Dystopia

by LuminousRabbit

Prologue: History

At first it was just Twilight. Twilight Sparkle was her name, and after a time her name was known to everypony in Equestria. She was quite an extraordinary pony; a unicorn, in fact. The most unusual and extraordinary thing about her was her special talent.

Sparkle had a talent for magic. At first it was just the rudimentary stuff, the kind of thing any unicorn can do these days, thanks to her. Then she progressed, merging science and magic, closing the rift between the two to create magic that was available to anyone. She put it in clothes, tools, books, anything you could imagine.

She became famous, of course. Things like this, such incredible technological advancements do not just go unnoticed, even in a primitive society like that where the passing of news was slow and unreliable.

But Twilight Sparkle soon fixed that, with the creation of the Interface. The Interface was a virtual system that anypony could connect to, anywhere in Equestria. It was extremely limited, of course, but soon grew to become an Equestria-wide phenomenon that shocked the scientists and politicians to no end.

Sparkle's Interface became the most widely used method of communication within as little as twenty years. The amount of information contained in Twilight's databases grew and grew, never stopping. Anypony could add to it, anypony could talk to anypony else. It was a revolution like no other.

Then of course came the corruption. The Interface was almost 85% junk and a measly 15% solid information, and the percentage of information was dropping by the minute. But Sparkle was not the sort of pony to give up without a fight, and boy, did she give one.

It took Sparkle and her team five whole years to make a decision. But finally they found the solution. The Interface itself was making Twilight Sparkle alone 150 000 000 bits a year, with her team's inner circle (five ponies and a dragon) 70 000 000 bits a year between them, and all her outer circle (32 ponies, 12 griffins and 3 dragons) earned about 1 000 000 bits each. It was incredible profit, and Sparkle could have shut down the Interface then and there, with enough bits to live her entire life in comfort.

But she didn't. What she did do caused a tremendous uproar, but there weren't nearly as many protests as if she had shut down the entire thing completely. So, giving Equestria three month's warning, Twilight Sparkle deleted all the data from the Interface.

Then she rebuilt it. Slower this time, but with no more room for the faults she had encountered before. Twilight tasked 1 000 ponies with the job of moderating the information that was being added to the Interface. It was slow going, but eventually they managed to set it all up automatically. Nopony really knows how they did it, but after a while everything that a pony applied to put on the Interface was either accepted or rejected - with no questions asked. It had finally made it a safe, and fully automatic system.

Meanwhile, with funding streaming in from all her successes, Sparkle made herself even more famous by introducing programs for foals to help them with their respective genetic trade - flying, magic or strength. She got together some of the finest of all three pony races and together they started a course that could help a foal who was having trouble with the latter.

Soon enough, these programs were available in every Equestrian classroom there was. And they expanded, too. Not only to the basics, but to finer, more specialised things like making fudge brownies or trigonometry. These meant that each foal in a class could be studying something different, depending on what they wanted to do in later life. It changed the education system for the better, just as the Interface and genetic enhancements changed Equestria for the better.

Equestria was changing. It wasn't just the Interface, it was the magic that was everywhere, guiding those who couldn't use it and bettering those who could. It gave the population a freedom - the kind they'd never had before.

The freedom it gave was that to be absolutely whatever you wanted. Earth ponies flew in the skies, pegasi weilded magic, unicorns had the strength they wanted. All three races were finally equal in every aspect, simply because they wished it to be so. If an earth pony wanted a career in cloud-moving or weather management, he could have it. If a unicorn desired to work on a farm, she could make her dream come true.

There were no limits in this new age of discovery.

But it was short-lived. Twilight Sparkle was getting old, and age was the one thing she did not have a cure for. Perhaps she did not want to find a cure for it, we shall never know. Some things are best left undiscovered. Anyway, after another few years, she died, leaving her secrets and mysteries with no heir.

But she didn't leave her company and technology with no heir. Sometime along her journey, Princess Celestia told Twilight that she had nothing left to teach her, and that some of Twilight's discoveries had surpassed anything she was capable of.

A few years later, Twilight took a student herself. He was a colt, originally a pegasus pony as far as the records go, but with a passion for magic and discovery, just like Sparkle herself. Twilight Sparkle taught him, as Princess Celestia had taught her, magic and astronomy and friendship and harmony and everything else under the sun and moon.

The colt, after Twilight had died, took over everything she owned and kept it working, like she had before him. And like her, he continued to discover.

That's where I come in. No, I'm not that colt, far from it. I'm the fifth pony to take the title of "Faithful Student" since Twilight herself. My name is Aurora Aura, and I'm also the first unicorn to take it, ever since Twilight, not that it matters. All the Faithful Students weilded magic anyway. But mine is more pure than theirs was, being straight from a horn.

The faithful students aren't taught by Celestia any more, they're taught by the previous faithful student. My teacher's name is called Auburn Blaze. She's a pegasus pony, and she's taught me everything she knows. When I'm not learning from her, I read books, search the Interface, and lurk around the database, scaring the living daylights out of everypony who works there by jumping out at them from unexpected places.

I'm not a child, but I'm still treated as one. It doesn't matter though. Underneath everthing that everypony sees, I'm a very smart pony. And I can see that there's something very wrong with Equestria.

Comments

[KartalTheWriter]

Very very interesting concept, there. I'm still not exactly sure "what" this Interface is, but it sounds somewhat like virtual reality. I'll just have to read more...