The New Hacker In Town

by AlexTFish

Things May Come And Things May Go

The boy knocked nervously on the door.

“Come in,” came the imperious voice from within. He tentatively pushed open the door and inched his way in. The room’s inhabitant locked eyes with him. “And give me some good news.”

“Um, yes, yes, of course,” he babbled. “Ah, yes! Good news! The new guardians are ready.”

“Excellent. And these won’t have the same issues as last time?”

“Definitely not,” he said hastily. “I had some, uh, teething problems with the prototype, but those are all sorted now.”

The figure behind the desk growled, “They had better be.” Not because she was particularly angry, but just because she enjoyed seeing how he cowered in front of her. Her fingers casually twirled a pen as she continued, “Because I’ll be taking one of them with me tonight. I’ve been investigating a lead, and I think we have a very interesting new target.”

---

---

“I was robbed last night,” Twilight Sparkle said dully, staring straight through the plate of what could generously be termed ‘school lunch’.

For a moment, her announcement hung silently in the air. Then her friends around the cafeteria table all started talking at once.

“What did they take?” “Do you know who it was?” “Oh no! Was anyone hurt?” “Have you told the police?” “Wait, don’t you have a top-of-the line burglar alarm?”

Twilight gave a deep sigh and rubbed her eyes behind her glasses. “Yes, we called the police; I was up until 1 a.m. talking to them. No, nobody was hurt, and no, we have no idea who did it. We do indeed have a very good security system, which was somehow disabled with no record… And they took a load of my hardware and inventions, including several prototypes I haven’t shown anyone yet.”

“Oh, darling,” Rarity said compassionately, putting an arm around Twilight’s shoulders. “We’re so sorry for you. If there’s anything any of us can do…”

“We should track them down!” declared Rainbow Dash, and smacked a fist into her palm.

Applejack rolled her eyes. “An’ just how do ya suggest we do that, Dash?”

“Someone has to have seen something, right? Like, neighbours, or… or local wildlife! Fluttershy could talk to the critters nearby and see if any of them saw anything!” Rainbow Dash pointed triumphantly at Fluttershy, who instinctively flinched and retreated on general principles.

Sunset Shimmer, who had been quietly frowning, looked at Twilight thoughtfully. “They took your inventions, you say?” Twilight nodded. “And not any valuables? Like paintings or jewellery?”

“Wait, yeah, good point!” Dash exclaimed. “Twilight’s family’s loaded! Didn’t they steal any of your parents’ expensive stuff?”

“A little jewellery and a couple of laptops. But it seems their main target was my lab. The police are calling it a ‘targeted theft’.”

“Targeted is one word for it,” Sunset mused. “And they also disabled your security system?”

“That’s the bit I really don’t understand,” said Twilight plaintively. “I applied some custom upgrades to the sensors! It’s remote controlled from my secure workstation in the lab! I have no idea how they got in without tripping fifteen alarms.”

Pinkie Pie interjected, “Don’t you have a bunch of other stuff with cameras in that lab? Didn’t any of them see anything?”

Twilight Sparkle stopped short. “...Hmm. They took everything that looked like a robot or a weapon, and the private camera in the corner, but… they did leave behind the mainframes. I’ve been training a neural network on the webcam feed, so I can probably get it to reconstruct its recent input! Pinkie, you’re a genius!”

“Aww, shucks.” Pinkie Pie smiled modestly.

Applejack nodded decisively. “Sounds like we got a couple of leads to try then. You okay havin’ us all come by your place after school, Twi? If you want to have a bit o’ peace an’ quiet to yourself, we’ll understand.”

Smiling helplessly, Twilight replied, “No... No, it’s wonderful of you all to offer. Thank you. I don’t know if we’ll get anywhere, but... it’s nice to have friends with me as we try.”

---

“I guess ‘try’ is the operative word.” Sunset Shimmer squinted at the screen and pinched her forehead. “Is that actually a camera image at all? ‘Cause if so, you really need to clean your lens.”

“No, it’s not. I keep my lenses perfectly clean, I’ll have you know,” Twilight Sparkle replied in mock affront, but couldn’t manage to keep a small smile off her face. “I don’t have a record of the webcam feed… I typically only record one camera feed in this room, and that” – she pointed up at a corner of the room where a bracket had been yanked off the wall – “was showing just an empty room until the camera itself was taken. Somehow. But as a side project, I’ve been training a network to recognise me and Spike whenever we’re in the room, and it’s always learning from whatever faces it sees. By comparing the network weights from yesterday’s backup with the day before’s, I ought to be able to reverse it, make it generate just the faces it saw in the twenty-four hours when the burglary happened.” She scowled at the screen and started typing. “But I clearly need to tweak some parameters…”

Sunset watched with an affectionate smile. When Twilight didn’t seem to be about to immediately find something, Sunset said, “I’ll step outside and see how the others are doing, okay?” Twilight gave a distracted grunt of vague affirmation.

Sunset found Fluttershy on the front lawn, surrounded by a flock of miscellaneous small birds, a couple of dogs, a cat and several squirrels. Rainbow Dash and Rarity were standing nearby. When Sunset approached the herd of creatures, the birds started chirping vigorously.

“Calm down, everyone, please!” Fluttershy said sternly. “One at a time! I’m very grateful for your help, but I need you to talk to me one at a time. Now, you first, Stormcaller Nightwing?” A small sparrow tweeted and flapped for a few seconds. Fluttershy glanced back and forth between Sunset and the bird, looking nervous. Well that’s not worrying at all, Sunset thought to herself.

Sunset waited until the bird seemed to be done, then interjected, “Everything okay, Fluttershy?”

Fluttershy frowned. “They’ve been very helpful. But I can’t quite make sense of what they’re telling me. The birds are saying one thing, but the dogs are saying another.”

“That doesn’t sound that surprising to me. I have to imagine birds and dogs perceive the world very differently to each other.”

“Perceive…?” Fluttershy mused. “You… might be onto something there, Sunset. Stormcaller, when you saw her, how did you sense it was her? What about you, Deathbeak?” The birds tweeted a bit, and others joined in. Fluttershy nodded and turned to the dogs. “Thank you. Now, same question to you, Snufflekins and Lolloper?” After a few canine noises, Fluttershy’s eyes widened and she glanced at Sunset again.

Sunset sighed. “Okay, what’s going on?”

“Um…” Fluttershy suddenly developed an intense interest in her feet.

Rainbow Dash wandered over. “Come on, Flutters. You can’t just keep us in suspense here. If they told ya something interesting, spill!”

Fluttershy took a deep breath. “Okay… I need you to understand that I’m just passing on what the critters told me…”

“We get it, Fluttershy,” Sunset said, trying to be gentle even as she was itching to know. “Out with it.”

“Well… the birds say that around the time we know the theft happened, they saw you come in, Sunset.”

“Me? I haven’t been here for weeks.” Sunset gestured to Rarity who was coming over to the animated discussion. “I was just telling Rarity a couple of days ago that I hadn’t been to Twilight’s for ages.”

Fluttershy continued, still hesitantly, “And the thing is, the dogs agree with you. They say the intruder definitely didn’t smell like you. But the birdies are quite insistent that she looked like you.”

“So, what, someone was disguised as me?”

Rarity clapped her hands, her eyes wide. “Or… maybe we’ve finally found the person we’ve been wondering about for years… your human counterpart, Sunset.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sunset grumbled. “I searched for that girl for years without finding so much as a trace, and now when we do find her she’s robbing my best friend?”

Rainbow Dash looked surprised. “Wait, you searched for the human Sunset Shimmer? When?”

Sunset pinched the bridge of her nose. “If we’re going to go into this I need to be sitting down. Let’s go round up… oh, hey, Twilight. Did you get any images out of that analysis you were doing?”

Twilight Sparkle laughed nervously. “Ha ha! Well, um, the results are, ah, a little confusing… I might need to recalibrate something, maybe…”

“Let me guess. It produced a face that looks a lot like mine,” said Sunset steadily.

“What? How did you–”

“A little bird told me,” Sunset interrupted sardonically, glancing over her shoulder at Fluttershy and her animal entourage. “Yeah, we definitely need to sit down. And preferably find something to drink.”

---

Sunset Shimmer drained the last of the cola bottle, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and slumped backwards into the sofa in Twilight’s living room. “So. Long story short, we have two reasons to believe that my human doppelganger was the mysterious thief who took Twilight’s kit. Fluttershy’s animal friends say someone who looked like me but didn’t smell like me, and Twilight’s… facial… reconstruction… thing… says someone with my face was in that room on the night in question.”

“But there’s still a lot we don’t understand,” Twilight added sombrely. “Why did she only raid my lab? How did she bypass all our security systems? How did she find out about my lab in the first place? And what did she do to my camera to interfere with the feed while she was doing it?”

“Never mind the techie details, where has she taken it all?!” exclaimed Rainbow Dash.

Pinkie Pie nodded. “Yeah! I would have thought Twilight would have put some kind of location tracker thingie in her robots. Gee, it’s such a pity you don’t.”

Twilight replied indignantly, “Of course I do! At least three of the projects they took will be uploading their GPS coordinates to ThingSpeak every… minute…” She trailed off, wide-eyed.

Sunset eagerly carried on for her. “So we can just check those data streams to find out where the robots have been taken! Pinkie, you’re a genius!”

“Oh, you flatterer,” Pinkie Pie laughed. “I’m not the one who actually built the robots. I’m just the one who reminded her she put a GPS whatjamacallit in them.”

Fluttershy nervously spoke up. “Um, everyone? When we find out where they went, what are you thinking we’ll do?”

“Bust in there an’ get Twi’s inventions back, o’course!” Applejack declared.

Rainbow Dash nodded eagerly. “Definitely! It’ll be a great chance to use our powers!”

“Oh, dear, I was afraid you were going to say that,” murmured Fluttershy. “Shouldn’t we, um, tell the police and let them handle it?”

“That is a good point,” Rarity said thoughtfully. “Unless… how dangerous would the stolen items be in the wrong hands, Twilight?”

“I mean… I wasn’t building them as weapons…” Twilight hedged.

“Is that a ’I’d get in trouble with the police if they saw them’ kind of situation?”

“They’re industrial prototypes!” Twilight protested. “They’re not covered by the regulations on consumer electronics… but, ah, just in case, it might be worth seeing if we can easily retrieve them first ourselves…”

“Then it’s decided,” said Sunset. “Twilight, do you want to go check out where those GPS coordinates lead?”

“I’ll set up a portable directions unit to point us in the right direction. Who wants to hold it?”

“That sounds fun!” Pinkie Pie cheered. “And it was me that asked about the GPS thingie, so I should get to! When can we leave?”

Comments

[Ri2]

I like those animal names.

[Thought Prism]

10489677
Yeah, having the sparrows be edgelords was a hilarious call.

[AlexTFish]

10489677
10490316
Thank you! Yeah, it occurred to me that Fluttershy would call the animals by whatever their own names for themselves are, and it could be amusing if two different species (sparrows and dogs) have very different types of names for themselves .

[Fillyfoolish]

“A little bird told me,”

👈👈

[PresentPerfect]

All that setup with the birds and dogs just so you could sneak "a little bird told me" in there. XD Priceless.

I also love how the birds clearly named themselves (and are edgelords) while the dogs seem content to take on the names they've been given. :)