• Published 30th May 2015
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pony.exe - Blue Blaze {COMET}



David Carrian finds a virus has infected his computer. Meanwhile, Twilight Sparkle doesn't know where she is, and there's data floating everywhere around her...

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answers.exe

“I have an A.I. in my computer,” David thought to himself, tracing the life lines on the palms of his hands as his back curved forward. “There’s an A.I. in my computer and she has full control of my system!”

“David,” Twilight called out from behind the computer monitor. “Let’s just calm down for a second before we jump to any hasty conclusions. What makes you think that I’m in your computer?”

“Ah…” David sounded out, trying to find his voice. He suddenly realized that his lips were chapped and his throat was dry, with copious amounts of sweat glistening on his thin neck. He needed a drink, and the room was far too hot for his liking, even with the window of his room open. For a second he forgot how to breathe, how to speak, and the words he wanted to communicate were lost to the darkness in his head before coming back in startling clarity. “You know all those numbers and letters you’ve been, uh, ‘seeing’ around you?”

“Yes?” she confirmed.

“I’m pretty sure those are all the inner workings of my computer. Every single value and variable you see there is a part of my machine. Twilight, when you tried to use your ‘magic’, you screwed with my system!”

“What?” Twilight said, aghast. “But that doesn’t make any sense! Magic can’t interact with technology like that! It doesn’t work like that! Magical energy doesn’t translate to electrical energy, I wouldn’t even be able to begin to touch your computer with magic!”

David wiped off his forehead with his forearm, which was already somewhat damp. His shirt was becoming soaked like a used beach towel, and he cursed in his head. “You said it yourself. Whatever you were trying to do in there, you said it felt weird. You said the room felt odd, like it was missing something, and then you tried to do your magical thing and my computer went crazy right after.”

“T-That’s impossible. That can’t be true.”

“You got a headache, right?” David continued, pushing his point home. Abrupt pressure began to squeeze every angle of his head. “You got a headache after trying to do whatever the heck you wanted to do, and then our connection got interference and my system slowed down from all the programs you were inadvertently opening up. And remember that thing where I warned you about disconnecting from you for twenty seconds or so? That was me unplugging the cord that allows me to connect to others long distance, so there’s no way that we’re still speaking to each other from far away, magic spell or not.”

“There’s no way. There’s no scientific explanation possible!”

“The proof’s etched into my leg, right here,” David stated, a bit of a wild craze beneath his hazel eyes as he touched his newest wound, his heart hammering in his chest.

The system lagged for the split second pony.exe took to hog a large chunk of his CPU. “What?!”

“Heh, you threw my system into some kind of overdrive and burned my leg with electricity! My computer case had huge strands of static bouncing all over the surface!” he explained, a nervous chuckle following closely to his first words. “I don’t even know how everything stayed together after that and my hard drive wasn’t fried, and I don’t know how I’m not dead at this point, but I’m not complaining, and that’s what happened.”

No one decided to say anything. David finally leaned back into his chair and reclined it, relaxing into the black leather, listening to the chirping crickets outside in the thick, humid air of early summer. His head lolled off to face the open window, his mouth slightly ajar, staring out to the quiet neighbourhood street below, illuminated by several streetlights that dotted the stretching grassy terrace beside the road. Tall oak trees towered over the pavement, creating a soft canopy with leaves that weaved back and forth from the dancing wind, casting shadows from the bright silvery moonlight above. The green power light of his PC continued to burn bright, and the disk puttered for a second or two as time ticked by.

“…I’m sorry,” Twilight finally said. “I have no idea what I’m doing. I can’t control it.”

David let out a snort. “I have an A.I. in my system that has no idea what it’s doing. Great.” “That’s ok. Just try not to do anything else revolving around your, uh, magic, until we figure out what’s happening.”

“Ok.” she agreed. A sigh soon followed after. “How did I even get here in the first place?”

“Tell me, what do you remember before you found yourself in that room?”

He waited patiently for her answer, bringing his head back to his computer monitor, spotting the screen littered with useless windows that ate up more and more of his precious computer strength. He lifted his arms back onto the arms rests, spreading his perspiration all over the top surface. A streetlight outside flickered for a brief moment in the corner of his eye. “My friends and I got an invitation from Princess Celestia, the ruler of where I live, to attend a technology convention in northwest Vanhoover. We all agreed to go for the two day and took the train to get there. I remember that it got late into the evening on the train and we all went to bed with still a ways to go. And that…”

David closed his eyes, resting them.

“…That’s it.” she finished. “That’s all I can remember.”

“More about these horse puns on cities, eh?” David pondered to himself, his conscious growing slightly hazy.

“David, I’m not in Equestria anymore, am I? Have you heard of such a place?” Twilight asked, pleading for hope in her voice.

“I’m sorry Twilight. You’re not in ‘Equestria’ anymore. I’ve never heard of anywhere remotely named like that. You’re in a place called America.”

There was silence over the connection. Then, David heard quiet sniffling from the other end of the call. He briefly wondered what she was doing until it occurred to him that the sniffling quickly turned into soft sobbing. His heart broke in two.

“There’s no way an A.I. is supposed to be this smart,” David reasoned with himself, folding his hands atop each other on his lap, opening one eye a crack to check the time. It was 12:43 A.M. “No program can simulate emotion this well. Not even the crackpots at Google are even close to this level of intelligence. It sounds like she has a complete history to herself too, written up for her to believe.”

He had no idea what to do next. The virus on his computer was technically in complete control, allowed to whatever it wanted with a simple command or two, all the power of his system in the hands of a pony girl sitting somewhere in the hard drive, crying, wondering if she’ll ever see her home again. But was there a home for her? Wasn’t her home a fabricated story melded into the depths of her artificial memory to give her character and emotion?

It was all real to her, but what would happen when she learned it was fake? Would she accept it? Or would she turn it away and pull a Space Odyssey?

Those were the kind of questions David was asking himself.

“Twilight?” David called to attention, giving her a moment to steel herself.

She sniffled, and he imagined her wiping the tears from the bottom of her eyes. “Y-yes?”

“What is it in life that you like?” he asked.

“What?”

“What do you find enjoyment out of in your life?” he repeated.

“Well, I-I like to read books, a-a-and researching magical theory, a-and spending time with my friends…”

His eyes opened, looking through the lens of his glasses. “But why? Why do you like to do those kinds of things?”

She sniffed. “B-books are interesting, and they h-hold information and can t-tell stories and s-store all of pony history, a-and I have a special talent in magic, s-s-so I’m always trying to push my limits further and further, a-and I don’t know what I would do without my friends..”

Her crying became more intense after her last thought.

“Oh, Spike!” she cried out in the darkness. “Rarity, Rainbow Dash, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy… Princess…”

David waited, thinking.

“…I miss you all…”

He had made up his mind. With slow and patient purpose, he drove his chair back to in front of the desk, minimizing Task Manager and closing every single window that wasn’t being used at the moment. Twilight continued her sorrow in the background, with David systematically making his way through each copy of MS Paint, Notepad and every Windows Explorer window. Soon, the weight on his computer was alleviated as he lost count of how many he closed, reaching the upper fifties. As his task came to a close, it dawned on him that the almost unnoticeable filter that covered Twilight’s voice disappeared as he made more and more room for the rest of his computer to breathe.

“Twilight?” he finally asked once his job was done.

She inhaled through her nose, trying to bypass all of the mucus she had generated. “Yes?”

“Don’t give up hope. Don’t give up, and I’m going to try everything to help you get back home, ok?”

“Y-You would do that?” she asked.

“Yeah, yeah I would.” David said, staring down and off to the side, counting the soft grass-like stems of the dark-blue carpet. “I couldn’t just not help you. What kind of a person would I be if I did that?”

She sniffed. He had no idea what she looked like, but he liked to believe she had a warm smile beneath her bloodshot eyes. “Thank you. T-thank you so much…”

The corners of his lips crept up. “Heh, don’t thank me just yet. We still have to figure out exactly what’s going on,”

“You’re right,” she concluded. “I need to keep myself in control. J-just give me a second to get a hold of myself, I…”

“Take your time. We’re in no rush here.” he soothed.

He closed his eyes and pulled a lever beneath his chair, locking the recliner in a thirty-five degree position. Leaning back, he put his hands criss-cross on his lap and tried to take a small rest, listening to the peaceful nightlife outside his tiny, dimly lit room in his house. He heard thunder, which somehow snuck up on him during the chaos of the situation he found himself entangled in. The room flashed from beyond his closed eyelids and his smile evaporated while Twilight sniffed and wiped her nose.

“She’s a special girl,” David told himself. “Completely unique to her situation. If I’m going to play along, I’ll have to take extra care. She’s not simply just an unusually smart artificial intelligence anymore,”

His eyes opened, looking at the fresh computer screen on the desk he was so familiar with.

“She’s more like a soul trapped in a computer.”

“O-Ok, David” Twilight said after a few more moments. “I’m a bit more stable again. Sorry about that.”

“It’s perfectly fine. You don’t have to say sorry about anything.” he reassured her.

Twilight took one last, long breath through her nose. David had to wonder how exactly she knew how to simulate those sounds. It was if she had actually breathed before, it being so close to lifelike. “Ok!” she shouted, throwing all of her conflicts away for the moment. “What’s the first step?”

David suddenly let out a yawn he had been holding the entire evening. “Actually, Twilight, I…”

“Yes?” she asked.

David felt bad. He got her all riled up and ready to go and he was passing out on the spot. One, insistent half of him wanted to flop onto his bed and snooze until the morning while the other felt dedicated to what he had started already. What would Twilight think? Would she be disappointed, or understanding? He rubbed his eye, letting out a small groan and trying to wake himself up for the last moments he had of the day.

"Damn it. I could just leave the computer on, but I really don't want to leave Twilight alone like that. I probably won't be able to see her for another 18 hours, because of classes tomorrow, and that won't be good for her mind. I also really don't want to leave her with the faculties of my computer. I can only imagine the kind of things that she might try while alone."

“Is everything ok David?” Twilight asked after she hadn’t received a response in several seconds.

“Yeah, it’s just… Sorry Twilight, I know I brought you back up and all, but in reality it’s in the dead of night and I’m falling asleep, fast.”

“Oh,” Twilight simply stated. “Well, that’s ok, I guess. I can’t force you to stay awake. I mean, do whatever you need to do.”

David grimaced. She was definitely hurt a bit by his flip-floppy decision-making.

But then he had an idea. “Twilight, there is one thing we can do before I hit the hay,”

“And what’s that?”

“We can try turning off my computer,” David said, adorning a nervous smile.

Twilight had a late rebuttal. “Uhh,”

“Or at least put the computer to sleep so that I don’t have to boot it from scratch tomorrow. That way your program will keep running in a low-power state and won’t have to disappear completely.”

“Ah, that sounds like it makes sense, I guess,” Twilight commented, uneasy in her tone. “But what do you mean, putting the computer to sleep? I’m assuming it’s something similar to a living being going to sleep?”

“Exactly. Instead of turning off the computer completely, it shuts down to a state where it remembers everything, but isn’t exactly awake and running. I don’t know all the details and technical aspects of it, but just know that you’ll be safe since putting the computer to sleep doesn’t end any processes.”

“Processes?” Twilight asked.

David glided his cursor to close Task Manager, pony.exe’s information disappearing from his eyes. He realized that in his fervor of window-closing he accidentally closed every other program in the act, and nothing was left running. He cursed mentally, realizing that he lost all the tabs he had open and would have to start from scratch because he disabled the history function on his internet browser. Scratching the back of his head, he opened up the start bar at the top-right corner of the screen and kept the white arrow over the ‘sleep’ button.

“It’s what keeps the computer running,” David explained. “There are several things at once that have to keep on running in order for the computer to run properly, like, er, how the tracks of a train keep it running straight in the desired direction. It’s like a well-oiled machine.”

“I see,” Twilight affirmed, interest sparking in her voice. “Are processes the same as programs?”

David found a grin on his face but couldn’t muster the energy to pair it with a chuckle. “I’ll tell you in the morning. I need to test this out.”

“And I also have no idea what the difference between a process and a program are. I’m totally unprepared to teach an A.I. on how computers work. I guess it’ll be as much of a learning experience for her as it will be for me.” he mused, biting his lip.

“W-will anything happen to me?” she asked, poking her hooves together.

“What? No, nothing will happen to you,” David said. “Well, nothing in theory. We’re not turning off the computer, so the process that is hosting you on the system will stay running, although at a much slower pace, I think,”

“J-just tell me when you’re about to do it, so I can brace myself,” Twilight requested.

“Certainly. I’ll give you a count down.”

Twilight took a deep breath. David made certain that the button behind his cursor read ‘Sleep’, and not ‘Shut Down’.

“Are you ready?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok, here we go. Three, two, one…”

He clicked.

Nothing happened for a few seconds. Twilight held her breath in anticipation.

Then, it suddenly hit her. “David? I… I suddenly feel very dizzy…”

Without David’s knowledge, she fell down, and everything went dark.

Author's Note:

A part of me feels like this chapter's a tad bit stupid, but another part says that just roll with it and have confidence in myself.