Glitched Stitches

by Quillamore

ERROR:ENVY

Still nothing. Always nothing.

Coco was used to the sort of information the episode list gave, but it still somehow managed to disappoint herself every time. Every day this time of year, her databases would flood with script after script, but never any room for her. The message was always clear: whatever role the creators would find for her, it wasn’t ready yet.

There was, at least, a tiny consolation to the way this system worked--at most, only three scripts were available at a time, meaning that tomorrow, she would have another chance to return to the Equestrian simulation. Even ponies outside the Motherboard could lay idle for that long, without a single line fed to them by an outside party. There was even the legendary Princess Luna, who’d gone a whole season untouched by the creators, only to be saved from the Motherboard at the last second. If she could do it, so could Coco.

She’d been fine when the last set of Season Five scripts came out, figured the main cast had better things to do than hang out with her all the time. But in the hiatus, she’d started to grow restless, before finally accepting that she was going to be in the Motherboard for awhile. By now, she didn’t even mind staying there, now that she had Babs and Lightning on her side. But somehow, once Season Six news came, she was straight back to where she had started.

Having a purpose in life only meant so much if the life you lived wasn’t even real to begin with.

After staring at the episode list for what seemed like ages, Coco finally called off her databases and forced herself out of bed towards another day. As usual, her roommates--family was such an Equestrian word, and hence one she was never allowed to experience--were up earlier than she was, though Babs was nowhere to be found. Figuring she was hidden in some other location in the house she hadn’t checked yet, Coco stepped into Lightning’s secret room, where the pegasus was already waiting for her.

“Hey,” she muttered from her control chair, “I was just about to go upstairs and find you. Babs is in the bathroom right now, and there was somethin’ I wanted to tell the two of you about.”

There was a hidden edge to Lightning’s voice, as if her programming had suddenly gone rogue. While Motherboard ponies possessed the same emotions as other Equestrian AIs, Lightning didn’t often get like this when Coco was around. Heck, she’d never even heard a voice clip of her friend acting this way--in her debut, the pegasus had been told to act laid-back for most of the episode and indignant for the climax.

“You’ve seen the list, haven’t you?” Coco said hesitantly. “I know it’s hard, not seeing your name on there, but you’ve got us now. I was a little upset about the whole thing until I reminded myself of that, but I’m good now.”

“I don’t care about that crummy list anymore, and the sooner you realize it doesn’t mean nothin’ to you, the better. All it does is put ponies at each other’s throats. And before you say that I’m supposed to be the kind of competitive mare who cares about that sort of thing, let me just say that I pick my battles. Anything that would make my glitch go wild ain’t worth worrying about.”

Lightning took a sip of coffee, one of the many things that lacked a purpose in the Motherboard. Ponies who lived there could still eat, drink, and do anything Equestrian AIs could, but they didn’t experience the same effects. Alcohol didn’t get you drunk, chocolate didn’t make you fat, and caffeine didn’t give you energy. Still, the desperate and exhausted gesture of reaching out for a cup of coffee meant much the same thing here. She was still drinking when Babs entered the room, not even noticing how unsurprised the filly seemed by the whole situation.

“Lightning wants to talk to us about her glitch,” Babs finally explained. “‘Fore you came in, she was tellin’ me how hard all this was gonna have to be, but she wants us to know anyway. She says she’s tired of keepin’ it secret.”

Coco’s eyes practically bulged out of her head as the filly said this, even though Lightning confirmed it with a nod. Lightning was one of the few ponies in the Motherboard who refused to divulge her glitch, and Coco had been slow to trust her because of that. Just like the scripts, though, she came to accept the secret as part of her life in the Motherboard and questioned it no further after that. All Lightning had ever told her about it was that it was “miles worse than just having the wrong name,” and Coco accepted that.

After all, just about any glitch was worse than her own.

“I’ll admit,” Lightning began, “I’m tired of all this. I hate the fact that ponies can never know who I really am, and I always have. Even though I’ve let my guard down around you more than I ever have with anypony else, it’s still gonna be a hard revelation to make. So before you judge me for keeping all this under wraps, I want you to hear me out. I haven’t been able to trust anypony with this knowledge, and I want to believe I can trust you.”

“I can,” Coco said in a soft voice, as if already fearing what would come to pass. “Both of us can.”

“Whatever mistake you made back there, I’ve made worse,” Babs agreed. “At least you weren’t supposed to be a reformed model.”

Lightning gave a final, tiny smile at Babs’ joke before continuing onward into uncharted territory. She guided herself under the computer, almost as if in shame, and came out with a wire hooked to her flank. With her usual bravado, she explained that this would allow everypony present to see the glitch text that’d been programmed into her, and sure enough, the screen beside her rang with two little words.

ERROR: ENVY.

“You’ve all heard about the accident that happened during my episode,” she began. “And now, you’re about to find out that it wasn’t an accident. Up until I was sent to the Motherboard, I’d planned everything out. I was even able to fool the creators, for a little while.”

Lightning said all this in such a matter-of-fact tone, yet Coco wasn’t able to make heads or tails of what she was really implying. The episode she’d been in had run fairly smoothly from everything Coco had heard, with everypony playing their carefully assigned roles. Sure, the mane cast sans Rainbow Dash had almost died that day, but even that had been added in for drama; even that was an illusion. Even though nopony in Equestria knew that they were in a show for children, everypony had a hunch that unless you were a villain, you could never get yourself into too much danger. You would be saved, redeemed, brought back.

But then again, the very existence of the Motherboard disproved that last one. Coco still wasn’t quite sure if the same was true for salvation and redemption, and didn’t know if she would ever be sure again. At this point in the game, she wasn’t even sure if Lightning was a friend or a foe.

As much as she assured Lightning that she trusted her, seeing that glitch put a wrench into matters. Glitches were almost always related to some sort of physical feature--having the wrong name, or speaking the wrong way, or just not being appealing enough to the audience. Every once in awhile, they related to some sort of emotional fault, like how Babs could be easily manipulated into taking orders. But even those were simple issues, something that could interrupt an episode without jeopardizing personal relationships.

Judging by the fact that Lightning had been created to be an antagonist, her glitch probably extended far beyond simple jealousy--after all, if that was the case, it would have been easy to bring her back for friendship lesson fodder. Granted, the show had already covered such material, but it was so far back in Season One that the children watching the show might have forgotten it already. For her to have such an easily exploitable glitch and still not return to Equestria, she had to have done something--

Coco tripped on the word for a few seconds, an unfamiliar one almost never used to describe glitches, or AIs, or anything controlled by another entity. Just saying it almost implied some degree of free will, a luxury that was only afforded in the Motherboard.

Sinful.

“You planned your glitch?” Babs finally questioned. “You could control it like that?”

“I thought I could,” Lightning said with a scoff. “Back then, I didn’t realize everything it was doing to me. I’d almost say that it was less like I was in control and more like...it overwhelmed me so much, I didn’t know I wasn’t. All I knew was, the minute I was sent to the Motherboard, they didn’t call me a glitch. They called me a virus.”

She leaned back in her chair and tried to gain some of her usual composure, but even Coco was able to tell it was like an act. Lightning’s gestures were no longer her own, but rather the sort she would have made as a puppet AI reciting from a script. Just the thought of her not being in control sent shivers down Coco’s spine, especially considering what could control her beyond the creators’ reaches.

Coco wasn’t sure if viruses still had power down here, but as she gulped down her nerves, she knew she didn’t want to find out.

“Sooner or later, they wised up and realized I was just a glitch with a virus. Small distinction, but it made all the difference. Who knows what kind of capsule I would’ve ended up in if the creators never figured that out? Um, no offense.”

It took Babs a few seconds to even recognize that Lightning was talking about her, but the filly eventually gave her an acknowledging nod, one of several ways she and the pegasus could communicate without speaking. Rather than fear, Coco noticed that Babs looked at their companion with a sort of surprised awe--perhaps she trusted Lightning too much, or perhaps it was some youthful instinct towards forgiveness. Either way, Coco figured that, as somepony with a more severe glitch, Babs probably had better judgement on the matter. And so, Coco let the alarm bells in her head disappear for a few brief moments, and did what she was made to do.

Believe in your friends, and forgive them when they do wrong. It was what the pony AIs were made for, and even if Lightning was different, Coco wanted to believe they had more in common than either realized. Maybe it was her naive programming, but she wanted to believe nothing Lightning could say today would ruin their friendship.

What the pegasus said next, however, made that promise especially hard to fulfill.

“But anyway, enough beating around the bush. It’s hard for me to tell anypony about this, let alone you two, but it all started when Season Three was almost a quarter of the way through, when my episode was supposed to air. After what I did, my debut ended up being halfway through the season instead. It took the creators a long time to recover from the mistakes I made, and that’s why Season Three was so short. By the time they cleaned up my mess, they didn’t have enough energy to write thirteen more episodes.”

From the look on Babs’ face, it seemed the filly had just accepted that change as fact. No matter how much the creators tried, not every memory from Equestria transferred back into the Motherboard, and it was likely she’d already forgotten that Season Three was supposed to be the same length as the others.

“I hate to say it, but that’s probably why I let Coco free you from the capsule, Babs. You already had two episodes planned that season, and they really seemed to be pushing for you. If I hadn’t slipped up, maybe you would’ve had a few more, or even gotten to stay. I feel like I owe you somethin’ after all that.”

Both Coco and Babs let themselves consider that possibility for a second. If Lightning really had caused as much damage as she claimed, it could have impacted all three of their futures. But, in a twisted way, it’d also brought all three of them together. After all, it wasn’t like the creators would ever think to bring an Apple filly, a daredevil pegasus, and a Bridleway costume designer into the same episode.

“I don’t think anythin’ would’ve changed,” spoke Babs. “They knew I had a glitch, and my time was numbered with or without you. Even if they were pushing for me, there’s only so much a glitch can do before slipping up.”

Lightning shook her head with resignation, making Coco wonder if the pegasus really considered her fate so inevitable. As much as Coco hated to think about it, feeling that way would’ve almost been preferable to beating yourself up over one mistake as her friends had done so many times before.

Knowing you’re a mistake, she thought to herself, makes it easier for you to make them.

“But anyway, here’s the way it went down,” Lightning continued, “from the beginning all the way to when I ended up here. I ain’t gonna repeat it ever again, so pay close attention, okay?”

Up until that moment, Coco had forgotten that Lightning and Commander Spitfire had been in the same episode together, but hearing her friend’s tone now burned that detail into her brain. She was every bit as commanding as the leader of the Wonderbolts, and perhaps if things had gone differently, she could have been exactly that.

Then again, Coco was starting to hate that word, ‘perhaps.’ And so, she made a mental note to eliminate that word from her vocabulary as soon as she heard Lightning’s story.

“I was created differently from a lot of pony AIs. The creators reprogrammed part of Rainbow Dash’s data into me, the stuff that got lost in her character development, that sort of thing. They basically skimped on the rest, ‘cause they wanted me to be a ‘foil’ to her. It was easier for them to take a character they already knew and change some stuff up about her, y’know?

“And for awhile, I didn’t mind too much, ‘cause I didn’t know and didn’t care. All I knew was that these people were going to give me the life of my dreams, and all I had to do was hang out with somepony a lot like me. Just that was enough, even. I’ve always wanted a friend who was just like me! No offense.”

At this point in the game, Coco just shook her head, knowing that was Lightning’s way of saying how much she really cared about her.

“But then it stopped being so nice. I loved Dash, don’t get me wrong, and maybe if that virus never crashed the party, we would’ve really gotten somewhere. Even then, though, I started realizing that she had it so much better than I did. We’d talk off-camera in the academy simulation, and she’d tell me about all these friends and family she had. But no matter how hard I tried...I couldn’t remember any of mine. I couldn’t remember having anypony in my life before Dash, because the creators didn’t program anypony to be there! What’s the use of giving her friends, when you just want your new pony to be Rainbow Dash 2.0?”

Coco could practically see Lightning’s chair dissolving into pixels as the pegasus gripped its handles ever tighter. She’d seen her friend’s amber eyes contort themselves into all sorts of expressions, but never the sort of crazed glint they were taking on now. However, Lightning came into herself just as quickly as she’d disappeared, and her face returned to its normal smile within seconds.

“Or at least, that was what my glitch told me. Looking back on it, I think I remembered the Motherboard stuff a bit too early, because I knew what I really was before too long. That was about the time I started having these weird thoughts. My virus was pretty good at disguising them as real, things I actually believed, until I put my plan into action.

“It got to the point where I couldn’t stop thinking about Dash. She didn’t know anything was wrong, and she kept talking about her friends until I wanted them, too. I even wanted to have a little filly friend like the one she told me about, the orange one with all the nightmares. Now, I know it was probably ‘cause I missed Babs, but my virus warped it into something bigger until I asked myself this.”

Lightning cringed from the very thought, and for all Coco knew, this was something she’d hoped to never say again.

“If Dash and I are so alike...why don’t I just replace her?”

Even though this revelation should have horrified Coco more than anything, she placed a hoof on Lightning’s shoulder. The more she heard her friend talk, the more she realized that every change Lightning had made to herself hadn’t been to separate herself from Rainbow Dash. The way she never flew. Her obsession with fixing things. How she never wanted to talk about the Wonderbolts, or Cloudsdale, or anything that’d make her a pegasus.

Every change she had made was meant to keep her from turning back into the mare she was before. And even if Coco couldn’t understand the voices or the virus, she could at least understand that.

“I was already supposed to go wild in the last few scenes,” Lightning whispered, her voice as low as it could go. “I figured the creators wouldn’t notice if I hit the wrong pony. So I...rigged the tornado to hit Dash instead. I’d already planned so much--the way I’d do my mane, paint my body, and convince them I was her--that I thought I’d had it made. I was going to be the star. I was going to have friends. I was going to have friends, finally.”

And, just like that, Lightning became little more than a heap of wings and fur, curled into a ball like a newborn foal.

“I didn’t know villains weren’t supposed to have friends,” she murmured as her cheeks cascaded with tears.

“You have friends now,” Coco whispered, patting Lightning on the back.

“I know,” Lightning replied, “but I don’t deserve them. And if I ever go back there, I’ll lose everything. I’ll go back to being the virus again.”

“Then I’ll just have to make sure you don’t forget. We have a rare glitch on our side, and more machines than the creators can imagine. You don’t have to be scared of going back to Equestria anymore, because we’ll find a way to get rid of that other you for good.”

Babs nodded in agreement, and although Coco couldn’t remember her exact words, the filly summed up the situation far better than she ever could. But somehow, it was Coco’s words that Lightning reacted to as she slowly gained her determined attitude. The three had found their adventure, and they were willing to stay in the Motherboard forever until they found it.

All the while, none of them thought to check their episode lists. None of them questioned why notifications were running through their brains a mile a minute, until Coco dared to check. And that was when she saw the three pieces of information that would shock everypony.

One: the episode list had been updated until Season Eight, quicker than it ever had before. Two: both Coco and Lightning had been scheduled to appear in the Equestrian simulation at separate times, alongside a dizzying number of other Motherboard ponies. Which, of course, led to the third and gravest conclusion: whatever reason the creators had for Babs’ confinement meant that the filly could never return to Equestria. Everything they ever had was destined to be destroyed with a single blow.

But it was in that moment that Coco realized something else: glitches weren’t supposed to have destinies. They were errors in the system, something not even the creators could have planned for. That meant they could create their own destinies. That was what Coco came to realize, in that moment and forevermore.

She might lose the friends and family that were assigned to her. But in the Motherboard, she could make new ones beyond her maker’s wildest dreams. She had her flaws, but as long as she was in a place of exile, she knew that she could never be exiled for them again. The feeling she used to have, of some mysterious force controlling her actions, vanished without a trace.

Being a glitch means being free.

Author's Note:

They say that there are two kinds of people: people who would fall in love with their double, and people who would kill their double. Lightning Dust is probably a bit of both. And also, by "they say," please realize that I'm quoting a Tumblr post.

Anyway, I tried something new with the way the last few paragraphs repeated the prologue, and I'm pretty pleased with the results. This is a part I've been wanting to write for a while, so I hope you all enjoy it. The next part will look at the creators more, and what their real purpose for the Motherboard is...

Comments

[Starlight Nova]

Do the CMC appear in this story?

[Quillamore]

9130602

No, they do not.

[The Bricklayer]

God... just god. If I knew Lightning Dust honestly was repenting here, I'd want to be punching her so hard here. She's definitely learned her lesson, unlike the show's Dust who's remained a bitch and reckless loose cannon through and through.

Also Coco, you're absolutely right. You fight fate, you make your own destiny.

[JMP]

OOoooh, this was a really nice chapter.

[Quillamore]

9130955

Thanks. I’m pretty proud of it, so I’m glad you liked it.

[Kinder der Nacht]

Darn it... The last part legit got me in tears

The story of pony-AIs living under manipulations within a huge illusion of simulation created by some other more capable “beings", for a lack of words, reminds me so much of the game Detroit: Become Human. Different stories though, but you can still see the similar desires and struggles for independence, self-fulfillment and freedom.

Very powerful story. Now I really want to see how this is going to unfold from now on!

And please have a fav!

[GNSLNGR]

The second half felt a bit rushed, but otherwise this was a good chapter. I really like this story.