Long-Distance

by Bicyclette

6. Codec

Wallflower noticed that the guard scanning her visitor’s pass was a woman this time. It had been something she had noticed more lately, that the pairs of Foundation guards were now usually a man and a woman. Not that it made any difference. It just made the same identical guard come in two flavors.

As usual, Twilight was behind the entrance doors, and greeted her with a wave and a smile. They hugged.

Twilight spoke when they broke the hug. “We’re still getting things ready for you. But in the meantime, I wanted to show you what I was working on!”

“Uh, sure!” Wallflower agreed, trying to not let the anxiety show in her voice. It had been three days, when they normally only took one to refresh the pages of the journal. Twilight led her to her office, which Wallflower recognized as one half of a converted classroom, complete with an equation-covered chalkboard on the wall that she could swear was left over from the building’s high school days. There was a messy computer desk covered in a sprawl of papers, and a clean work table with some sort of device sitting on it. Twilight walked over to the work table, and motioned for Wallflower to join her.

“What is this, Twilight?” Wallflower asked as she approached the table to get a better look at the device. It was a rectangle of glass and plastic, sitting on a metal bracket suspending it above a book that was spread open on the table. She blinked at the familiar shape before realizing that it was not Sunset’s journal, but rather Twilight’s.

“Here!” Wallflower looked up to see Twilight handing her a pair of shaded goggles, identical to the pair she was now wearing. Wallflower got the hint and put them on. Twilight clicked a button, and the lights in the room went off, leaving the lamp above the work table the only source of illumination.

“Now, watch the paper!”

She did so, and Twilight clicked another button. A red laser flashed for a split-second from the device down onto a spot on the sheet, which darkened to black for about half a second before returning to its original color.

“Laser-activated pigment microcapsules! It’s very similar in principle to e-ink, except that we can impregnate actual, cellulose paper with it. And we can do a lot more than just that one pixel you saw. Here, check this out!”

Twilight clicked another button, and instead of one laser flashing, it was hundreds, darkening and lightening spots on the page underneath in a random pattern, reminding Wallflower of television static. Then, the pattern became far less random, resolving itself as a silhouette of a galloping horse and rider, blinking through its twelve frames of animation.

“Isn’t that neat?”

“Yeah!” Wallflower agreed, trying to figure out what the point of it was. “It’s very pretty.”

The lights in the room went back on, and Wallflower removed her goggles when she saw Twilight doing the same. Twilight smiled at her, eyes bright behind her thick, square glasses.

“So that got sent to the other Twilight’s journal just now?”

“Exactly!” Twilight beamed.

“Oh! That’s neat! So, uh, you can send animated pictures to Equestria? Like, black-and-white ones, I guess?”

“So much more than that!” Twilight took her phone out of her coat pocket. “Everything that’s transmitted over the internet is just a stream of ones and zeros. A lot of them. For Wi-Fi, that’s a radio wave that shifts between frequencies, billions of times a second! But ones and zeros can be anything, you just need two separate states. Like a pixel being black or white.”

Wallflower blinked. “So you can get an internet connection to Equestria?” Her heart began to beat faster. An internet connection meant…

“Not exactly! They don’t have computers over there.” Of course. Wallflower frowned, feeling silly. Twilight continued.

“And it’s not just not having computers! Even the concept of digitization was foreign to them, much less the implementation! Ha, and no wonder, too. Digitization!” Twilight held her hands in front of her face, wiggling her fingers, then laughed again. Wallflower just looked at her, confused. “Never mind!” Twilight said. “Point is, I had a lot of work to do over these past few years to get them up to speed.”

“Up to speed?”

“Yeah! There’s just so much to be done! Standardization of measurements and instruments. Building an industrial base.” She put a hand on her journal. “The other Twilight has been very receptive to my ideas.” She laughed to herself. “Well, duh! She is me, after all!”

Twilight smiled at Wallflower apologetically, realizing that she had gotten herself sidetracked.

“Of course, we’re still years away from setting up something that’s anything close to a modern computer on their end. But there was something we could get them to figure out. They have phonographs. With that analogy, they could design the right spells to play what we send them. And send recordings back.“ Wallflower’s heart began pounding again as Twilight smiled at her. “You can hear her voice again.”

How long had it been? Six years now. Six years of living with the fact that she would never again hear that voice saying anything that she hadn’t heard from a recording she had already played a thousand times.

“When will it be ready?” was all she could manage.

Twilight beamed as she opened a desk drawer. “It already is! What I showed you was the proof-of-concept. This is the working model. It even has Bluetooth!”

She pulled out Sunset’s journal and showed it to Wallflower, who saw that its back cover had been replaced by a sleeker-looking version of the rectangle of glass and plastic she had seen earlier. Twilight then took something out of her coat pocket and handed it to her. She recognized it as her phone only after she took it and let it sit heavy in her palm.

“It’s why security took so long! Had to give me enough time to get the surprise ready. Had to jailbreak your phone too, so I could sideload the app we wrote. Sorry about that!”

Wallflower was hardly listening. All she could focus on was what was flashing on the screen, and how absurdly mundane it looked for all that it represented.

Call incoming: Sunset Shimmer.

Wallflower accepted the call and brought her phone to her ear, more muscle memory than anything. Time seemed to slow down. Her mind raced to steel herself. To lower her expectations. To make sure that whatever came over the phone next would not leave her a sobbing mess in the middle of Twilight’s office. It was all for nothing.

“Wally? Can you hear me?”