Chapter 2
Twilight Sparkle had always had a certain fascination with robots. Or, rather, a more accurate description of her condition would be a ‘Secret Obsession that she Never Shared with Anypony and Spent Every Waking Moment of her Life Feeding’. SONSASEWMLF, for short.
Sometimes, she would randomly give off a speech about the ‘the possible advancements that could be made in the field of bio-magical… stuff if somepony were to come along and make a sentient robot’ to anypony who would be there to listen, which was usually nopony. Now, this wasn’t due to a lack of friends, as would have been the case a few months back, but because she would never give the speech in a place where somepony might hear. This, on its own, was quite odd.
But Twilight Sparkle was an odd pony.
And, as all odd ponies are wont to do, she spent every minute she had alone attempting to make her very own robot. Everything she had ever learned, ever, was all in preparation for the one moment, of the one day, in which she’d finally finish her robot and advance the field of bio-magical… stuff so much that Celestia would be dead before the scientists could figure out what to do with their advancements.
She hadn’t been very successful, at first. The very first time she’d tried to create her own sentient equine life form, she’d ended up with a toaster. A very nice toaster, as a matter of fact, one that would brown the bread just right and give off a cheerful little ‘ding!’ as it popped the bread up. It wasn’t, however, a particularly nice sentient equine life form, so it counted as a failure.
She’d gotten better with time, of course. The second time she’d tried, she ended up with a vaguely equine shaped, quite sapient, toaster.
Some part of Twilight’s subconscious really, really liked toasters.
In the end, she had so many toasters that to put all of them in operation at once would both overload the local power grid and require enough bread to feed the entire race of consumerist numbskulls living just off the coast of the Mareific Ocean.
Even her final model, which she had just completed earlier today, and was currently charging its battery in her basement, had two little slots on its back in which you could toast toast. Even after an hour of careful thought and days spent studying the blueprints, she had no idea how they had gotten there. Sometimes the universe just didn’t make sense.
She was in her basement now, of course, waiting for the battery to become fully charged. Spike was out at Rarity’s, doing Spike things while Rarity did her Rarity things, none of which mattered because today, on the day of days, Twilight Sparkle was about to turn on Equestria’s very first sentient equine shaped robot.
The battery was fully charged with enough batteries to last a year, maybe two.
The front hooves were loaded with a grappling gun, a Blasty Zarg Lap laser pistol, and a saxophone. It paid to be ready for anything.
The brain was loaded with all the processing power of a computer the size of a planet.
Twilight Sparkle reached a hoof over and pressed the power button, grinning gleefully. ‘Good morning!’ she cried happily.
And whatever she’d expected any sentient life form to say, ever, it wasn’t this: ‘What’s so good about it?’
Twilight frowned. He wasn’t supposed to talk like that. She thought she’d designed him with a little more... joie de vivre. But still, she thought, I’ve made a robot! Squee! ‘Well,’ she replied, ‘to begin with, today’s the day I created you! You’re officially the first sentient robot ever to be created in Equestria! Isn’t that wonderful?’
She clapped her hooves together.
The metallic equine sighed, then sat down on his haunches as if life, however short his was, was not worth living anymore. ‘Yes,’ replied the robot, ‘Wonderful describes it wonderfully. I have a brain the size of a planet and I’m stuck talking to a mutant deer horse who’s clearly just come out from the ocean.’ He said this in a bemoaned moan.
The lavender unicorn furrowed her eyebrows at him and felt a pang of disappointment. This wasn’t what she had been hoping for at all.
‘Well, er, uh, robot-
‘Well isn’t that just the greatest feeling on Earth? You can’t even bother to remember my name,’ grumbled the robot.
He proceeded to roll around on the floor in abject misery.
‘Well if you’re not going to tell me your name, then how am I supposed to remember it?’ She was frustrated now. She’d even begun to wonder if devoting her entire life to making a robot had been entirely worth it.
Marvin stopped rolling around and looked up at her in such a way that she felt guilty for ever experiencing the feeling of happiness in her life. ‘Well, if you must know, my name’s Marvin,’ said the manically depressed robot.
And with that, he trotted out the door, leaving Twilight Sparkle standing there with her mouth agape. Eventually, she began to wonder if it had all been a hallucination, and decided that robots were definitely a bad subject to base her SONSASEWMLF on.
‘That’s it,’ said the unicorn, ‘time to find a new SONSASEWMLF.’ She levitated a book and began desperately searching for something else to devote her entire life to.
***
Outside the Books and Branches library, Marvin suddenly realized that he had no idea where to go, or how he would get there even if he did have somewhere to go. The thought made him feel wonder why he was even bothering to go on.
So he did what any advanced being would do in his situation: math. He decided to do probability equations.
He calculated the probability of him being picked up by a motor vehicle in a country with no registered motor vehicles, and came up with a fairly low number.
He then calculated the probability of him being picked up by a particularly important pony in a motor vehicle, and came up with the 5th lowest number in existence.
Lastly, he calculated the probability of him being picked up by Princess Luna driving in an unregistered, homemade R.V. in order to escape the Equestrian Revenue Services and their tax reforms, and he came up with a number so impossibly low that the universe was more likely to condense, implode, explode, reform, and align in the shape of gummy the toothless alligator.
One second later, he was lying muzzle down on the ground, thinking, ‘Well, that’s odd.’
He thought this because it was a homemade R.V. that had knocked him into the dirt, driven by none other than Princess Luna, co-ruler of Equestria. She turned around and angrily shook her hoof in no general direction.
‘THOU SHALT NEVER CATCH US ALIVE, ERS!’ boomed the princess of the night.
Marvin lifted his head despondently. He didn’t like having his muzzle pressed against the dirt. To be fair, however, there wasn’t much he did like.
Princess Luna looked down at Marvin, and opened her mouth to boom at him.
‘THOU! HOW SENTIENT ART THOU?’
Marvin didn’t much like being boomed at, either. ‘I’m sentient enough to know that your question depresses me,’ he said, sighing.
‘WONDERFUL! WOULDST THOU LIKE TO JOIN ME ON AN ADVENTURE?’
He looked behind him, at the Books and Branches Library, where Twilight Sparkle, his creator, was busily reading book after book in a desperate attempt to find a SONSASEWMLF. A small purple dragon was making himself busy cleaning up after his friend, and an owl was staring at Marvin as if he were the single most interesting thing on the planet.
It wasn’t much of a choice, really.
***
In a quiet little town on the outskirts of Equestria, just bordering the Everfree forest, two ponies sat in a bar while a third, completely unrelated pony stood off in a corner singing drunken ditties of sadness, loss, and the inevitability of life, life, life, life, life, life, life, life, life- she was drunk, you see.
It was the second pony, of the cream colored earth variety, that sputtered and splattered a general mishmash of incomprehensible words at her completely related conversation partner, who was chugging down pints of berry punch as if it were the last time she’d ever be able to drink them- which it were.
It has been said, and argued, and argued over the saying of, that if a pony is subjected to too much new information at one time, even the slightest of shocks, mental or physical, would be enough to put their brain on hold. This, of course, would cause the brain to stop sending signals to the jaw, which would lead to the repetition of the first syllables to enter an equine’s mouth-neurons, which was usually but, um, or wha.
‘But- but- um- um-’ spluttered Bonbon. She paused, and once again opened her mouth, thinking that she might be able to form her thoughts into a coherent word, and spluttered some more, ‘wha- wha-’
Lyra, who could see that this conversation was going nowhere, interrupted. ‘Well, you said you were ready.’
She had the bartender refill Bonbon’s glass, and passed it over to her. ‘This might help,’ said the minty unicorn.
Bonbon closed her mouth, stopped spluttering, and took another swig of the berry punch. She could feel her brain begin, once again, to send signals to her brain, which was a fairly pleasant sensation, and she opened her mouth to say something coherent.
‘Why? What possible reason could you ever have that would justify you leaving Equestria in, say, three minutes?’
‘Tax Reform Day.’
‘Tax Reform Day?’
***
Tax reform day, according to The Prodigal Explorer’s Map, is a singular day in a thousand years, in which the ERS sends every living resident of Equestria a record of their entire lifetime’s taxes, in the form of a really, really long tax log. Every page would need to be read over and approved. Many pages were written in Griffin, and all tax logs would include such words as back taxes, yearly interest growth rate yield, yield logs tax years, growth yield rate logs, and back taxes year logs interest growth, effectively making them almost entirely indecipherable.
‘Well, why can’t we have our fun?’ Said Josy-Ki Nomana, head of the ERS, when asked about the ethics of Tax Reform Day.
If somepony were to not hand in their tax logs on time one week after receiving it, members of the Equestrian Revenue Services would hunt them down, forcing them to approve them whilst reading bad ‘My Little Homo: Sapiens are Magic’ fanfiction.
Even the princesses would be forced to complete their tax logs, which usually resulted in a week of Princess Celestia being ridiculously grumpy and banishing to the moon any unlucky pony who dared approach her.
This also resulted in Luna taking surprise vacations, sometimes for years on end. It was altogether probable, if not likely, that she was never Nightmare Moon in the first place, and that she simply went to the moon because it was the only place she could ever go to to escape the ERS.
It was also fairly probable that she had managed to somehow lose her travel visa on the moon, spent 1000 years looking for it because she couldn’t be bothered to ask her sister for one, and had her sister invent a crazy monster named Nightmare Moon in order to disguise the fact that she was the kind of pony to lose her travel visa.
She was, of course. Always had been.
***
‘That’s Tax Reform Day?’ asked Bon-Bon.
Lyra nodded.
‘That sounds dreadful.’
‘Well it is,’ said Lyra. ‘And I’m leaving. Wanna come with?’
The earth pony looked outside at Derpy Hooves, who was struggling to fly under the weight of almost a hundred tax logs, one for each pony in Ponyville. One for her, as well.
It wasn’t much of a choice, really.
***
Marvin stepped into the R.V. and found himself in a long, white, circular room, with a white, circular couch in the center, a circular tray of various fruits and vegetables sitting on a plain white circular table in the middle. The walls stretched beyond the distance that they were supposedly supposed to stretch.
‘WE ARE HEADED TO IT’S BEYOND,’ said Luna, who was now at the steering wheel and driving forwards, ‘T’WOULD BE NICE IF WE COULD FIND A GUIDE.’
Marvin did some probability calculations. ‘According to my brain, which has the processing power of an entire planet, the chances of that happening are so infinitesimally small that-
The R.V. pulled to a stop in front of two suspicious looking ponies, one of whom had a foam thumb strapped to her hoof.
‘WHERE TO, FAIR TRAVELERS?’ shouted Luna.
‘Well, I do have a pleasant little summer cottage in It’s Beyond,’ said Lyra, ‘I suppose we could head there.’
Probability, it seemed, could go jump off a cliff and impale itself on some sharp-looking rocks, for all it was worth today.