As far as the eye could see, there was nothing; and nothing was dark, it was light; an endless expanse of barren white. The only break in the nothing was herself, and the three other ponies with her – four splashes of color against the canvas.
As she opened her mouth to speak, the landscape changed, glowing, ethereal lines crisscrossing the white, joining together to form shapes – squares, rectangles, circles and triangles, nigh infinite in number and complexity. Color followed where the shapes were joined, flowing over the construct like a rushing tide. Within seconds, what had been nothing was a landscape as real, if not more so, than the one they had just left.
It was a forest. No, deeper than that, she thought – a jungle. Something about the plants was different from the forest that surrounded the library. “Whoa. Uh … where are we?”
She looked at Rainbow, then around her once again, and shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
“It’s really big, really dark, and kind of holy horsefeathers what is that?!” They all looked at where the pink mare was pointing, and Twilight did a double-take; the wood of a nearby tree was warping and twisting, the vines that nearly covered its surface writhing. It soon took shape, and her eyes widened in recognition; it was the horse head. Vines framed it, forming its mane and emphasizing the lines of the face, lavender blossoms standing in for eyes.
Standing, she approached the head, trying to make sense of the situation. This was all, likely, a construct – not fully a part of The World, but real enough to fool someone who didn’t know what was going on. Her best guess at the meaning of Theatrum bore that out – information on that particular language had been frustratingly difficult to come by.
Her thoughts jumped tracks, arrested by the sight of the blossoms lighting up. The cube upon her chest followed suit, and she stared at it. How was that happening? That wasn’t even the real cube – just Pinkie’s curiously persistent representation of it. Exclamations from behind her brought her head around, and she found that the badges of her Voluntariae were glowing in similar fashion. Those made sense – they were constructs of the library itself. But the cube?
She shook her head, filing that away as a mystery to examine later. The head was communicating, words appearing in glowing purple in the air in front of it. “First-run protocols activated – now testing rendering mechanisms,” she read, then blinked, as pink intruded in her vision.
“Wow, you can read that?” She looked askance at Pinkie, then back at the text. It was clear as day.
“You can’t?” she asked, and the pink mare shook her head, her mane flopping about in wild fashion.
“Nope! It’s all in some weird code lettering!” Pinkie said. “Isn’t it, girls?”
Twilight looked to Rainbow, then Rarity, who were both staring at the words with puzzled looks on their faces. “She’s right, darling. I’ve never seen anything quite like that.”
“I have,” Rainbow said, rubbing her chin with a hoof. “I mean, not exactly like this, but a lot of the testing software I get is actually hidden behind encryption codes, and the more advanced ones are kind like this.”
Twilight stared at the lettering, one eyebrow raised. “So why can I read it?”
“You have the cipher key, of course!” Pinkie said, rolling her eyes as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “If you turn off your auto-decrypt, you could see it like we do!”
The unicorn blinked, and turned her attention inward, finding that Pinkie was right. Her decryption function was, in fact, running on auto. She disabled it, and took another look at the words; sure enough, she couldn’t make head or tail of them. Each letter had been replaced with a kind of swirly symbol. “A full alphabet replacement,” she mused, enabling the function. “I wonder … why the security?”
“Probably to make it hard for people who aren’t supposed to be using it to get anywhere,” Pinkie said, and nudged Twilight in the flank. “It’s saying more stuff, what’s it saying what’s it saying?”
“Warning,” she read, ears flattening at the word. “Errors detected – voice protocols corrupted.” Voice protocols?
“First launch quirks?” Rainbow asked.
“Probably,” Pinkie answered.
“Semper, report,” Twilight ordered, and was answered by silence. “Theatrum, report.” Again, silence. She sighed. “Voice protocols corrupted. So Semper can’t communicate, and we can’t either. Not the usual way, at least.”
“Oh dear. Are we stuck, then?” Rarity asked, her face concerned as she looked about her.
“No, I don’t think so,” Twilight answered, turning around and sitting. “There would be failsafes and alternate command venues built in – after all, you don’t use voice commands for your design software, do you?”
“Of course not!” the unicorn replied. “That would be horridly clunky.”
“Right,” Twilight said, her horn lighting up. “Let’s see if this works here, too.”
It did. The constructed world around her faded away, revealing the code from which it was formed. She ignored most of it, focusing on the head in front of her, and the star that hung, spinning right where the brain would be, exactly as she had hoped.
“You know, you look kind of scary when you do that,” Rainbow said, drawing murmurs of agreement from the other two mares.
“What exactly are you doing, darling?” Rarity asked, flinching as Twilight looked at her. “My, but that’s unsettling.”
“Uh … what is?” She wasn’t looking at the unicorn’s code, she knew that. She’d specifically worked that, spending at least a full day’s worth out of the past weeks practicing with Rainbow to ensure that she only examined what she chose to examine.
“Your eyes!” Pinkie said, putting her face right in Twilight’s. “They’re all, like, super glowy and really really white and you can’t even see a pupil or an iris or even really the whites of your eyes, because I think it’s just that weird light that’s coming from!” The pony sat back, rubbing her chin with a hoof. “It’s kind of like in certain movies when a really powerful wizard goes all ‘rawr I’m magical’ and channels a huge super powerful awesome spell, or something like that.”
Twilight found herself unable to blink – huh. So not only did she look scary, but while examining the code, she could not blink. Could she close her eyes? No, she couldn’t even close her eyes. How very strange. “What purpose would there be to that?”
“Well, it does look kind of cool, actually,” Rainbow said, and Pinkie nodded emphatically.
“Not the most practical of reasons,” she replied, turning her attention back to the star, and giving the system messages a onceover. Interesting – they all came with an identifier tag, now: Theatrum.exe. So this wasn’t the library talking, it was the program.
Rarity prodded her shoulder. “You still haven’t explained what you’re doing, dear.”
She nodded, peering more closely at the star. “Sorry, Rarity. I’m looking at the code,” she said, tightening her focus. The star itself started to fade, its various skeins of code slipping into focus. She could see the links, now, going from star to nearly every corner of the world they currently inhabited, which confirmed it – this was exactly what she was looking for. “Part of my design is the ability to actually look at the underlying code of The World. I figure that with this, I should also be able to fix the errors, if I can find them.”
A message scrolled across her vision, and she frowned. “What’s wrong?” Rainbow asked.
“Debugging failed – malicious intrusions detected,” she read, and was answered by a trio of gasps.
“You mean a hacker?!” Pinkie said, her voice nearly screaming in Twilight’s ear.
“Or a virus,” Rainbow said, darkly.
“But that doesn’t make sense, the Library’s only been online for two weeks!”
“Yeah, but it’s more deeply connected to the world than most other constructs,” the pegasus said.
“That means it’s more secure, Dashie, not less. Viruses don’t come from the system, they come from outside – most vectors take advantage of careless users more than anything else, and the system’s security is so robust that most viruses can’t even make it out of the user’s sandbox,” Pinkie said. It sounded like she knew what she was talking about, certainly; there was definitely more to this mare than met the eye. “The last crisis-level infection only managed to temporarily corrupt a single region – it didn’t even get server wide.”
Rainbow’s brow furrowed. “Well what makes you say it’s a hacker, then?”
“Same reason! The Library’s connected to the system! That’s, like, a massive security hole, if the wrong person got access to the Library systems!”
“But it’s only been here for two weeks! And there’s major level encryption on this whole thing! Who’d even know to try and crack it?”
“That’s the mystery!”
Twilight gasped. Was that … that couldn’t be. But it had to be. “Girls!” she said, and they looked at her.
“You find something, Twilight?” Pinkie asked, her voice fairly quivering with … probably excitement.
“Yes. A problem.” She turned to face them, her glow vanished, her eyes wide. “Something is locking me out of systems. Critical systems.”
“Hacker,” Pinkie said, her voice triumphant, her expression grim.
“It gets worse.”
“How so?” Rarity asked, brow furrowed.
“One of the systems is the core command line. I can’t tell Theatrum what to do.”
Rainbow and Pinkie were struck speechless, mouths hanging open in horror. Rarity looked between them and Twilight, her unease visibly growing. “I’m no expert, so I’ll ask,” she said. “If you can’t give the program orders, then that means …”
“I can’t tell it to end,” Twilight said, glumly. “And if I can’t tell it to end-”
“Then we can’t leave.”