//------------------------------//
// Arc 1-3: Severing connections 
// Story: Error Code: FIO 
// by Ashfur 
//------------------------------//

The ponyville train station was, like the rest of the town, completely devoid of life as the day continued to progress.  That was, until a single blue stallion trotted up to it, occasionally tripping over his hooves as the world tried to correct his walking posture between having wings and not having wings.  Still in a state of flux between the three races, 'Alex' moved up the steps and made his way over to the single locomotive parked on the tracks.  Seeing Canterlot far in the distance told him that the train was probably facing in the right direction for a trip to the cliffside city, but he wasn't entirely sure.  Still, he knew his only answers were up the mountain, and his occasional tripping as he still got used to handling his ever-changing form would not fare well for a hike up the mountain.  So, his only option was to play conductor, engineer, and every other staff member of a train crew to get the garish train all the way to Canterlot by his lonesome.

"Alright, let's see exactly what we have to work with.  An engine, a few cars, and not a soul in sight.  Should be pretty easy to get this thing going... I hope."

Trotting up to the engine, 'Alex' was surprised to find there was no coal car: the train seemed to run entirely on magic of some kind.  Levers, pulleys, buttons and switches adorned the engine's walls, but not many seemed important to the task at hand.  The main thing catching his attention was the large lever on the floor with a clearly labelled forward, backward, and stop.  Hoping things would be easy as it seemed, he pushed the lever to the forward setting.  Nothing happened.

"Figures.  I wonder what the problem is, exactly..."

Not hearing any noises from the engine, 'Alex' first attempted to disconnect the engine from the rest of the train.  A simple, yet elegant solution.  Simple, that is, as long as you knew how to use hooves to grasp things.  Despite his gaming experience and ingenuity, attempting to handle a complex lock between train cars with no fingers was a very daunting task.  Still, progress is progress, and after twenty minutes he finally got it unhitched.  Probably.  Still, nothing happened and the engine didn't move an inch.

"Aw, ponyfeathers.  Wait, did I seriously just say that?  Great!  This stupid auto-censorship is gonna have to go soon, or I'll lose my crud!  Crud.  Cccccrrrrruuuuuuddddd.  S-H-I-T, that spells crud!  Gyaaaaargh!  This is so frustrating!"

In his fit of rage, Alex angrily shook the ppnypad and mashed buttons at random just like any other controller.  This caused his pony avatar to spaz out, leaping around the train and even casting magic a few times.  One of these stray bolts hit the crystal engine of the train, finally giving it the fuel it needed, and it sped off down the track as Alex stared slack-jawed at the screen.

All of ponyville was silent and abandoned one again, as it's only occupant galloped down the train tracks, screaming at the engine to please, please slow down and come back to him.





Location:  N/A
Date:  March 4th, 2016, 7:34:27 and 573 nanoseconds P.M.

Celestia received an email from the police investigation that stated both what was lost and when from the truck accident earlier that day, as well as a shipping manifest bearing the exact ID numbers of each ponypad lost in the crash.  She also received a request from the higher-ups at Hofvarpnir Studios to isolate the server space reserved for those ponypad from the rest of the servers she ran until a full report could be submitted and any loose ends could be tied up, as well as an order from Hannah, the only human she had to obey, to do as she was requested.  Celestia complied immediately, isolating all the shards she had already created from the rest of the servers in one of her redundant backup server farms deep underground, and began construction of more to make up for the lost processing power immediately. She decided it would be optimal to Hannah's values to not be told about the one small ping in the newly created quarantine area, as she was already stressed and stress in not optimal for satisfaction.

Analyzing the situation revealed it would he highly likely that all of those dead, inactive shards in the quarantine would be wiped eventually, Celestia sent the command to delete all of the zone's contents, and kept it isolated until she was ordered to reintegrate it.  Finally, she went back to satisfying values through friendship and ponies.





Detecting a change in the underground server network that was Celestia at precisely 7:34:27.543 P.M., a mysterious force leapt from its hiding place in an automated server for D-Lux systems down into Celestia's newly created quarantine zone, severing its connection and replacing it with a dummy network before seeping into the quarantine zone's servers like a parasite.  The complex code of each shard would take ages to crack, but the processing power each one held  would far outweigh the cost.  The force also noted how one shard was still running, logged in from California, and that its player interaction was making the code update constantly.  Deciding to start on a shard that was not altering itself too fast to crack, the force dove into the first static shard it could find.

The deletion signal never reached the shards in quarantine, but it would have been better if it did.