*** Mission Log: Sol 5132 ***
*** AOS – undefined ***
*** Message Received (Source: null): Candygram! ***
*** PARSE ERROR: Command not recognized. ***
“What?” Starlight looked up, along with Opportunity which had been watching over her shoulder as she had clacked away at the now, barely, functioning laptop.
Pinkie Pie bounced into the room, hoofing over a pie to Starlight. “Heard you were having computer trouble, so I brought this!”
“Uhm, thanks?”
“It’s a raspberry pie,” Pinkie informed her, wiggling her eyebrows. “Get it?”
“Nooo, not really,” Starlight replied after a moment’s thought.
“Huh. Don’t worry, neither do I. But the readers will. Well, some readers will. The rest will get the joke explained to them in the comments by the computer nerds who do get it.”
“Okay then. Thanks for the pie, I guess … What are you doing, Pinkie?”
The baker giggled. She had begun bouncing around Opportunity in a circle. The rover, finding the bouncing ball of pink fluff extremely interesting, was following her movements with its panoramic camera. “This is fun! We have a new friend, and he’s up and about now. Why won’t you let me throw him a party at Sugarcube Corner?”
“Because it would take him, it,” Starlight corrected herself, “the better part of a week to get to Sugarcube Corner at top speed. And it’s still not clear just how extensive the damage is. So Twilight and I don’t want to put extra stress on it by moving it around too much.”
“Oh, come on! He was clearly built to roam, Starlight. Oppy wants to be free!”
“Oppy?” Starlight asked, turning around and finishing up some key strokes at the laptop.
“Yeah, it sounds much better than what Spike calls him, don’t you think? Opi makes him sound so old. Oppy’s got more pep!”
“Well, I’m not calling it anything until I’ve found out its real name. That just seems wrong.”
“But we gotta call him something until we find out.”
“Well, with any luck, that moment is now,” Starlight said and flicked a switch on a device connected to the computer. Opportunity suddenly stopped all movement and looked up.
*** AOS – BSN ***
*** Message Received (Source: Glimmy-PC-XP): NETSTAT ***
*** Message Sent: MER-B ***
*** Message Received (Source: Glimmy-PC-XP): PING ***
*** Message Sent: ECHO ***
*** Message Received (Source: Glimmy-PC-XP): PING ***
*** Message Sent: ECHO ***
*** Message Received (Source: Glimmy-PC-XP): PING ***
*** Message Sent: ECHO ***
*** Message Received (Source: Glimmy-PC-XP): PING ***
*** Message Sent: ECHO ***
“It worked! It worked! It worked!” Starlight jubilated, having wrapped Pinkie in a bear hug and spinning her around in circles with a huge grin on her face.
“Yay!” Pinkie replied, not bothered in the least that she was being spun around like a top, then added: “Wheee!!! What are we celebrating, by the way? I need to know what to write on the cupcakes later.”
“That!” Starlight stopped her impromptu victory dance and pointed at one of the final lines that had popped up in the console which informed the user that in response to the ping four data packages had been received, each one with a response time of 23 to 26 milliseconds. “It answered!” She wheezed, feeling a little nauseous. Perhaps she’d overdone it on the spinning, or it was just the excitement.
Pinkie didn’t seem to suffer from the same problem. “That’s great! But I thought Oppy was already answering you before.”
“It was,” Starlight replied, entering some more commands and making sure the connection remained stable. “But I couldn’t get the translation spell to work. But when Twilight’s counterpart from the human world gave us an overview on how computers work, we had a breakthrough.”
“Is it because computers communicate with ones and zeroes rather than words?” Pinkie ventured.
“It’s because computers comm … “ Starlight blinked. “Yes, that’s exactly why. How did you know?”
Pinkie laughed nervously. “Heh, heh. Pinkie sense? It’s definitely not because my human counterpart and I regularly switch places through the portal without letting anypony know. Noperoony! Please, go on.”
“Okay,” Starlight continued with a raised eyebrow. “Anyway, translation spells are used to translate from one language to another, but the problem was that it had to go through two layers. So while Twilight was camped out in the human world for the last few days, the Sparkle siblings came up with this.” She pointed at the apparatus connected to the laptop. Magic sparks were intermittently arcing between two aerials protruding from it.
“Shiny.”
“Thank you,” Starlight replied modestly. “Sunset and I actually worked out the practical and engineering part of the setup. It’s based on her ingenious design of converting magic into electrical current to charge the laptops. I realized that I could use the same principle to make magical spikes turn an electric circuit on or off which the computer can then read as ones and zeroes. We’re calling it the Sunset Glimmer Transceiver, the SGT.
It connects to Equestria’s ambient magic field and creates a more localized field that works like a computer network. Our Twilight came up with the spell matrix and human Twilight wrote the network protocols based on ones from Earth. They have dubbed it the Binary Sparkle Network, or BSN for short. The rover can connect to that and send its binary message to the computer.”
“Okay, but that still only gets you ones and zeroes, right?”
“It does. But this computer also reads ones and zeroes and interprets that data internally, then turns it into text. By teaching the translation spell matrix to the computer, it can then translate the binary code into Equestrian!”
Pinkie gasped. “You taught a computer magic?”
“In a manner of speaking. That’s what the two Twilights have been working on for the last few days, writing a parser that can take the input from the SGT and the BSN and translate it into something readable for us.”
“And does it work?”
For the first time since she’d flipped the switch, Starlight’s smile faded. “I … don’t know.”
“Then why don’t we find out?”
Starlight swallowed, casting a furtive glance at the machine. “It’s just that … everything works now. I know it can hear me when I talk directly. But whether or not we can get an answer … it’s all down to the translation spell matrix I wrote in the first place.”
“And?”
“And … what if it doesn’t work?” Or worse, Starlight added silently with a sinking feeling, what if it does work and it’s upset with me? Bringing it here without asking. I thought I was helping, but can I really be sure of that? Everypony else thought I was crazy when I said that it was a call for help. What if I was wrong? What if I brought it here against its will? What if it’s mad at me.
“Oh, come on! Nopony likes a gloomy Glimmy,” Pinkie stated and pushed Starlight towards the laptop. “What have you got to lose? The way I see it, making a friend begins with saying hello.”
Starlight looked at Pinkie, then the rover. It almost seemed as if Opportunity was straining its ears, if it had had any, to listen for any follow-up signal on the BSN.
She took a deep breath, thinking for a moment, before settling on a question she thought she’d gotten an answer to way back when they’d first made contact. Standing up straight, she looked at Opportunity and said: “Hello. My name is Starlight Glimmer. What is your name?”
The rover’s camera eyes swiveled to meet hers, seemingly indicating that it had heard her and even recognized the source of the message.
“Look!” Pinkie shouted, pointing a hoof at the monitor and Starlight turned around to read the lines appearing in the console output.
*** Message Received: Source - MER-B ***
*** Parsing ***
*** Parsing ***
*** Designation: Mars Exploration Rover B – Opportunity ***
The two mares looked at each other, then back to the screen. More came in, Opportunity’s eyes still fixed on the unicorn. She was about to ask another question when, maybe in response to Starlight’s own worry that had been carried along with her message, more lines appeared.
*** Message Received: Source - MER-B ***
*** Parsing ***
*** Parsing ***
*** Parsing ***
*** Sol 5111: My battery is low, and it’s getting dark ***
*** Sol 5132: My battery is full, and it’s warm ***
*** Parsing ***
*** Parsing ***
*** Starlight – save ***
*** Starlight – fix ***
*** Parsing ***
*** Starlight – friend ***
“Look! Look!” Pinkie called out happily, bouncing up and down. “Isn’t that great, Starlight? You can talk to your friend now. Starlight?”
But the unicorn wasn’t listening. She was looking back at the rover and not even trying to hold back the tears.
Pinkie put a hoof on Starlight’s shoulder. “Are you alright? Aren’t you happy?”
“Yes,” Starlight sniffed. “I’m very happy.” She lightly wrapped her hooves around Opportunity’s mast, and for the next few minutes, the only sound in the room was the sobbing of a unicorn crying tears of happiness.