Friendship is Optimal: Last Leap

by StarrySkies

Chapter 4 - Troubleshooting

Nobody blamed her, that was the worst part. Rachel walked around at work, and more than a few people expressed sympathy for the explosive failure of the new rocket, but not a single person seemed to think that she was at fault. There had been some flaw in the materials, some fault in the setup for the test, she was assured again and again. Her design had been perfect, a leap forward in rocket design. It wasn’t her fault.

There was a worm of doubt in her chest, gnawing away, and every reassurance made it that much heavier and hungrier. The morning after the disaster, she could barely muster the energy to drag herself from her car to the cafe, and just looking at Tobin’s table crowded with techs and management made her empty stomach twist.

Kampos had been the first to come to her after the explosion, while they were still spraying flame-retardant foam and waiting for the wreckage to cool enough to see what could be analyzed and recovered. He’d clapped her on the back and loudly announced, “Some chucklehead on the assembly team must have put tab A into slot C. Don’t worry, Rache, we’ll build another one - I want to see your design fly.”

Now he glanced up when she entered the room, and gave her an expansive, welcoming wave with the hand not holding an overfull spoonful of cereal. Rachel’s heart sank another foot, and she froze long enough for him to swallow and make it all worse by calling her over.

"Come on, have a seat! Let's brainstorm a bit on that rocket design. Someone just had an idea on how to keep the cone temperature down a little bit - wasn’t that was you, Louis?”

The engineer hastily swallowed a gulp of orange juice and nodded. “Yeah, I thought it might have been a problem with the alloys we used for the skeleton - “

Rachel cut him off as she backpedaled towards the door. “Listen, guys, I’m sure you’ve got some great ideas, but -” The door jamb cut her off, the back of her head smacking painfully against it, and she had to wave back three concerned techs who immediately came to see if she was all right. She fled with a muttered excuse of “lady problems”, and it took all she had to not literally run from the room.

Something was wrong with the rocket design, her rocket design. It was something she couldn’t see, and it was bad enough to lead to a total failure in testing - and that didn’t add up. She had run the numbers, over and over again, even going over some of it with her Equestrian rocketry friends to double-check her careful figures.

Whatever the flaw was, they hadn’t found it yet, but she wouldn’t stop trying until she did. Something about the design had been off. That had to be the answer, but it didn’t make sense. Math didn’t lie, and between the materials testing they’d done beforehand and the simulations she’d worked out with her friends on EO, there shouldn’t have been room for an error grievous enough to doom the engine.

Rachel paused as her heart froze in her chest, and carefully reexamined that last thought. Her work systems were advanced, and she’d run test after test on them since the failure. Everything checked out. So the problem had to be the other numbers she had worked out with Sine Wave and Landing Skid and Twilight.

Twilight Sparkle, who she knew was a game construct, an NPC. Twilight Sparkle, whose kindness and friendship had lulled Rachel into forgetting that she had been the first pony to welcome her to the game, before she even created Booster.

Doubts that had dulled and faded into the background of her mind flared back to life. Rachel had to talk to Twilight, and she feared she already had an idea what the pony would tell her.

---

Bruce was having a rough time at work, Emily knew that. The new engine his team was working on kept failing, and they weren’t sure why; one or two tests would go perfectly, and then the whole thing would blow up on the next one. She knew the whole team was working long hours, trying to get to the bottom of it before the failures started seriously impacting their budget and they had to scrap the design entirely.

She knew all of that, and it still didn’t help that she hadn’t seen him in person in almost four days. Normally, she got to see him in the morning before she went to school, and afterward he generally made a real effort to be home in time for at least the tail end of dinner. Even when he worked late, normally, she got to see him before she went to bed. But now, he wasn’t coming home at all. As far as she could tell, he must have been sleeping at work and probably swinging by the house to pick up clean clothes while she was in class.

It wasn’t that he was avoiding her, but it certainly was starting to feel that way, no matter how much she tried to push the thought from her mind; if it wasn’t for Rock Solid and Sharp Angle and the friends she’d made on Equestria Online, she would have felt entirely alone. Thankfully, some of those friends overlapped with her school day. Despite the scene with Janna (it still made her face hot thinking about it), more than a few of her classmates had quietly asked her if they wanted to play together, joining up in a shared version of Ponyville.

Apple Star and Sweet Caramel and Dapper Hooves were all in her class, and they’d had a lot of fun together, though the school was already looking down on students bringing PonyPads to school. There had been a push for it at first, even some talk of having study halls and club meetings together in the game, but then there had been a sudden reversal - some of the students claimed they’d seen black vans and serious people in suits and dark glasses talking with the principal, but then, there were students who’d claim they had seen a UFO over the football field or that there was a secret swimming pool in the school basement.

Either way, getting caught using a PonyPad in the halls was now a good way to get a stern talking-to if you were lucky, or getting it confiscated and a dose of detention if not. Still, the school librarian was a soft touch, and she didn’t mind them getting together at lunchtime to run an in-game study hall of their own, as long as they kept quiet.

Sharp Angle helped, too, of course. Emily was pretty sure at this point that he wasn’t one of her father’s coworkers - she didn’t think he was human at all, really. He seemed to be an Equestrian native, though she had seen him chatting with Rock Solid more than a few times even when she was pretty sure it was her dad controlling the stallion and not the digital homunculus.

She still didn’t know how she felt about that, but it was hard to deny that having someone an awful lot like her dad who she could always talk to. Bruce might be busy with work, but Rock Solid was always around.

Emily settled onto the couch in the empty house with a plate of microwaved pizza, and booted up her PonyPad. Logging in and getting into the comfortable, confident voice of Rock Roller was like taking off a weighted jacket that she’d been wearing without realizing it - playing him felt, in an odd sense, more comfortable than her own skin.

---

Bruce didn’t really come home for more than a week. It was early Sunday morning when he walked through the door intending to do more than grab a change of clothes, and found Emily snoring gently, curled up on the big couch with the television playing mindlessly at low volume and a logged-in PonyPad dangling from her hand.

He shucked his shoes by the door, relying on the carpeting to keep his footsteps from waking her up. Extracting the PonyPad from her hand was a little more tricky, but she tended to be a fairly deep sleeper; he smiled as he saw that her character was asleep in-game, too, the “camera” leaving first-person for once to pan around Rock Roller tucked neatly into a pony-sized bed of his own. The murmur of the television pulled his attention from the tablet, though, as a morning news report came on, something about Equestria Online.

A flick of the remote turned on captions, and Bruce’s eyes widened as he read the scrolling text. The anchor kept a calm and collected expression as she read the copy, but there was a certain wildness at the corners of her eyes that suggested she didn’t quite believe what she was reporting.

“Hofvarpnir Studios to release brain-uploading for early public access,” the text ran. It went on about Japanese clinics for the terminally ill, and something about access to the uploaded via any Equestria Experience Center, but Bruce didn’t really hear the details. He was staring into the distance, thinking about the implications. An end to death, even if virtual. If it had come a few years earlier…

“Dad?” Emily rubbed at her eyes as she stirred on the couch; Bruce turned off the television with the click of a button and immediately felt strangely guilty about it. If that brain upload tech was legitimate, she’d know about it soon enough, but on some level he felt like it was a dividing line. Everything would change if there really was some way around death.

“Yeah, honey, I’m home. Sorry work’s been so busy lately, we’ve had some technical issues with the new rocket - but that should be good, now, for a bit. We’re machining the new prototypes now, I’ll be home at regular hours for a few days until they’re done. Are you okay? You’ve had the house card to order food with, right? Hope you haven’t just been having pizza every night.”

She stretched, stood, and gave him a hug, which he returned with a pang of guilt. It wasn’t every teenager who’d be so open to showing affection; Lord knew he hadn’t been that close with his parents at her age.

“It’s OK, Dad, really it is. But, uh - just make sure you have your PonyPad with you next time, OK? You know you can always log on and ping me there, leave me a message if I’m not logged on.” She went quiet for a moment after that. An odd expression crossing her face, one Bruce couldn’t parse, but he didn’t think it was worth asking more about.

“It’s a promise, pebble. Now come on, how about you go up and grab a shower? I’ll have pancakes ready down here by the time you’re done. No work is going to grab me today, I promise.”

The pancakes (chocolate chip) wound up a little burnt in places, but they were delicious, anyway.