’t transform. In comparison, something like a camera does change. It doesn’t matter if it’s an old film camera or a modern digital camera; it changes into an Equestrian camera, which resembles an old Polaroid camera, but using magic instead of film. But with a smart phone, I can take pictures or video that I can then transfer to my computer.
One of the things I do is post pictures of Equestria and its citizens to DeviantArt. I take actual pictures, run them through some Photoshop filters, and call it “photo art”. I’ve received a lot of praise for my “art”, and quite a few commenters have noticed how I favor a certain earth pony in my pictures.
It’s all approved by the princesses, as something no one would believe is real. But some day, I hope to be able to reveal that Rose is in fact real.
I noticed a text message from my friend John. He knows my secret, thanks to his own past travels to Equestria, only one of which was my fault. His message was short and to the point: “Season 9 announced.” He never liked the cartoon, but to his credit, he followed the news about the show while I was “out of town”.
I sighed. As much as I enjoy the cartoon, I suspect it’s the reason there hasn’t been an official meeting of our worlds. Somehow, actual events that happen in Equestria get portrayed in episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, albeit in sanitized form. Nopony knows how that happens, or if they do, they’re not saying. Even Twilight Sparkle, who is normally eager to discuss the theories behind a magical mystery like this, is strangely tightlipped.
I speculate that the official announcement that Equestria is real is waiting for the cartoon to be cancelled, so the announcement of the new season just means I have to lie for another year.
But there’s nothing I can do about that. What I can do is the grocery shopping. I pulled Rose’s list out of my backpack. Oranges, apricot preserves, and macadamia nuts. It reminded me of just how much I had to get used to, living in another world.
The oranges are far tastier in Equestria, but this late in the year, fresh oranges are simply not available at a reasonable price. There’s a limit to how long earth ponies can keep their crops fresh, so winter is normally filled with canned, jarred, and dried produce. And hay. Lots of hay.
Apricot preserves simply don’t exist in town. Barnyard Bargains mostly sells dried goods, so I can’t go there. The local jelly maker doesn’t make apricot preserves. And there’s no Ponyville apricot farm. So options are limited to hoping a traveling merchant comes through, or getting them back on Earth.
Macadamia nuts are even rarer. I always thought they were expensive here. But seeing them for sale in Equestria? A small jar costs an entire day’s wages. Rose loved them the one time she had them, and when she learned they were a lot cheaper here, I found myself buying them a lot more often than I used to.
I dumped out the contents of the pail, which included empty jars of apricot preserves and macadamia nuts originally purchased here. I glanced at my phone. I needed to hurry. I needed to drop off this month’s rent, and then visit the bank before it closed. My car was overdue for its 90,000 mile servicing, and so I needed to deposit enough money to cover it first. It’s kind of hard for someone working in another dimension to get a credit card.
I checked my coin pouch, which transformed back into my wallet. The large denomination bit coins changed to their equivalent value in U.S. currency. I counted out the money; for some reason, I always got old, worn bills. It’d be easier if I could bring back Equestria’s actual gold coins, but Twilight Sparkle said something called Star Swirl’s Fourth Law of Interdimensional Travel prevented this kind of arbitrage between universes.
I shrugged and grabbed my winter coat, heading outside. It was time to make the most of my forty-eight hours as a human.
Monday, December 17, 2018
East Rutherford, New Jersey
Jimmy Leopardi liked to tell people he had more cash than Bill Gates. He just couldn’t keep it.
In his job at the East Rutherford Operations Center, Leopardi oversaw the processing of old currency. Every day, a machine scanned millions of dollars of Federal Reserve notes. Occasionally, one would be flagged as possibly counterfeit; that involved a whole bunch of paperwork. But most of the time, they just got shredded and turned into souvenirs.
He already had two pillows stuffed with shredded $100 bills on his couch. And that, alas, was as close as he could get to all that money. He never physically touched any of the currency he watched get destroyed.
All in all, it was a routine job. Little changed other than the paperwork and the names of the people he reported to at the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the Secret Service. Probably the biggest change he’d seen yet had happened over the weekend, when they upgraded the venerable BPS 3000 system to the 3005 model.
If it shredded those old bills any faster, Leopardi couldn’t tell.
An hour into his day, something different did happen. A message popped up on the screen, one he hadn’t seen before.
LB 51022789 B: Flagged duplicate
IG 42566071 B: Flagged duplicate
He stared at the message, and then called his boss.
Edward Stiles joined Leopardi at his terminal right away. He also stared at the message. Finally, he spoke. “I remember that now. It’s a new functionality with the BPS 3005.”
“Yeah, but what does it mean?” Leopardi asked.
“The system flagged the bills because those serial numbers were listed as previously destroyed,” Stiles replied.
“So they’re counterfeit?”
“No; counterfeit bills get handled the same way. The system recognizes these as real bills, but bills that shouldn’t still be in circulation.”
“We didn’t check that before?” Leopardi asked.
Stiles shrugged. “The machines were old. Maybe they couldn’t do it. Or maybe it was a Jurassic Park thing.”
“Jurassic Park?”
“You know, the park assumed no dinosaurs could be born outside the lab, so the system stopped counting once it reached the number of dinosaurs that were supposed to be there?”
“I don’t remember that,” Leopardi said.
“It was in the original movie. Or maybe just the book. Anyway, I’ve got to deal with this.”
Leopardi held up his hands. “Don’t look at me. I didn’t do it,” he joked.
“I know. But now I have to figure out who did.”
Edward Stiles took off his glasses and rubbed his temples. Reviewing hours of security camera footage made it clear that one would have to be David Copperfield to steal a bill from these machines. There was no way to access the bill between it entering the EBS machine and being destroyed, and besides, the video made it clear no one was around when it happened.
His inbox was filled with e-mails from highers-up at Treasury, all wanting answers, and all having no idea how this happened, either.
Stiles only had one idea. He distributed the list of serial numbers of destroyed bills logged by the EBS machine that day. “See if any of these bills make an appearance again.”
Sunday, January 20, 2019
Indianapolis, Indiana
The sky was already dark by the time I returned home. The weather today had been very cold, but it was clear and sunny, making it a good day to travel. Today, I had gone to rural Union County, near the Ohio border, to take photographs.
I tell people I work for the Rural Roads Project, an AmeriCorps program dedicated to redesigning and rebuilding old roads in rural areas. It’s the reason I give for why it’s hard to reach me by phone during the week, and it’s also an excuse for why I don’t use social media much. The Rural Roads Project doesn’t exist, of course, but if you type the name into a search engine, you’ll find a realistic Web page on the AmeriCorps site for the program. I suspect it was created by one of the other people like me who make the same cross-universe commute.
To make this fake job more realistic, I post photographs of the places where I claim to have been. The photograph of an old gravel road is a given; I started by posting those, and now friends and family expect them. I also added some photos I took around the town of Liberty.
I then turned to the photographs that don’t get posted to Facebook, the ones from Equestria. I selected the one I took of the farrier, Shoeshine, at work hammering a horseshoe into place. That’s something I’ve thankfully not had to do as a pony; most unicorns don’t get shod. But I do need to get my hooves filed; it feels as strange as you might think.
I loaded the photograph into Photoshop to adjust it. I removed Shoeshine from the picture, and then added her back in. The goal was not to make it look perfect, but rather to make it look like I took one photo of an old shop and added a photorealistic pony image to it. After that, I ran it through some filters, creating a sepia tone photograph. That was the image I uploaded to my DeviantArt account.
Each photo got a lot of praise for how realistic it looked. People liked the details in my “art”. I took the time to respond to comments there. But seeing the photos of Rose made me think of how eager I was to return to Equestria.
I sighed and closed my computer. Heading to the kitchen, I looked through cans and boxes for something to eat. Fresh food isn’t an option when I spend so little time here. It was going to be a quiet and lonely evening.
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Washington, District of Columbia
Agent Samuel Lepore had been involved with a number of investigations in his time with the Treasury Department, but none were as infuriating as this current case. An investment firm running a Ponzi scheme? He knew what to look for and how to extract the one card to bring the whole house of cards down. A violation of one of the myriad laws named after two congressmen? He had all the procedures down pat. Tax evasion? That was easiest of all; he would just pass the case to his counterparts at the Internal Revenue Service.
Today, however, he was forced to meet with one of these IRS investigators, all because of the one case that didn’t make any sense. He had at least worked with Ian Ponta in the past; his agency was better at collecting the personal financial records of the people at the organizations Lepore investigated
The mystery of the reappearing bank notes just didn’t make sense. It had been discovered at one of the Federal Reserve banks, and further investigation found it was a small but systematic problem, first logged after an equipment upgrade at the facilities that processed old bank notes. Bank notes that were confirmed destroyed at the end of their life cycle were somehow being reintroduced into circulation, just a few at a time. It was less than ten thousand dollars. With no sign of wrongdoing, there was little anyone could do. The Secret Service bowed out; with no evidence of counterfeiting, they said it was out of their jurisdiction. But Lepore couldn’t forget the case. It was less an investigation, and more a mystery straight out of a Sherlock Holmes story.
Someone at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had the foresight to create a list of serial numbers of recently destroyed bills when he first noticed the problem. And from that, they were able to trace two bills back, from the Federal Reserve Bank to the independent bank to the person who had deposited the bills, Jason Sedmak, a 29 year old man from Indiana with no criminal record. He looked at the information Ponta sent over. Just like the case, it made no sense.
Lepore looked up as Ponta entered the room. “Please tell me you’ve made sense of this,” he said.
“Not a chance,” Ponta replied. “What did you think of the information in the file?”
“The first thing I noticed was the fact that he had no reported income in any year past 2012. My first thought was drug dealer. Probably meth, since it’s Indiana.”
“Meth’s more of a rural thing. But I don’t know any drug dealers who tell people they’re civil engineers. And it’s hard to be a drug dealer without a phone.”
Lepore looked at another document. “No cell phone service at all?”
“Pretty consistently, from Monday morning through Saturday morning.”
“I’d say working under the table is more likely,” Lepore said.
“If he is, he isn’t getting any benefit out of it,” Ponta said. “He’s not registered for any need-based social service program, not even Medicaid.”
“And is this true?” Lepore asked, holding up a statement.
“Yes. While Mr. Sedmak was kind enough to tell us of his life on Facebook, CNCS says there is no such program as the Rural Roads Project, and they have no answer as to why a page devoted to the program exists on their servers,” Ponta replied.
“They say it looks like someone cloned an existing page, and then changed it to highlight this fake program,” Lepore said, reading the report. “But why?”
“Just like you said, it makes no sense.”
“So what now? There’s no way we can get a warrant,” Lepore said.
“Since this is such an unusual case, we could try an unusual tactic, and just ask him,” Ponta said. “Two words: road trip.”
Monday, January 28, 2019
Indianapolis, Indiana
Samuel Lepore and Ian Ponta waited in their SUV outside their target’s home. The apartment complex in which he lived was old, but looked to be in decent shape. Around them, people walked to their cars and headed off to work.
Ponta donned a pair of sunglasses.
Lepore snorted. “It’s winter, it’s overcast. Why the sunglasses?”
“I make this look good,” Ponta replied.
“You’re no Will Smith,” Lepore said to his pasty companion. “You’re not even David Caruso.”
“Ouch,” Ponta said.
“Just calling it like it is.”
“Shall we go?”
With confidence, the two agents strode into the building where Jason Sedmak lived, found his apartment, and knocked.
There was no answer.
Lepore listened at the door; he heard no movement inside.
“I told you we should have gotten here earlier,” Ponta said.
“We didn’t see him leave, and his car’s still here,” Lepore replied. He checked his watch. “8:00 AM is normally when his cell phone signal disappears, so we’ll wait until then.”
They stood back from the door, taking a position within sight of both Jason’s door and the door to his apartment building.
I walked back to my apartment as fast as I could go without crossing the threshold into running. All I wanted to do was drop off my rent and go. But since I was paying with cash this month, I needed a receipt, and that took far longer than it should have. First the office manager had trouble finding my account, and then she couldn’t find the receipt book. It was like she was taking it out on me for making her job harder.
I’d missed my ride in the past, rarely with a good reason. I knew I could always contact Twilight Sparkle via her magical journal, and she would arrange for a second portal, but the look she always gave me said “I’m disappointed in you”.
And I don’t want to disappoint her. She’s like my boss, except with the authority to stop me from ever coming back. I don’t feel she’d do it, but there’s something about the sight of a horn and wings that instills in me a sense of respect and a small degree of fear.
I was so lost in my thoughts that I didn’t notice the two men waiting in my apartment building’s central area. They both wore dark suits, and one wore sunglasses. They might as well have been carrying a sign saying “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”.
“Mr. Sedmak. May we have a word?” the one without sunglasses said.
One of the most important instructions I received from Princess Celestia is to avoid the government learning about our situation. She emphasized that diplomatic relationships would be opened when the time is right, using proper means.
“Sorry, but no,” I said, and went for my door. The government agents interposed themselves between me and the door. The one without sunglasses, who was both taller and more muscular than me, was especially imposing.
“Rest assured, you are not under arrest, nor are you under any formal investigation,” Sunglasses said. He flashed his badge. “Agent Ponta, Internal Revenue Service.”
Muscles did likewise. “Agent Lepore, Department of the Treasury. We just have a few questions for you about old currency.”
“Huh?” I just stared at them.
“You’ve deposited several large denomination bills into your bank account,” he continued.
“More than one might expect for a person with no reported income,” Ponta said.
Lepore shot Ponta a look. “There’s no crime in using cash, but there is a mystery in how you acquired old bank notes the Department of Treasury had recorded as destroyed.”
“How would I know? I never ask the person I get it from,” I said. Really, I didn’t know, but then it hit me. All the money I earned in Equestria, money that magically transformed from bits into dollars... I never thought about how the bills were made, about how the magic worked.
I noticed a slight tickling sensation in my mind, one I associated with magic winking out. I pulled out my phone. 8:01 AM. I swore under my breath.
Lepore checked his watch. “Was something supposed to happen at 8 AM, Mr. Sedmak? That’s another part of this little mystery.”
“I don’t know what to say, other than I have nothing to say,” I said. “I have to get to work. Since I’m not under arrest, could you kindly step aside?”
The agents didn’t seem inclined to move. I really needed to get inside; my only way of communicating with Equestria was the journal in my bedroom. I wasn’t sure how to resolve this standoff. But then I saw red and felt magic wash over me, the familiar portal magic.
This time, I swore out loud.