pony.exe

by Blue Blaze {COMET}

treehouse.exe V1.31

It was a blank, grey window.

David stared at the computer screen. The interface was very simple, with the title of the program labeled at the top of the window, a few tabs available underneath with the rest of the program's visual space taken up by an empty square. His arms were glued to his sides, his eyes wandering to the mouse right beside his keyboard. He had no desire to touch it, to even let his hand near it, in fear that the program would suddenly jump up and take a hold of the rest of his system as soon as he moved the cursor. He leaned forward, bringing his face inches away from the glass surface of the monitor, squinting.

"Ok, calm down David," he mused. "Let's take this one step at a time here. No need to rush. Just examine what you've got here and don't click on anything."

Moving his head away from the light source, he hopped in his seat to get better posture and slid the chair forward. His left hand went to rest across the desk with the right gingerly hovering over the mouse before decidedly grasping it. The white pointer moved from the start menu to over the general vicinity of the window.

"Let's see here. 'File'..."

He slid over to the file tab on the menu bar. Clicking, multiple options presented themselves for him.

"'New', 'Open', 'Open Recent', same things per usual. Version info? That sounds interesting. Let's click on that."

He clicked. A new window popped up.

He frowned, closing the window. "I've already seen this before." His eyes wandered back to the tabs to explore more. The next button was labeled "General Settings", which he clicked. He became wide-eyed at the myriad of different options that he could change from the resulting window he opened. His attention glazed over them, unable to make too much sense of what he was seeing at that moment.

"I think I'll take a better look at that later. I better skip the next option in 'File' too, 'cause I have no idea what 'SOPHIA' is."

The cursor made its way over to the "Edit" tab, selecting it.

"Hmm, this tab it pretty empty. 'Undo', 'Redo', nothing out of the ordinary here."

Deciding to move on, he followed the cursor to the right. The next option made him grimace.

"'Runtime'? Ok, that manages what happens when the main program runs, I guess," he thought, biting his lip. "We've got 'Runtime Settings', 'Camera' — now that sounds interesting — and, an option that says run with an un-checked check mark box. There's also a 'Pause' option too, but it's grey text. I can't select it."

He sat straight up. His vision became unfocused as he went deep into thought. The low hum of the computer soothed the room's atmosphere in the dark of night, the window behind David still firmly closed. Beneath the desk, the air was heated by the little machine, keeping David's toes warm, heating the underside of the glass desk surface and transferring the heat to the top side. He blinked twice before returning to reality. His pupils rested on the "Run" button. Taking a few seconds to reconsider, he nodded and clicked once.

The program hanged while David tapped his fingers on the edge of his keyboard, leaning at an angle back on his chair, forcing himself to control his breathing. A dozen seconds passed, then two, then three. David momentarily checked Task Manager, a scowl growing on his face. His eyes checked the clock; it had been a minute since he pressed that single button. Suddenly, the next minute passed, and he let out a harsh breath, his eyes widening as he pulled his head away from the computer screen. Scratching his head, he clicked inside the window. The window obtained a grey-white hue, and the cursor indicated loading when he placed it over the program. He grunted.

He loosened his eyebrows when the window turned back to normal and a new message popped up. He scanned the text carefully.

Warning: Current runtime environment missing elements:
bookofhmny.txt not found.
lab01.bsp not found.

Error Code 152:489:7B

[Stop] [Replace with Default] [Close Program]

"Uh," David said. He clicked "close". Another message became apparent to him.

Are you sure? This will close the program.

[Yes] [No]

"No no no no!" he rapidly declared, eyes wide, immediately gravitating the cursor to the latter answer and clicking on it. When the program went to the previous window, he breathed a sigh of relief. "Replace with Default" was selected instead.

More loading was done. Time passed. David took a moment to stand up and stretch, wandering over to the window to take a peek outside. He saw a black cat with yellow eyes that glinted from the streetlight it was under. It took one look at him and scurried away in a hurry. He could only imagine how cold it was out there, nights becoming even chillier as the month grew on. He went back to his desk to grab his phone, check his texts, and check his emails, before looking back to the monitor to see if anything progressed. He rolled his eyes, and could only wonder what was happening to make the program run so slow.

Suddenly the window became normal again. His eyes locked onto target and he sat back down in a dramatic flourish, sliding the chair along the carpet before grabbing the edge of the desk and pulling himself closer once again. New features presented themselves on the screen. The window had grown bigger, taking up two-thirds of the screen's resolution instead of minding its business like before, the insides no longer grey, but black. The status bar changed, displaying everything from CPU usage to memory allocated, as well as some other numbers David couldn't make head or tails of. The opposite side of the status bar read "loading libraryDefault.bsp". The fans of his computer became louder, activity starting up behind the small metal case where the hardware was being housed. David stared at the screen. Nothing happened for several seconds.

Just then, David heard muted groaning somewhere. He checked his immediate area, determining that it was coming from his headphones as they sat on his desk. He grabbed them in one swift motion and set it on his head, shifting it so it fit properly, putting the mic bit the correct distance away from his lips. The black screen suddenly displayed Twilight waking up on the ground, holding her head, her eyelids still heavy.

"Ugh, I have to stop waking up like this," Twilight muttered to herself.

"Twilight!" David called out.

"Huh? David?" she asked. "What happened? Why do I feel so nauseous?"

David face palmed, making a resounding slap that carried into the microphone. "I should have figured you lost data. What's the last thing you can remember?"

Twilight appeared thoughtful. "I was still searching for pony-dot-e-x-e, but then... Oh, David! Did I ever get to mention—"

"That you found it? Yep, you did. That's why you're waking up in a mess like that. You found it and told me and we started a different program, but pony-dot-e-x-e crashed as soon as the other program was started."

"What's the other program?" she inquired.

"It's some kind of editor," David said, rubbing his chin, following to the 'Environment' tab to the right of his cursor. He clicked. "Environment. 'Import', 'Template', 'Location', 'Geographic Data'? What in the crap? 'Object List'. Ok, that last one makes more sense."

"What does it edit?" Twilight continued.

"Uh," David said, hesitating. "It edits your program, I think. I mean, it changes how pony-dot-e-x-e behaves. There's a bunch of different settings that I think I can fool around with. Haven't touched anything yet, though."

"I see," Twilight replied a bit slowly. She turned her head here and there, scanning the environment for something. “I can't seem to find the window for this editor anywhere. The process is missing too."

"Really?" David asked, confused.

"Yeah. In fact, there's a lot less data that I have access to. I'm missing a lot of programs and threads from my view."

"That's probably a safety feature," David shared. "I don't think it would be good if you had the ability to change how the program manages you."

"Why not?" Twilight asked.

"What if you accidentally nuked yourself?"

"What?"

David paused. "Sorry, you wouldn't know that saying. What I'm trying to say is, what if you accidentally did something horrible to yourself without knowing? You could try and make the editor do something but it does something else, or you cast a spell to do one thing with the program but the program has an entirely different reaction than you expected. It could be dangerous."

"You're right," Twilight said. "So you haven't tried anything yet?"

"Nope, not yet. I want to see what everything does first. I already had an error message that—"

Twilight's screen filled with light, and a loud hissing sound erupted from the headphone speakers. She cried out behind the computer screen, throwing her forehooves over her closing eyes.

"Twilight?" David asked with alarm.

"David, what's happening?" Twilight cried, unable to see through the blinding light.

"I don't know," David stated, checking the program. The status bar at the bottom of the rectangle had changed once again, displaying a different message.

"'libraryDefault.bsp loading'? What the hell is a b-s-p?" David thought with both hands on the desk surface, leaning forward.

Twilight's space was abruptly filling with details. David watched in shock as thin black lines drew themselves over the background, colour bleeding in from the light where lines were joining together to create boundaries between each other. The doodles swirled and curved, all moving as one, the disk light on the computer case lit like a fire in the night. Twilight kept still, unsure what to do, unable to open her eyes.

David blinked several times, unsure of what he was seeing. Twilight's environment was filled with wood, brown oak that lay across the floor, walls, and ceiling. Several spirals and designs etched into the material in various places. Holes were filled out in the sides of the room, forming smooth, mostly rectangular bookcases. Rings of a tree's age originated from the center of the appearing room and extended outward until they kissed the corners of the walls. There were stairs at the back of the room, with a green-painted door right beside it that had a tiny window to the inside. There were lofts all over the upper portion of the area, the ceiling reaching high up, an orange and yellow sun painted right on the wood. Several glass panes offered sunlight from the outside, which poured in copious amounts, lighting the room, motes of dust floating in the rays of warmth.

He couldn't believe his eyes. A tiny tree stump was smoothed out at the top, creating a book stand that held an open book which was empty for the moment. A maple statue of a unicorn head sat against the wall at one end of the space, while a small laboratory set with empty vials, clear corked casks and Bunsen burners took its place at the other side, put away for later use. To the north was a work desk, clear of any parchment, ink pots sitting neatly near the back of the surface with pure white quills of different sizes, multiple rolled-up scrolls sitting on the ledge above.

And the books. Oh, the books. David couldn't begin to count how many books he could see before him. Red hardcovers, green paperbacks, works of old, and large collections of encyclopaedias filled every single notch in the walls, acting as the population of the residence. It was a bibliophile's dream. Some were already open on two round tables that had deep purple cushions lying right beneath them. He couldn't make out any writing on them, but thought that the resolution of the window couldn't render the pixels properly from that distance anyway. The last details of the environment filled in, and suddenly the noise from his headset was gone. Instead, morning birds chirped from outside, singing lovely tunes of joy with the freedom of the blue sky above.

Twilight lowered her hooves, opening her eyes slowly. She sat up on her flank, stabilizing herself with one foreleg, looking around. David gaped. A spark filled her eyes as she took in the setting.

"I'm... I'm back?" she whispered.

David turned his head away from the screen, but his eyes kept glued on.

"I'm really back?" she asked herself. Her gaze went down to her hooves, and she tapped the ground with both. The resounding clop that came from the oak could not lie to either her ears or David's. A small smile lit her face. "A-Am I... Did I truly..."

“Hang on, Twilight,” David said slowly. She looked around the ceiling of the room, as if there was some foreign entity hanging about, their presence bouncing off the walls. “I can still see you from this location.”

“What?” she questioned, her ears folding. Panic took hold. “B-But I could have sworn, I… T-This is the Ponyville Library, so where…?”

“I’m sorry, Twilight,” David said, pained. “I’m pretty sure you’re still in my computer.”

“No way,” she enounced, taking a look around the room once more. Her eyes appeared lost, and her body turned this way and that, unsure where to start. Twilight’s breathing quickened. “No way! T-This is my home! My house! How can I still be in your computer when it’s right here before me?”

Twilight finally found the camera floating above the room. Her pupils shrunk. Tears welled up in the bottom of her eyes.

David was troubled. “I think the program is generating the room for you, graphically speaking.” He brought up Task Manager and took a peek. “It looks like it’s eating up a bit more of my system than usual.”

She collapsed, her head hanging. Lifting up a hoof, she wiped her cheeks, and although David couldn’t tell for what at his angle, he could guess. “I-I really thought I made it home,” she said, pawing at the wood beneath her. “It feels all so r-real to me.”

“And I don’t even know how it’s pulling all of this off,” David declared, throwing his arms up in a stretch before letting them hang back behind his head as he leaned into his chair. “If this was some kind of game-like environment where you were the player and the Library was the map, then the program is generating a lot of proper collision detection real fast.”

Twilight frowned. David didn’t think she got all of that, but some of it did get through. He guessed that some of the learning she’d been doing had paid off, after all.

“Can you see the system properly now, Twilight?” he asked, bringing his hands back to the controls on the desk. “Like all the code and stuff?”

Her horn lit up. He didn’t like the sign that the suddenly appearing dark circles under her eyes gave him. He swore her mane was sticking out in some places too. “I d-don’t know,” she said, trying out her magic. “I-I think it’s there, it reactivated again, it’s just that all I see are the walls of the library.”

Suddenly, Twilight's pink magic enveloped the nearby door with a candle etched onto it. She shrieked as it slammed open, jumping back a bit.

“Twilight?” David asked, alarmed. “What was that?”

She stared at something in front of her for a few seconds, her eyes almost going cross. A nervous laugh came before her next words. “It’s just the system-viewing spell I made.” She peered out the open door, but David couldn’t see what was beyond. “I think the code is located outside the Library.”

David rose a single eyebrow. Bringing his attention out of the center of the window, he swung the cursor around to the menu bar again, getting back to where he was exploring before Twilight spawned in.

"Ok, so the next tab is 'windows'," he thought, clicking on the button. His eyebrows twitched at the results. "I've seen one of these before, I know what this is. If I wanted to open different editor views, I could use this. Not touching any of that for now, there's too many options. So, that just leaves one thing left."

He heard a door close. "You done peeking?" he asked.

"Heh, yeah," she answered, taking a few slow steps back away from the entrance. "It's just a bit odd how my library is kind of floating in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing out there. In here, there's sunlight, but there's no sun outside. No Ponyville." Her head turned towards the books on the shelves, gulping. "I'm curious as to what these books are, though. There's nothing on their spines!"

He saw she grabbed a hardcover with her magic and brought it towards her. It opened inches away from her face. She let out a gasp and flipped thought a couple of pages, her eyes glued to the screen, scanning rapidly as she went through the content easily.

"What? What is it?" David asked.

"It's completely blank!" Twilight said. She reached the end of the book, firmly closing it with a slam and sliding it back where it belonged. "There was nothing in it!"

David gave an odd look. He watched as Twilight pulled out another book and started reading it. "Empty," she declared, placing the book back and taking the one right next to it, reading it immediately. "Empty," she said again, not even bothering to put it away this time as she summoned another from the wall, now having two in her telekinesis. "Empty," she stated after flipping through the next. "Empty, empty, empty. Empty! David, these are all just empty books!"

David scratched his chin. "Well, maybe the map doesn't contain your library's contents. It's your library for certain, but maybe the developer couldn't pull all the books you owned into the program."

Twilight sat firmly in frustration, letting the last book in her possession fall onto the pile she made, not noticing that she left them all facing down on the floor, completely open. "This is ridiculous! I finally have my house back and I've lost every single book it had?"

"I can't even tell if those are supposed to be proper books or if they're just there as placeholder props," David pondered, his eyes wandering to the bottom of the window. The words "empty.txt opened" took hold of his interest. He clicked on the line, curious if it would actually do anything. Suddenly, a new window popped up, showing him contents of a folder that was labeled "Library". All it had in it was "empty.txt" and a "read me" file. He clicked on the latter, which opened up notepad for his use.

"Place any readable text files into this folder," David muttered under his breath, reading the screen. "Is really that it? Hey, Twilight,"

"Yeah?" Twilight returned a bit irritably.

"I found a folder named 'library'. See if you can find it and try putting some of your reading materials in it."

Twilight's horn lit up for a second before the front door slammed open again, sending Twilight jumping with a shriek. A part of her mane became more disheveled.

"I don't think I'm calling up any system searching anytime soon," Twilight said, holing a hoof to her chest as she caught her breath. "I have to change my spell a little so it stops doing that."

David frowned. He manually opened Windows Explorer and went to Twilight's e-books. He had a theory, and experimentally clicked-and-dragged one of the files from the Explorer window to the file viewer of the editor. There was a beat, and the reading file moved from Explorer to the editor successfully.

"Sweet," David stated.

Twilight turned sharply around, letting out a breath. David clicked back on the interface, trying to guide the camera to see where she was looking. A book on one of the shelves was glowing in a golden light before simmering down to nothing. Getting up, Twilight trotted over to the face of the wall and pulled down the book with her magic, slowly opening it up with a curious expression. Her eyes widened at the words inside.

"Hey! This is a copy of Computer Science for Dummies!" Twilight declared, looking into the camera lens.

"Ha! Just as I thought! We can populate your library with anything kind of e-book or text file! We just have to put it in the right folder! Is it ok if I move all of your readables to the library?" David asked.

"Uh, sure," Twilight said a bit hesitantly. Suddenly, the room around her was filled with glowing, newly placed books. She noted no new books appeared, but instead random reads would begin to shimmer light, and when they calmed down there would be a title along the spine of the book.

"Very interesting," Twilight stated, putting the book back and grabbing another that had finished glowing. "I'm going to need to organize these later." She gave a smile she couldn't hold back. "This is great! I can actually read physical books again! I won't have to read them off the background in weird colours of text anymore!"

"I wonder how the program formats the e-books into physical reading material for you," David question aloud. His focus was pulled back to the screen as he saw Twilight flip through the book, a wide grin on her face with her glittering eyes. He smiled back.

He blinked. He scanned the last tab at the top of the window, his smile disappearing. "Just the last tab left, 'tools'," he said again, clicking on it.

His mouth hung open as his eyebrows shot up. He shook his head, speechless.

"David?" Twilight asked.

He didn't respond.

"David?" she tried again.

"Hmm? Yeah?" He said, blinking rapidly and getting out of his stupor.

"Thank you for finding this," Twilight said, looking at the camera. The book in her grasp lowered slightly as the aura around it grew in opacity. Her magic enveloped the hill of forgotten, artificial books that she left previously and tried to put them back in some sort of attempted organized manner. "This actually means a lot to me, seeing the library again. I know I'm not exactly, you know, home, yet, but I think that finding the editor will be a large step forward to finding the solution to get me back."

"Oh," David simply stated. "You're very welcome, Twilight."

"I think that this is a perfect time to start a new book that I just got," she announced, taking a book from one of the shelves and trotting over to a purple cushion at one of the round tables in the room. She took a seat, the book on the table, her tail happily swishing back and forth as she was lost to the world. Unbeknownst to David, her mane actually started to go back to normal.

David nodded, lifting a shaky hand to his headset and lifting the mic bit back into place so it turned off. He took off the headset, placing it slowly on the desk, and reached over to his cell phone, his palms sweaty, eyes not leaving the menu that dropped down from the tab he had clicked.

The phone was flipped open. He didn't even need to look at the interface of the touch screen on the phone to put in his password and start a call. He brought the phone to his ear.

"Hello? Jack? Are you still at work? Listen, I need you to list me the best webcams you have to offer..."