Twilight groaned, her head throbbing painfully, her eyes edging open bit by bit. It became apparent to her that she was certainly not in her room, and that she certainly wasn’t recovering from a long, peaceful sleep in her bed. Her first thought was about her location, where she was and why she wasn’t in the safety of her library, snuggled in the warm blankets in the early sunrise of the day. She found herself on a pitch black floor, looking down at it from her prone position on her side. Getting on her front hooves, she tried to shake off the sudden exhaustion that racked her being after waking up. She held her hoof against her temple, massaging the skin to try and sooth the soreness that the strong beat of her heart was causing. When she lifted her head sufficiently, her focus moved to the floating numbers and letters all around her, giving her a wide enough berth to breathe and exist comfortably, the characters sometimes forming words as they continuously slid down their vertical axis.
Her ears bent back as she remembered her situation. She looked at the ground, or at least where the ground was supposed to meet her hooves, and found the text slid past the imaginary horizon in the background through the threshold at the height of her hooves towards a vast emptiness below her. The pit in her stomach grew, and she nervously got to her other hooves and took a step back only to realize that there was no solid earth behind her either. She stared with terrified eyes at how hollow everything looked around her; there were no features, objects, or anything recognizable anywhere. There was no sun above her, no sky, no moon and no stars. The world she now lived in was as void and dark as Sombra’s heart, and Twilight’s fears came to fruition when for a very brief moment her paranoia let her believe that she was actually, in fact, inside the deceased evil king’s soul.
Suddenly the atmosphere reverberated around her, sudden rumbling shockwaves pushing the air around her, crashing in to her as she braced herself against the sudden oncoming storm. A few seconds past and the rush stopped, replaced with something that she had not expected in the least.
“Twilight?” David asked, putting on his headset and fiddling around with the microphone so that he wasn’t directly eating it, his fingers wrapped around the sensitive end of the device. “Twilight, are you there? Can you hear me?”
“David!” Twilight called out. “Goodness, I forgot about you for a moment. I’m so glad to hear from you. How did the computer-sleeping test go?”
David rolled his chair up underneath his glass desk, shaded with the hue of a soft, cloudless sky. The log-in screen was the center of attention of his 20 inch computer monitor, and he typed in his password, 18 characters exactly, giving him access to all the functions of his user once again. He scratched his head and reached over to grab the tinted glasses surrounding his mouse sitting on the rather large mousepad. He put the glasses on with ease, taking care not to poke his eye out from adorning them too quickly and kept his eyes glued to the screen as his desktop appeared.
His green t-shirt and cargo shorts were under the light of his monitor that reflected around the room. The window was open once again, but a large standing white fan was plugged into the socked near his bed behind him, blowing a nice, cool breeze in his direction. He rubbed his feet together in anticipation, his socks creating heat and a bit of static against the carpet beneath him. The computer hummed softly in the warm atmosphere of late evening, the moon outside obscured by a large mass of clouds floating by, the wind almost non-existent this time.
“Well,” he began, tracking Task Manager as it popped up with the rest of his icons on his desktop. “The computer went to sleep successfully last night. How do you feel?”
“Eh, I have a terrible headache right now,” Twilight said. “But what do you mean, last night? How long has the computer been asleep for?
“Twilight, it’s the next day already. It’s been a whole night, morning and afternoon since I put the computer to sleep. The sun’s already set by now.”
David instinctively tried to open his web browser after finding it closed for some reason he could not fathom only to remember what he did in his flurry of key strokes the prior night and that his computer’s connection to the internet was severed. A metaphorical storm cloud smouldered over his head as he realized he would have to venture several days without the contact of the World Wide Web if he wanted to manage his A.I. safely until she learned how to control herself in his piece of hardware. He pinched the skin of his forehead together with the index finger and thumb of his left hand, gathering up the grease and applying it to the stubble that jutted from his sharp chin, looking at his black Logitech mouse idly, trying to think of what the best course of action would be next.
“Goodness, I really didn’t think it would have been that long,” Twilight stated. “I mean, I know you had to go to bed and all, but I would have liked to know exactly I would have been ‘sleeping’ for before you sent the computer to sleep.”
“Sorry Twilight, it didn’t really occur to me,” David apologized, trying to rub the heaviness out of the dark bags under his eyes. He let out a yawn. “I kind of lose focus in things when I’m falling asleep. Don’t let that stop you from waking me up if I do snooze when we’re in a conversation, ok?”
“What were you doing during the day?” Twilight queried tentatively.
The muscles on David’s cheek flexed. “I had classes. I’m attending university.”
“Really? What’s your major?”
“Creative writing,” David instantly answered.
“Interesting!” Twilight chirped. “I’ve always wanted to write a book someday. After reading so many in my life I think it’s apropos for me to follow suit in my own ideas, especially considering how many I have! I have some very intriguing angles on semi-conductive metamorphic materials and arcane influx operators.”
“Uhh,” David uttered.
“Books are so neat. I don’t know how I could possibly exist without them. Although, now that I think about it…”
David assumed Twilight’s pause was her re-assessing her surroundings.
“I don’t think I’ll be seeing another one any time soon.” she said, deflated.
“That’s not true,” David informed her. “Computers can hold entire documents of stories, transcripts of articles and audio files that are books read to you.”
“Really?” Twilight asked. “Do you think you could get me some of those? At least one, maybe two to pass the time?”
“Sure. I’ll just have to get connected back to the internet to see what I can get.”
David opened up windows explorer from the start bar, and pane of the directory of his hard drive opened. He furrowed his eyebrows, going straight to the program files and looking through the names for something called pony.exe, or anything similar that was related to horses. He soon found nothing, and cursed in his head, thinking that nothing could be exactly that simple. He clicked on Task Manager, his eyes still locking onto the process at the top, powering the chatty personality running as electricity on complex rig. He had no idea where to start searching for the root of the program.
“Your technology in A-mare-ica is really amazing, David,” Twilight tittered. “It’s light years ahead of what we have in Equestria!”
“I could tell,” David notified. He began a search of pony.exe on Windows Explorer. The progress bar at the top slowly filled in with a softly flashing green, making very, very slow progress. David clenched his jaw, but tried to calm himself down. “And it’s just America, Twilight. You don’t need to emphasize the middle.”
“I have to be patient with this,” he thought to himself. “I don’t need to rush anything. I’ll let the search run and talk to Twilight in the meanwhile. This is just the first step in a series of discoveries for that damn virus. I have all the time in the world to work through this. I think.”
“I see. A-mer-ica,” Twilight tried aloud, letting the word roll off her tongue. “It sounds so odd without the emphasis, though. Your society seems to be very interesting, David. One this is all done and through we need to establish a stable connection between nations! Equestria has pretty much known all of the surrounding lands on the continent, but we hadn’t considered the possibility of such a highly advanced society overseas! We haven’t even gotten that far, yet. I have so many questions for America!”
“Heh, yeah,” David simply said. He would be lying if he said he wasn’t at least a smidgen interested too. But his mood sunk when he remembered that a place like that probably only existed in the memory of Twilight Sparkle. He idly tapped the left mouse button beneath his finger, his chin going on to his fist as his elbow was placed on the cool surface of the table. “I would like to know more about your world too.”
“My world?” Twilight asked. “What do you mean? Shouldn’t America exist overseas from Equestria?”
“Twilight, my race, the human race, has mapped out the entire planet, and we don’t have a place called Equestria.” David calmly informed her.
“N-No way,” Twilight said. “You have got to be kidding me!”
David shook his head, even though he knew Twilight wouldn’t be able to see him. “We’ve never heard about anything that you’ve mentioned to me before. You claimed to be a Unicorn. Well, on my world, Unicorns are creatures of myth, animals of old tales and legends. They’re very mystical and I bet some stories about them involve magic of some sort, but they certainly don’t have the ability to speak.”
Twilight didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds. The disk light of David’s PC flickered. “Are you sure? Maybe your race just called our continent something else? There are other races that live on Equiden. Have you encountered any Gryphons, or perhaps the Earth Ponies that live on the outskirts of the deserts near the south? Pegasus ponies, Minotaurs, the Deer folk, Dragons, maybe even the Horses from Saddle Arabia?
David was floored. How could one single fictional location span all those kinds of species? What kind of memory did Twilight’s creator put in her? “Those are all just from stories, Twilight, just from stories. Humans are the only sentient species on the planet. Everything else is just animals. Horses exist here, but they don’t speak either, which I’m assuming they do on your, uh, planet.”
Twilight choked on her next words. David’s shoulder slumped.
“I’m sorry, Twilight.”
Twilight groaned. “This situation just went from bad to worse.”
David inwardly agreed. He leaned back in his chair, reclining it slightly, folding his hands over his stomach and went deep into contemplation. It was truly a hopeless situation for Twilight. “Remember what I told you before? You can’t give up right now. If you got sent here, there must be a way to send you back.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said.
He closed his eyes for a brief moment, visualizing the inner workings of his computer, imagining what was going on in that world of hers, how she found herself in a swirling mass of darkness all around her, filled to the brim with symbols and objects that had no meaning or value to her. He thought up of a grid along a three-dimensional place, outlined in pure-white lines, his vision something along the lines of those cheesy movies from forty years ago that tried to make a visual for the audience of what the insides of a network or computer looked like. He knew what he had in mind was nothing like the real deal, but he tried to imagine what it would be like. He contemplated about being stuck, alone, with nothing to do, nowhere around you that looked familiar with only an ominous, booming voice in the air to keep you company, owned by a creature that you haven’t seen yet with its true intentions unknown. He was surprised that Twilight put so much trust into him already, and that she didn’t suspect him of secondary motives. But in the end, in her position, she really didn’t have any choice, did she?
“And Twilight,” David suddenly said, shooting up in his seat and looking back at his computer monitor, a sly grin stretching on his face. His hands landed on his keyboard, clicking on Task Manager and going to the page labeled ‘Performance’ to click on the button that lay in wait there. “You know what the first step towards getting you back is?”
Twilight tapped her hoof on her chin without David’s knowledge. “Research?”
“Exactly. Or more specifically, experimentation.”
“Ooh, now this I could help you with, David!” Twilight said enthusiastically. “If there’s one thing I can do, it’s performing tests.”
“Fantastic,” he stated, grabbing some spare paper and a pen near the end of his desk away from his computer. “Let’s get started then.”