“Found it.”
David blinked, and had to check himself when Twilight’s face returned back to her screen after she was done leaning to the side, her attention deep in concentration as she peered off-camera. Her horn glowed magenta, and David heard disk activity as she manipulated the system.
“Hang on, let me open it up in a window for you,” she said.
A second Windows Explorer window popped up beside the one David had already used for searching. There was a document file highlighted in blue, the details of the file below on a strip of space with a preview of the text to the right. He gave an approving frown, nodding.
“Wow. That was really fast,” he noted.
“Yep. It wasn’t too hard to find. I saw that you were already searching under ‘documents’, so I figured that it was probably somewhere in your user folder.” Twilight replied.
“I can’t believe I saved it to pictures!” he exclaimed. “How the heck did I manage that?”
“We’re lucky you didn’t save it anywhere else,” Twilight noted. “And lucky that everything is so organized! The user is given folders ready to save that are separated by medium and are labeled as types that are commonly looked to be saved! The developers’ insight is amazing! They must have been geniuses!”
David took a hold of his mouse and double-clicked on the file. “Well, they had blueprints to work from. The code, or whatever, of the previous versions of Windows was available to the programmers, so it wasn’t like they had nowhere to start from, and there’s no doubt that they had an idea of what to improve on from Windows 11. I’m just glad that they brought back the old Explorer interface. Damn Windows Looking Glass…”
Twilight’s visage for a second was overlapped by Microsoft Word, the document appearing before David’s eyes. A wild grin formed on his face. That was everything he needed.
“Hey David?” Twilight asked.
“Yeah?
“I also found this in your pictures folder,” she said, opening up Windows Picture Viewer quickly and presenting a photo on the screen. “What is it?”
David took a second to identify the picture. “That’s, uh, that’s a gun.”
“Hmm?” Twilight sounded out, her window choosing to move itself over Word again. “What’s a gun?”
David bit his lip. His answer came out slow and deliberate. “It’s sort of a weapon we humans have. You hold the handle with two hands, aim down the sight and pull the trigger with your finger.”
“Interesting,” Twilight noted, although David couldn’t read the thoughts on her face. “How does it work?”
“Well,” David began, preparing himself. “You load a clip of bullets into the bottom of the handle, where there is a slot, and there’s a hammer at the back of the gun that rams into the back of the bullet at the top of the clip. The bullet is filled with this ignitable powder, so the hammer ignites the powder and the projectile at the end of the bullet flies out of the chamber.”
Twilight stared at what David believed to be the picture, which he couldn’t spot from the camera’s angle. Her right ear flicked while she was engaged deep in thought. “It seems like a very efficient weapon, certainly steps up from the crossbows we have in Equestria,” Twilight observed. David took note of the fine line her lips made. “Why do you have a picture of this?”
David leaned forward on to his desk. “I used it for a game I used to play a few years back. You could paint custom pictures from your computer onto any surface in the game, and that’s what I used when I was first introduced to the feature.”
“Okay,” Twilight stated, tilting her head. Her forelegs took a position very familiar to David, one reaching across her body and supporting the other that connected to the bottom of her chin.
He leaned back, tilting his seat and putting his hands behind his head, taking a deep breath in. “So I guess you can see pictures now, huh?”
“Oh?” Twilight muttered. “Yeah, I can. I read about it in one of the books you gave me, how computers can hold pictures inside them by having a piece of data for every pixel in the picture. All I had to do was figure out a spell that could decompress the data. It was a bit difficult to figure out until I got to take a look at the libraries that uncompressed certain picture types. The spell ended up following along the lines as the browsing spell I made.”
“You made a spell for browsing my computer?” David asked dubiously.
“I did, yes.”
“Is that how you do all those things in my system? With magical spells?”
“You make it sound silly if you put it that way,” Twilight said. “But yes, that’s how I work the system. I had to figure out how to properly navigate your computer sooner or later, and after reading those books I couldn’t help but try to figure it out. I made out a relation between computers and magic, and formed a basis for my spells to work on. My magic works in here, it’s just a bit different. So, I composed spells based on theory after making some gratuitous extrapolation on the arcane laws. We just ran a test on it last week, remember?”
“I thought that was you just calling functions or whatever from the computer.” David stated.
“I don’t exactly know how to do that,” Twilight clarified, looking to the side at the floor. “I mean, I technically am calling other programs to help me do specific things in your computer, I just can’t do it without magic. It’s the only way I can make the computer do what I want it to do. The relation I made between the different types of logic a computer and the arcane arts have aren’t too far off from each other. I put the two together and it helped me understand what I need to do in order to get a spell to work in here.”
David nodded. “I think I get it.”
Twilight bit her lip, thinking. “Oh! There’s something I forgot to mention.”
“What is it?”
Suddenly another Explorer window opened before David, and he looked to see exactly what it was. He almost recognized the folder location instantly. He paled.
“I was testing an improvement I made to my searching spell a few days ago and I came across this. Why’s there a folder labeled with “Environmental Pictures” even though there isn’t a single environmental picture in it? And what’s with their names of the pictures inside? ‘X GONNA GIVE IT TO YOU’? ‘Guide to Skyrim’s Main Quest’? What’s Skyrim? I know you could misplace your folders, but why are there so many files in here? Why is the folder titled so… oddly?”
David’s head was racing. He slowly moved his hands to his mouse and keyboard, edging the cursor to the red “X” in the upper right corner of the window and clicking on it. “Eh, to answer both of your questions, Skyrim is an old game I’ve installed, and sometimes I can’t think of names to label my folders or files as, so I make up some random gobbledegook to use.”
Twilight pondered that for a moment. “Some of these files take up huge amounts of space, but they have small resolutions. Why is that?”
“Ah, heh,” David chuckled nervously. “My friend Jack was teaching me how to hide programs in picture files. These programs are, uh, hidden beneath picture file types, so when opened instead of displaying a picture they’ll execute a program instead. It’s actually pretty neat.”
“You must have been working for a long time for these programs to get so big,” Twilight said, once again looking off-screen, squinting. “And you have multiple programs here! I thought you said you didn’t know anything about computers?”
“Twilight, knowing about computers doesn’t equate to knowing nothing about computer programming,” David said, lying in the implication. “But there’s also an odd conversion rate from code when you hide it in a photo file. The file size massively inflates, which can be a huge problem when you’re trying to make something that’s not anything beyond simple.”
There was a pause. David looked at Twilight’s window halfway with his head turned to one side. Her face was leaning out of the window again. After a few seconds, David wondered if Twilight had frozen again. He almost panicked.
“Wow,” Twilight stated, moving back into vision. David was slightly disturbed by the starry-eyed stare that Twilight gave the camera, adorning an open smile. “That’s so neat! Do you think you could get Jack to teach me how to do that some day?”
He covered the microphone bit at the end of his headset and let out a sigh of relief, closing the other Explorer windows as he got his brain into order. “I don’t know, Twilight. I haven’t told anyone yet of your existence. The only one who knows you’re here is me,” he said after removing his fingers from the mic.
Twilight gave a wide-eyed frown. “What? Why haven’t you told anyone? I thought we were working together to try and get me back home. It’ll be easier if we had more ponies, uh, I mean people, to manage this. You know, if you could find an expert on computers, maybe it would shed some insight as to how I got here!”
David winced. “Twilight, no one knows because it will do more harm than good. You know how hesitant I was to believing that you were actually stuck in my computer in the first place instead of just being a virus that infected my PC. Imagine how it would be if I tried to convince someone else that there was something living in my computer who was as intelligent and advanced as you! We don’t have anything that’s as close to having a life in a computer system with both a personality, a history and the skills to learn!”
Twilight opened her mouth for a second before David spoke over her. “And even if I hid some of the details to make it more convincing, what would that mean for the other party? I couldn’t trust anyone else with the knowledge of your existence, Twilight. I wouldn’t be able to stop them from going to the media and telling them about you, or them going to the police, or them telling their friends, and suddenly I’ve got a huge problem on my hands with news centers hounding me for more information and the local university shipping off my PC to study you inside it!
Twilight’s ears folded back. “What about your friends?”
“I don’t trust Jack for anything,” David established right off the bat. “And all my other friends are still in my hometown, which I can only communicate with through the internet, which I haven’t had for two months,” he spat bitterly. “And no, before you ask, I don’t have any other friends from University. I don’t have the time for that. Between classes, work, doing homework and trying to help you get back to your world, I simply don’t have the time.”
Twilight’s lips made a downward arch. She blinked worryingly at the camera, and David caught his breath while he glared back. Relaxing his tensed eyebrows, he slid his headset off and lifted his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose, feeling greasiness on the tips of his fingers. His eyes were brought to the time on his monitor. Normally he had more patience this time of night, he figured.
“Sorry Twilight,” he apologized, putting the headset back on. “It’s just hard to explain why I haven’t told anyone. I don’t trust anyone, and if you knew a single thing about the human world, you’d be hard-pressed to trust anyone outside your friends too.”
“Oh, David…” Twilight uttered.
“Don’t worry about it,” he informed her, typing something on the computer, refusing to look at her window. “It’s nothing. And we’re getting off topic. I want you to find something else for me.”
Twilight straightened up to attention. “Yes, David?”
“I need you to look for a file named pony-dot-e-x-e.”
“Okay,” Twilight said slowly before turning to the side and lighting her horn again. “Where did you last leave it?”
“I can’t tell you that,” David answered. Twilight rose a single eyebrow. “I don’t know where it is, and I didn’t make it.”
“What? What do you mean?”
David opened an Explorer window of his own, even though he only clicking through folders he already knew wouldn’t contain the file. “It was put on my computer by something. I didn’t put it there, but I need to find it and I can’t.”
Twilight tapped her hoof on her chin for a moment, and then got up. “Hang on, this might take a bit more work than finding your document. Give me a couple of seconds.”
She stepped to the right of the video footage and disappeared.
David rose his eyebrows. He tried clicking inside Twilight’s window and scrolling around the camera. The viewpoint didn’t budge. “Hey Twilight? Twiii-light?”
“Yeah?” she called off in the distance.
“Where did you go? I can’t see you!”
“Oh!” she exclaimed. Suddenly the darkness of the background window was turned a shade of pink before Twilight swung into vision a dozen feet away from the lens. “Sorry about that, it didn’t occur to me I could move the camera at first. I just have to take a look at some specific folders so I can pinpoint a location.”
The rose tint faded away and David found himself staring dumbly at Twilight as she looked up into nothingness. She moved here and there, from one side of the screen to the other, occasionally standing on her back legs for moments before landing and moving across Cyberspace. Her horn would ignite for a few seconds, and squares of pink would be pulled towards her area, floating before her face until she doused her magic.
“So you’re examining text, huh?” David muttered, although Twilight turned her head to face him for a moment at his words.
“Yeah,” she confirmed before resuming her search. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, you know,” David started. He explained to her what he was seeing through the computer screen.
“That’s strange,” Twilight commented. “Why would you be able to see my telekinesis but not what I’m casting it on?”
“Another riddle which answer lies behind the mystery of that dumb program,” David thought.
Moments passed. Twilight grew increasingly more concentrated in her search. Sometimes David would see her move into the background, far away from the camera, while others her neck would almost be touching the rim of the lens. They kept quiet, Twilight focusing deeply while David waited patiently. He refused to touch the computer, seeing that disk activity was high from the light on the computer case. He kept his fingers crossed beneath his desk, hoping, praying that Twilight would be successful. He considered the situation where he would have to bring his computer to Jack after all, just to find the damn program, and he began to imagine all the chaos that would ensue with him trying to explain who and what Twilight was, accepting all the laughter that Jack would throw at him for all the inquiries on viruses and artificial intelligence he had given Jack. He could see Jack’s eyes bulging out of his head, rolling on the floor laughing as he realized that David had been talking to a tiny purple unicorn for two months alone in his bedroom.
He hit his head on the desk.
“What was that?” Twilight asked, brought out of her trance.
“Nouffing, Twiright,” David said, his lips smooshed against the glass.
“David?”
David snorted, almost asleep after closing his eyes one moment, leaning back, his arms folded with his neck relaxed. “Huh? What? Yes, Twilight?”
“Why are you looking for pony-dot-e-x-e, anyways?” she asked. David looked at Twilight, and she was still busy observing something to the side of the shot a few feet away. “What do you need it for?”
He gave a grunt of understanding, sat up in his seat, and stretched, slathering his tongue inside his dry mouth. He gave the question a few seconds of silent thought.
“David?” Twilight asked again.
“Hang on,” he prompted. “I’m just waking up from a nap. Give me a second."
She gave a second. That second turned into half a minute in which he finally came to a decision. “I’mma be honest with you, Twilight.”
“Okay?” she said, confused.
“I’m pretty certain pony-dot-e-x-e is you.”
Twilight stopped what she was doing and turned to gaze out the computer screen, wide-eyed. “What?”
“When I first got you, a new program popped up in Task Manager. I had initially intended to end the process the instant I saw it running. That’s what I meant by ‘terminating the program’ all those days ago.”
“Oh,” Twilight enunciated. “So it’s the program that’s running me?”
“Yep. I’m pretty sure it is. Can you access a list of computer processes from where you are?”
Twilight looked in a completely different direction, and Task manager maximized itself, moving itself from one end of the screen to slightly off the other. David stared at the window frowning, and shivered.
“Yep,” she said.
“Organize your list by memory and take a look at the top result.”
She took a moment to do just that. Suddenly her mouth was open in an “o” and she stared upward, her head craning back. “No way.”
“Your process is the top result,” he summarized.
“I never knew,” Twilight added, still gawking. “It never occurred to me to check the computer’s processes. I didn’t want to touch those because I didn’t want to accidentally harm your system somehow.”
“Well, now you know,” David concluded.
“But what do you plan on doing with it?” she queried, looking back at David.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Open it, check the folder it’s in, copy it to a portable drive if I can. Whatever I do, I need it to know where it is in order to try and figure out how you’re tethered to my computer.”
“Do you think it’ll help?” she had to ask.
“Oh, definitely,” he responded. “And once you find it, we’ll be one step closer to getting you back home.”
“Yeah,” Twilight said solemnly, a small smile on her face.
David opened the door to his room, and sighed. Walking in, he flipped the nearby switch on the wall, lighting the room. Then, he took off his black wool sweater, let the door swing shut, and dropped his backpack at the base of his dresser. He threw the sweater onto his bed, with the red one he also wore underneath following suit quickly. His toes flexed and stretched as he welcomed the cool fresh air to his tiny feet bits while making his way toward the window at the west side of the room. His eyes were glued to the floor, until he pulled his phone out, flipped it open and checked it, scanning his email and text centers. He had an urge to rub his eyes, and he could feel the signs of a yawn coming on to him.
When he made to the closed glass, he put the device away and looked out. It was already dark out, with the streetlights illuminating the pavement below, their sunset-like essence casting an orange tone onto the setting. The gardens in the neighbouring houses had their flowers stripped and flowerbeds cleaned for next spring’s countenance. Some of the usually brighter front lawns looked cold and bare without the normal colour that usually scattered along the grass line. The trees had shed, but there were no signs of leaves clogging up the sewer drains, nor were there tiny autumn rivers that had plagued the streets for weeks. A biting wind rattled the windowpane, and David subconsciously rubbed the goosebumps on his arms. The skinny limbs of the trees skittered and clacked with bony impudence, their vein-like structure a silhouette of a spider web against a starless sky.
“I wish there would be snow already, damn it.”
He checked his phone again, shook his head and shoved it in his pocket. Jack was being a dick again. Ever since David re-established contact with the fool, he wanted more and more attention from David. David ignored the message and continued to stare out the window.
There was a whisper along the wind. He figured that there had to be a draft in the house, because there was a tiny whistling in his right ear that refused to let him be. It was a soothing sound, trying to give him the lull of sleep, asking him to take a rest already. He closed his eyes and let his head drop, almost banging his forehead against the window. He could already feel himself nodding off despite the uncomforting feeling of a lower back soaked with perspiration. The air spoke softly to him again, although more urgently. It began to sound like a warning to him, a slight caution of something to come. He had the audacity to ignore it more, telling himself that something was coming at him every moment, and that every moment he engaged it head on, caution or not. There was no choice in the matter. He could handle one more foreboding sentence against a flood of previously identified problems.
If he couldn’t, then why was he even there in the first place?
The whisper almost turned into a shout. David opened his eyes and breathed in, feeling his ears move ever so slightly to a sound that they were picking up from behind. David turned, and his attention met his computer sitting on his desk, the monitor off in an eco-friendly state, the green power light on the case still glowing brightly. He took a look at the headset sitting in front of the black-and-orange keyboard, tracing its green outline, and focused his hearing there.
“David!”
His eyebrows rose. “That’s Twilight,” he figured, and he leaped to his desk. He swung the back of the chair counter-clockwise and jumped into the seat, rolling himself back under the desk with the use of his feet swiping against the carpet.
“What’s up, Twilight?” he asked before he had the microphone fully put on, the headset sliding parallel to the crest of his head. He pinched the edge of his gaming glasses next to his mouse, lifted it up, flicked his wrist and adorned the eyewear in one smooth motion. His right hand rapidly waved the mouse to and fro, the monitor coming to life a moment later.
“There you are,” Twilight sighed with relief, “I thought I heard you come in! I finally found it!”
David went wide-eyed and leaned forward. “The program?”
“Yes! Finally did. It took a while, but I finally did it.”
Twilight appeared on the screen in her window. David took note of the slightly frazzled state that her mane was in, and the dark circles under her eyes. Her back was to the camera, and she was sitting, but she turned her neck to look out the monitor, giving David a tired smile. He wasn’t sure if that was a sign to worry.
“Where is it? Can you bring it up for me in a window?” he asked.
“That’s something I was about to tell you,” Twilight informed. “I can see the file and the folder it’s in, but for some reason I can’t open it up in Explorer. It’s not that Windows won’t let me, it’s that it doesn’t think the folder exists. There’s something blocking it that’s keeping it from being read and I can’t figure out what it is.”
David’s eyebrows furrowed. “Well that’s weird.”
“Yeah, it is,” Twilight agreed. “But I can read the contents of the folder to you.”
“Uh,” David uttered, trying to think. “Ok.”
Twilight looked off to the side, reading. “The folder’s called ‘p-o-n-y program’, and it has pony-dot-e-x-e inside. It also has a folder called ‘data’, a file called ‘settings-dot-s-l-d’, another file called ‘logs’ with the same file type, a folder named ‘s-c’, and a file named ‘pony-g-u-i-dot-e-x-e’.”
“g-u-i-dot-e-x-e?” David clarified.
“Yes.”
David put one hand to his chin and the other beneath his elbow. “Hmm, I don’t know what kind of file type ‘s-l-d’ is. What’s in the contents of the other folders, Twilight?”
“Lots of stuff,” she answered. “There’s a lot of files here, some text, some i-n-i, more folders. There’s another file type called ‘s-d-f’, but I can’t get any information on what it means. The system doesn’t give a definition, and I’ve checked all the e-books I have, but none of them mention use of such a file. I could read them all out to you, but it might take a while.”
“Is there a ‘read me’ anywhere?”
“No,” Twilight answered.
“Are there any signs of instructions anywhere? Like a text file or a document or something?”
“Nothing labeled like that. I took a look into some of the text files, but they contained a bunch of variables that I assume are for the main program,” Twilight said.
David looked off to the upper left, biting his lip. He didn’t notice Twilight turning back around and walking closer to the camera.
“I don’t know what any of that means,” he reasoned with himself. “And there’s no read me, so we’re left in the dark. I could try running pony-dot-e-x-e, even though it’s already running, but what could possibly happen? Two copies of Twilight? My system crapping itself due to not enough memory? The program terminating itself because it’s not allowed to run two copies?”
“Do you have any idea what the g-u-i thing does?” David inquired.
“I’m pretty sure it generates some kind of user interface,” Twilight said.
“I knew that much,” David stated. His eyes went back to Twilight. “But did you get a chance to look into the program?”
Twilight shook her head. “I can’t. I haven’t figured it out yet. I can look into raw data, and see files that aren’t compressed, and pictures, but executables are beyond my ability.”
“Darn,” David muttered. “I guess we’ll have to try something. Twilight, will you do the honours of taking notes?”
She grinned, and her horn glowed. Notepad opened up for a fraction of a second of David’s screen before disappearing altogether.
“Ok, Are you ready?”
“I’m as set as I’ll ever be,” Twilight responded, her expression much more perky than in the state he found her in. At that moment he realized he was smiling too.
“Great, then let’s get this going. Execute pony-g-u-i.”
Twilight had her grin stuck on glee as she looked over to the ground behind the camera and her horn lit brighter for a second. David sat in his seat, searching the screen for any changes. Nothing happened. He blinked.
“Twilight?” he asked. She didn’t move on the screen. Her horn was still lit, and her mouth was stuck on the “happy” setting, but she didn’t say anything.
His hands went on the keyboard and mouse. “Twilight?” he asked again, moving his mouse around. She still didn’t say anything. He clicked on her window, and it turned a shade of white. A window popped up on David’s screen:
PONY has stopped responding.
Windows can check for a solution online. If you close the program, you might lose information.
--> Search for a solution online and close the program.
--> Close the program.
--> Wait for the program to respond.
David held his breath. He clicked on the window a few times, and the informant pop-up flashed several times, indicating that it was waiting for a response for him and that he couldn’t interact with the window without making a selection. He frowned, clicked the third option and clicked on task manager’s icon.
“No. No, no, no, no…” David said under his breath. He kept clicking on Task Manager several times, but it wasn’t opening. He clenched his jaw, and tried to move the mouse somewhere else. The cursor refused to budge. His breathing quickened, his eyes studying what was before him at the moment. The mouse kept moving under his influence, but nothing happened on the screen. He tapped the Caps Lock key with his other hand. The light didn’t activate on his keyboard.
“Uh oh.”
He pushed down on the floor with his legs, backing his chair up as he took a look at the front of his computer. The disk light was shining bright, and he could hear something going on behind the metal hull of the system. He pressed the Caps Lock key a few times again just to make sure. Nothing happened. He grit his teeth and pounded the desk with his fists.
“Come on, don’t do this to me!”
His attempt to move the mouse a third time had failed too. He tapped Control-Alt-Delete, trying to get something to work. The computer did not respond. He let out a low growl and kicked the side of the computer with his foot. It teetered to one side for a split second before it landed square on its base. Nothing changed. Regret began settling in.
He slouched forward, submitting his head to gravity as he rested it on his interlocked hands leaning against the smooth glass surface. Resisting his first instinct, to hold down the power button of his computer until everything was better, he waited. He didn’t want to hurt Twilight. Twilight was trapped in there, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. His eyes were wide, stinging behind his glasses from the attention of the day. He couldn’t help her. He didn’t begin to understand where or how he could help her. When he agreed to try and get her back home, he didn’t have an inkling on how he would do it. He just didn’t want to see her so upset like that. It broke his heart. But in reality, he figured he had made her an empty promise. He couldn’t get her back, he was too stupid! He made his PC, but he didn’t know how it worked, all he did was follow some instructions he found online! He couldn’t even try his very best for Twilight, because he had school and work to do! He couldn’t do his “Twilight” life, and his school life, and his work life, and his own life, all without compromise.
“Twilight needs an expert, not a damn idiot.”
So he sat there. He looked back up to the screen, covering his mouth by resting the top of his neck on his fingers, and waited.
He waited.
And so, reality awarded him. Task Manager suddenly managed to pop up in front of him, and he immediately grabbed the mouse and went to processes. The computer took another moment, the disk doing some activity unknown to him beneath the desk. Almost every resource was at one-hundred percent. Pony.exe was still at top of memory usage, but only because it used every single scrap of memory the system would allow it to allocate. It hogged the CPU, using the ninety-one percent that the rest of the computer wasn’t working on. The disk was all on pony.exe too, and was writing a whole gigabyte per second to the hard drive. David’s jaw dropped.
He blinked. He didn’t believe it. Then, he closed his mouth, folded his arms and leaned back, a stern expression on his face, watching the computer screen. He waited some more, and watched numbers in Task Manager jump around as pony.exe took more and more of what it could.
His pocket vibrated. He pulled his phone out, and read the text message from Jack. His expression relaxed, and he tapped the touch screen dozens of times in his own reply, putting the phone on the desk once he was done.
He didn’t know how much time had passed. He didn’t pay attention to the clock when he got onto the computer, and he didn’t know how much the corner clock on the monitor skipped after it was done being completely frozen. He kept waiting, his eyes open and awake. He wondered if Twilight was still inside, doing stuff without him knowing, unable to communicate with him. It was an amusing thought. Twilight was stuck inside, and just because her window stopped responding, and she didn’t answer his calls, didn’t mean she was as stuck as the rest of the computer was. David liked to think that she was the only one keeping things together in there, the only one to keep the computer going and prevent it from stopping altogether. He imagined the little unicorn racing around Cyberspace, trying to get things fixed, a panicked expression on her face as her tiny horn glowed and lines of text he couldn’t see were moves around all over the place. It brought a chuckle to his lips.
Finally, everything calmed down. He had closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them it was two in the morning. Twilight’s screen was still tinted white, but the information window changed.
PONY has stopped working.
Windows can check for a solution to the problem.
--> Check for a solution online and close the program.
--> Close the program.
He let out a heavy sigh, and clicked on the latter option. His task manager told him everything was alright now. His resource-use was at an all-time low, with no games being run to eat up CPU, no internet browser to leak memory, and no antivirus to spin the disk like a late DJ. Pony.exe disappeared from the processes list, nowhere to be seen.
David leaned back into his seat. He lifted his glasses up and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He still had no idea on where to go. He couldn’t run pony.exe; Twilight said it was hidden and only she could see it, but she wasn’t there anymore. He could try and restart the computer to see if pony.exe would run itself. That would probably work, but he wasn’t certain. After a decision was made, put his glasses properly back on, and looked at the screen once again.
The screen had changed.
There was a start-up window of a program that was beginning its functions, sitting in the middle of the screen as a rectangle. The text inside was of a simple font, the title not too big with copyright information at the bottom-right side of the box. There was loading text below the title stating what was happening with the program at the moment, changing periodically as progress was made. David was stuck in shock when he read the window:
PONY Graphical User Interface ver. 1.04
Loading Simulation Assets…
© Richard Louis 2033
He leaned back and held his hair, letting out his breath in a steady stream over tight lips. The program continued to load, the disk light activating in short bursts once in a while.
After a minute, the window disappeared. David held his breath as nothing appeared on the screen for a moment.
Then, a new window popped up, and David whispered the top of the window aloud:
“Personality Observation in Neuropsychological Interactions Editor?”