1: A Trip to Uncanny Valley
The main thing you’ve got to understand is this: It wasn’t like she had just popped straight out of the cartoon, exactly as drawn. I would’ve been even more incredulous if she had. The style they’d used for Celestia was a lot closer to what I was looking at. I’m sure even she would have looked quite different ‘in the flesh’, if it had been her instead, but this…!
This bordered on uncanny valley territory — where something looks almost right, but not quite. Where cute turns into creepy. That line varies somewhat for different people. For example, some are freaked out by anime eyes or certain kinds of dolls, while others can’t get enough of them.
Someone who had never spent a lot of time around horses or didn’t understand how they were put together might not have noticed all the differences I did. Hell, I probably couldn’t catalog all of them myself, despite the couple of years I’d spent working part time at a stable after high school. I’m not even talking about the existence of her horn and wings, either, although the latter were certainly much more complex in real life. To begin with, they had a visible, realistic structure, bone and muscle and skin and individual feathers, which the cartoon completely glossed over. Her legs were the same way. Well-defined muscles, joints, and hooves rather than simplified, featureless, tubular appendages.
But a lot of those muscles and joints were wrong. At least for any equine native to Earth. Sure, they looked similar enough at first glance, and from what I’d seen they could undoubtedly do everything a real horse or pony could do, but I had a feeling they’d have a lot greater range of motion. How much greater remained to be seen.
Her head was nothing like the huge round skull with a tiny muzzle in the cartoon, but comparing it to a real pony’s, it did tend vaguely in that direction. There was clearly room for a larger brain under her horn, making her mouth seem smaller, daintier, by contrast. That mouth looked fairly normal, but the way it moved while she spoke told of differences that couldn’t be easily seen. And no, she doesn’t sound just like the voice actor from the cartoon. There was some similarity, but it was hard to imagine her voice coming from a human at all.
Then there were her eyes. They weren’t the cartoon’s giant painted-on circles, of course, but they were larger than any equine’s I’d ever seen, and set in larger, unusually shaped sockets. It was obvious she had binocular vision, as she was using it to peer at the strange creatures surrounding her — but sometimes she would turn her eyes out to both sides, like our own equines, taking in her entire surroundings at once.
Like I said: Creepy.
Maybe I should back up. The best place to start a story really is at the beginning.
*****
My name is Casey Miller. I live in a comfortable but somewhat pricey one bedroom apartment in New York City, not far from Times Square. I liked the location, and it wasn’t like I had much else to spend my money on. I moved here a few years back to take a job as a technical writer for a PC magazine. Not a life where you saw a lot of excitement. That changed suddenly one day in early June.
I was walking down the streets of the Big Apple, on my way home from the office, minding my own business. Suddenly, over the usual hustle and bustle of the city, I heard a scream. And then a few more, and some confused shouting. The commotion was coming from just around the corner I was approaching, and I took a cautious peek, wondering if someone was hurt and hoping it didn’t involve violence. A brown belt in karate was useful, but knives and guns could kill you all the same. I hadn’t heard any shots, but that didn’t mean somebody wasn’t getting mugged or assaulted.
The reason for people’s alarm was not immediately obvious, but the crowd was parting, a space opening up around the source. I caught fleeting, confused glimpses of lavender, and at first I thought it was someone in a weird costume. Then I thought someone had dyed a horse as a joke. They’d even done the mane and tail patterns to match a certain cartoon character. Then I saw the wings, the horn, and the small tiara with the six-pointed gem, sparkling as its wearer moved. I barely even noticed the saddlebags tucked under the wings, I was too focused on the amazing detail work in the ‘cutie mark’.
“Mom! It’s Twilight Sparkle!” some girl near me cried out, and slipped from her parent’s grasp to rush forward.
I’ll give her this much, Twilight held her ground, unperturbed. I think she even tried to make herself look non-threatening, and let the wide-eyed girl run her hands over her nose and her side without complaint. But Mom wasn’t having any of it, and ran up to yank her child away.
The strange near-equine said something — yes, it was definitely speaking — in what seemed like a reassuring tone, but it was too quiet for me to understand at a distance over the chatter and the usual noise of the city. After a moment she cleared her throat and drew herself up, poised proudly like she was making an announcement. This time her voice was loud and clear, but I quickly realized that it didn’t matter one bit.
She was definitely not speaking English, and I had a feeling the language wasn’t something you’d find anywhere on Earth.
“Wow, is that some kind of robot?” a younger guy to my right asked his buddy. “Something from Japan? You know how complex the stuff they’re turning out now is.” He stepped forward, peering at the pony like he was trying to find seams in the hide.
His buddy followed slowly. “Nah, that didn’t sound like Japanese. Gotta be a movie prop, animatronics and stuff. There’s somebody controlling it remotely. Don’t bother, you’ll never find any sign of it. Special effects now-days, they can make anything look real! Probably a publicity stunt.”
Their approach was like a signal. More people came forward, mostly alone, some in twos or threes, closing in around the strange pony. She spoke again, briefly this time, and I heard other people commenting about the strange language. A lot of people stayed back, and some of those who approached kept their hands to themselves, but many weren’t so polite. Someone grabbed her tail and was examining the different colors in it, until she whipped it out of his hands. Others were reaching out, just trying to touch her or run their hands over her like the girl had. Mr. Robot Theory was messing with her wing’s feathers. The mare shook the wing, shying away from him and bumping into people on her other side as she turned her head to voice an obvious complaint in his direction.
I had been dubious as to whether or not this was really Twilight Sparkle, assuming ‘real’ had any meaning in this situation, but I’d also come to the conclusion that it didn’t matter. Whoever or whatever she was, too many of the people on the sidewalk saw her as a spectacle, a toy, a puzzle to explore, and not as a living creature with feelings. The signs were obvious to me, with my experience around horses, but there seemed to be enough ‘human’ in her mannerisms that I had trouble believing nobody else could see them.
Twilight had gone from confident to nervous in seconds as the crowd pressed in around her, and I was afraid that if this kept up someone would get hurt. I shouted and started trying to drag people away from her, but my voice was lost in the babble.
Then I saw someone grab the small tiara and try to take it off her head. She shouted an objection and the hand was forcibly removed, apparently by a shimmering purple aura just like the one her horn was emitting. She shouted again, a few more words (or at least syllables), and when nothing changed, that horn lit up like a purple light bulb and everyone close to her was pushed steadily away. It was gentle at first, but it looked like anyone who resisted experienced an increasing amount of force. A few people, more stubborn about retreating, finally stumbled or fell back instead.
As soon as the area was clear, a purple dome formed around the pony, just visible enough that you could easily tell it was there but could still clearly see through it. Then, as her horn’s bright aura winked out, the irritated alicorn began berating the onlookers — at great length and high volume. It still sounded like gibberish, but her intent was clear as she circled inside her small sanctuary, turning a frustrated frown on each of those who’d been poking and prodding at her.
I looked around and realized at least half the people who’d been standing back had pulled out smartphones or cameras and were busily recording everything. Seeing that reminded me of something. I wasn’t sure if it was unimportant or if it was the most vital detail of all. I pulled out my own phone and hastily queued up an episode of a certain cartoon series, one I’d watched on my phone a while back and hadn’t yet removed.
Most of the crowd were now leaving a half dozen feet or so of space around the perimeter of her dome, which effectively blocked most of the sidewalk. The pony was looking away from me as I pushed through the crowd, and still lecturing, although she kept glancing past the parked cars along the sidewalk to where traffic was whizzing by. The light had been red when she appeared, and this must have been the first chance she’d had to get a relatively clear view of moving vehicles. I reached out hesitantly and touched the dome, pulling my finger away quickly just in case, but I was unharmed. It felt a bit like soft plastic, with no noticeable temperature. So I knocked on it. Thud, thud, thud.
The dome’s occupant glanced in my direction, interrupting herself to say a few words to me. Then she did a double take and turned to my side of the dome. Her eyes locked onto the phone I was holding up to her, playing the intro of the cartoon. Suddenly it felt like my phone was slipping out of my grasp. I instinctively tried to catch it before it could fall, but instead it just hung in the air, shimmering and making me look stupid with my hands cupped under it. And then my phone disappeared in a puff of purple ‘smoke’ that faded into nothingness. A similar puff simultaneously occurred inside the shield, drawing my attention. My phone hovered in front of her, and she watched intently, her eyes widening. I wasn’t sure if it was because she’d never seen a device like this, or if it was the particular images on the screen.
She muttered something, and as I heard the last words of the music, she spun the phone around to show the ’photograph’ fading from the screen. She asked me a very deliberate question, to which I could only shrug.
“I’m sorry, but none of us can understand you.”
She apparently got the idea well enough, judging by the frustrated expression and growl. Her horn flashed brightly, and I became very disoriented for a moment. I stumbled and had to lean against the dome to catch my balance. It seemed like I’d gotten turned around somehow. Then I realized that the dome was curved the wrong way. I was no longer outside it. That meant...
Yes, I was trapped in a small space with a frustrated and very powerful winged unicorn princess from an entirely different world whom I had just shown a cartoonish depiction of herself and presumably her best friends, and I couldn’t even explain that nobody, so far as I knew, had actually been spying on their lives. I was so screwed.