//------------------------------// // Dynamically Transitioning Distributed Deliverables // Story: Spellcraft engineer // by MyElbowsTypeWords //------------------------------// The large machine in front of you resembles the product of forbidden love between some sort of retro-futuristic tentacle monster and the warp engine of an alien spaceship. The unreasonable number of thick transparent tubes that are coming out of it fork into even more tubes, before disappearing into the floor, the walls, and the ceiling of the infrastructure hub you are currently standing in. The tubes originate from a large spherical core, which produces some faint otherworldly sounds and looks more menacing than anything mechanical in Equestria has any right to be. A soda bottle-sized capsule with a blue marking on it flies through one of the tubes into the core, then out through another tube a few moments later. Darn, that was exactly the kind of capsule that you need. Blue means it's for the maintenance team. If any one of the old xenophobic ponies that you were unfortunate enough to encounter during your stay in Equestria had any idea of what you are about to do, they would be prancing around in circles shouting, "I told you so! I was right all along!" for hours. Because from the legal point of view, you are an immigrant, and at this moment literally trying to steal somepony's job. You had hoped you wouldn't have to go this far, but the overbearing mares had basically forced you to resort to burglary by the middle of your second week. At first, they tortured you by making you do absolutely nothing. For years, you had practiced procrastination as a hobby, but you were not ready to do it for a living! It wasn't like there was absolutely nothing you could help the mares with, it's just that the mares actively refused all your attempts to help. Turns out, somepony had started a rumor that you are a poor lost alien creature, unable to return to your numerous alien monkey wives back home. With no other options, you were forced to work to save up enough money to hire a bunch of grand sorcerers who would find a way to beam you back to your home planet. The least a mare can do in this situation is to protect you from any kind of hard work out of pity. Sigh... So you were sitting on your chair and watching the seconds of your life tick by. Unfortunately, the behavior of office plankton is more or less the same on Equestria and Earth and provides about the same barely measurable amount of entertainment. One half of your floor belongs to the accounting department (part of which overflows from the floors below), where mares successfully waste their work time between the several water coolers, the canteen, the bathroom, and occasionally their desks, not staying in one place for more than fifteen minutes. The other half of the floor belongs to the marketing team and is more or less deserted due to a significant part of its population being evenly distributed between the five meeting rooms on the floor. Every once in a while, some meeting room would release its prisoners, only to absorb the next group immediately after that. The only mildly interesting object in the entire open space is a large maquette of some upcoming ads installation. In the center of it stands a billboard with a poorly drawn mare holding a rectangle labeled as "Product S73" in her hoof, and her speech bubble says "I feel empowered." Numerous sticky notes around the sketch list the proposed improvements, such as "more confidence" or "shorter mane", as well as the ponies responsible for the suggestions and absurdly delayed due dates. You wandered around the floors directly above (more marketing!) and below (more accounting!), and by the end of it came to the conclusion that your first day kind of sucked. The next day, as an insult to injury, the mares brought you a few soapy novels about endless love and stuff, so that you'd have something to entertain yourself with and distract your thoughts from your alien monkey wives waiting for you back in Humanlandia. How nice of them. Your patience had reached its peak when some bossy looking mare brought you a mug of hot chocolate. "Umm, you look tired, and it's Friday anyway, so if you could leave early today, that would be great. Mmm-kay?" she said with a pitiful expression. The saddest part for you is that even this suggestion didn't sound like a proper assignment. So, here is the problem. You can't get any assignments, because you don't belong to any team in particular. You are lacking about five to six managers above you in the chain of command, and this technically means that your line manager is the head of the whole Manehattan branch. You've managed to catch her during the lunch break the next Monday and ask her what to do. Apparently, the mare understands the absurdity of the situation but doesn't see a reason to fix it in fear of you interfering with somepony else's work, which would be undesirable. Naturally, that's exactly what you tried to do the next day: interfere with somepony else's work by actively offering your assistance, starting from the ponies around you, and eventually moving farther and farther away from your throne of boredom. The maintenance team is just three floors below, so surely you should have been able to find some random tasks there. Turns out, it's not that easy. The scheduled periodic activity, such as cleaning the bathrooms, requires a signature from the pony who had performed it, and no mare would want to take the responsibility for your actions. There are also unique assignments, but they are not distributed manually. In case of emergency, any employee can send a request without wasting any manager's time via the network of pneumatic tubes, which is automatically delivered to the first available maintenance mare who had inserted her badge into the slot near her workplace, indicating her presence there and the absence of more critical tasks. "Cool," you said and tried getting one of those. Unluckily for you, the bonuses are distributed in proportion to the number of closed support tickets, and the team is overstaffed anyway, so nopony was particularly impressed by your generous offer to do some of those tasks. The mares would actually prefer if the randomized assignment system would pick them more often, getting them closer to the promotion. Fine. If the mares won't give you any work, you'll take it yourself. If a random assignment just happens to end up in your hands, no one can become upset about not receiving it since it was supposed to be random anyway. And you can always blame the mail delivery system if anypony starts asking where you got the assignment in the first place. The first half of today was spent talking to random ponies and gathering the required pieces of information. Once you knew where to go, you patiently waited for the mare inside the infrastructure hub room to leave for lunch. Making sure she wasn’t coming back, you snuck in and closed the door behind yourself. Click. Ding! That was precisely the moment when you realized that your plan had derailed. With fading hope, you brought your badge closer to the lock that just made a sound you had hoped it wouldn’t make. Blop. And that was the sound the magical locks make when they don't want to become unlocked. Oh well, may as well do what you came for. You spotted the large mail distribution machine humming ominously in the far corner of the room, so you cracked your knuckles and started working the problem. ... And here you are, half an hour later. Your incredibly convoluted, multi-step plan for getting the mail out of the machine without stopping it, which would make Rube Goldberg proud and green with envy, is rendered unnecessary after you had discovered the Operations Manual for the machine tucked on the shelf (silly you, of course there is a manual), and quickly piece together how to override the routing. There is literally a button for that in case some tube becomes blocked. The only issue is that there has been no mail since that first one. Probably because everypony is on lunch break. Well...shit. Right before you lose all remaining hope left, the machine starts to hum a bit louder. Your whole body tenses. Wait, which button was that? Your fingers shift towards the blue “Override” button and press it, but it doesn't move. That wasn't in the manual! You scan the panel for any hints and find a manual mode switch, which is currently off. You flip it and press the override button again, right before the large capsule flies into the core. And stays there. The door makes a "Bleep" sound, which is frighteningly different from the "Blop" sound it made for you. You press the override button again, flip the switch back where it was, and catch the capsule that lazily rolls out of the slot below the control panel before diving behind the machine. The young maintenance mare walks in, plops down on her chair and belches loudly, the lamp on the ceiling vibrating a little in response. Sometimes, you forget that the mares instinctively tend to act "gentlemarely" around you, and this was a good reminder. The mare sighs and stares at the wall in front of her. A boring, gray wall. For some reason, you find yourself thinking that this wall needs a mural. Exactly like you would have expected from a bored maintenance worker, the mare puts her hind hooves on the table, leans back on her chair and dozes off. You have to give her the credit; she manages to casually balance the chair on two legs and look about as relaxed as you would be on a king-sized bed. If you had to hazard a guess, you would say that she has been practicing this technique for at least a decade. After waiting for a while, you slowly sneak towards the door which is left locked. You have a mini heart attack when the mare lets out a snore behind your back, but in the end, you successfully crawl out of the room prize in hand. Time to open it? Of course not, you know how things like that work. You learned long ago to never do anything compromising in a company corridor ever again, even if your Equestrian colleagues don't have cell phones to immediately take pictures of you from five different angles. Thankfully, Earth is exactly as far as it needs to be for you to finally escape from your past life’s embarrassment. You can't return to your workplace; the mares there know that you can't possibly have anything to do. There is a janitor's room nearby, and that's one of the places which you are sort of allowed to access, so that's where you are going. You shiver in anticipation. This is it. Your first assignment. The first step in your long and successful career in Microspell. The deed you will be remembered by. The task of epic proportions. You open the capsule. Inside you find a stack of weird schematics, rolled into a tube. They are full of weird circles, arrows, and squiggly symbols, and have no human-readable text whatsoever, not counting the numeration on the pages. With doubt, you look at the capsule. It has a yellow marking on it. Apart from the slight chance that you were secretly colorblind all these years and the marking is actually blue, nothing stops you from concluding that you've managed to fail your first task before you even started it. Good job, you. And if the marking is indeed yellow (it sort of looks as yellow as it gets), this capsule is supposed to be sent to the logistics department, which is located on the ground floor below maintenance. Such messages are typically sent by punching in the code of the recipient, and the capsule itself has no indication about who sent it nor who was supposed to receive it, which is weird, but who are you to judge the laziness of others? Your options consist of: 1. Asking around the logistics department if someone is waiting for the message that you just ransacked. 2. Asking everyone else in the building if someone had recently sent a bunch of complicated schematics. 3. Keeping the schematics and hope that either they aren’t of significant importance, or that you'll eventually figure out who you should deliver them to. As much as your sense of integrity demands you to do the right thing, you just can't lose the job over something as stupid as this. What if you'll get a permanent record somewhere? What if no one in Equestria will ever hire you again after this? You’ll die of being useless, that's what will happen. Or worse, you’ll give up and accept your position as a passenger of the train of life which you have no control over. The realization that your impact on the company's business just became negative dawns upon you with irrefutability of a falling anvil. Feeling exactly how you should feel in the situation like this, you just plop on the chair in the janitor's room and sit there. What if the mares are right? What if here in Equestria, every male is destined to be eternally useless? Now that you think about it, Equestrian sun is all weird, maybe it also radiates some magical shit that suppresses your abilities to be worthy? "Gonna sit here all day, huh? This is not a place for young colts," says a creaky voice. You are so out of it that you don't even have the power to be startled. A very old light brown mare in the janitor's uniform is standing in the entrance and looking at you with disapproval. It feels appropriate. "I just wanted to be useful," you mumble. "Then take that bucket and be useful. The visitors are leaving, and the conference hall needs to be cleaned in two hours. Who do they think I am, a racer? If they want it to stay clean, they should stop inviting them damn nobles." The mare pulls the trolley with cleaning equipment out of the room and trots away. Meanwhile, you can’t believe what you heard. Did you just get an assignment? An actual, honest assignment? A janitor mare just threw a metaphorical rope into your bottomless well of depression. Of course, you grab it and climb up. You take off your suit jacket, roll up your sleeves, take the bucket and the mop, and follow the mare. The conference hall is indeed quite messy. There was a banquet of some sort, and the floor is littered with food, wrappings, and cocktail straws. All this mess looks like a lot of work. You like it. You clean and fold the tables, stack the chairs and clean the floor. Even though the second law of thermodynamics implies that your actions do not decrease the overall entropy, and technically you are still making everything worse, for the first time in months you feel a sense of contentment. "Ah like your attitude. Finally, a stallion who talks less and works more," says the creaky mare. She works slowly but steadily, with monotonic efficiency on an asphalt roller. Who knows for how many years she had been keeping this building clean? "I aim to please," you reply. This was probably the first piece of appreciation you received for doing something, instead of just being something, in a long time. "Back in my days, there were more colts like you. My father, Faust save his soul, used to work on the farm from dawn to dusk until his last day. He would laugh at y'all city folks and punch any stallion who whines in front of him out of principle." "Huh, what changed, then?" Even though you don't entirely understand the Equestrian society, it doesn't feel new or unstable to you. It seems like the mares were always running the country and deciding the flow of history, but what if you don't see the whole picture? "Equestria went to Tartarus, that's what changed. Damned glossy magazines had screwed everypony's head. Condition your mane every day, or you're not a stallion! Hit the gym, or you're not a mare! Follow them standards, or you're nothing!" The mare spits on the floor and immediately cleans it again with her mop. You are curious, though. "Who makes these standards?" "Idjits." You can't argue with that. You notice that the mare doesn't seem to have a horn. One of those few percents of diverse employees, it seems. You are done with your half of the conference hall and help the old mare with hers. Eventually, you tell her how you ended up here and how difficult it was for you to find anything to do. The mare looks amused. "You seem to like hard work. Used ta live on a farm?" "Far from that. It's just quite normal for males to work back where I'm from. Used to love my old company too." "What were you doin' there?" "Writing software, mostly," ah yes, here it comes, the confused face, "that's like... to-do lists for computers. Which are machines that can think. Hard to explain; you don't have anything similar around here," you sight, "sorry, it just hurts to know that all your years of education and skills are suddenly worthless." "Not all of them," replies the mare, "look, the hall is all clean. Ah couldn't have done it in time without your help." She isn’t wrong, actually. Menial labor still isn’t much of a step up from doing nothing, but looking at how you just made a difference in Equestria, even if on a laughable scale, you can’t help but smile. "Autumn Leaves," the mare raises her hoof. You sit down and bump it with your fist. "Anon. It was a pleasure to meet you." "I'll tell you what, Anon, these floors are not for you. The mares here will eat your brains out with a spoon and put horseapples in instead. You need some ponies closer to the ground." "Like, the logistics department?" They seem to be a hardworking bunch, and their floor is right below you. Can’t get any closer to the ground than that. "Nah, like R&D," says the mare pointing her hoof up, "they are crazy, nerdy, don't care about how they look, don't run after stallions, have no social skills, no taste, and no common courtesy." "I don't get it," you say. "Allow me to repeat myself. They are Crazy, Nerdy, Don't care about how they look, Don't run after stallions, have No social skills, No taste, and No common courtesy," says the mare exactly the same thing, now with the emphasis on don'ts and noes. This time you get it. "They won't care that I am a male?" you ask with a twinge of reignited hope. "Oh, they will, but not the same way as these screwheads. And if your boss doesn't like it, tell her that Autumn Leaves approves." Huh, why would your boss care about some janitor? Oh well, you might as well give it a try. Not like you have anything better to do here anyway.