First Contact
“Celestia, I think I've got it!” Twilight yelled excitedly.
“Got what?” she said, a little bit frustrated since she'd been conjuring up her mental list of things to do for the day. “I have a castle to run, please keep it quick.”
“So, you know about those bipedal creatures I talked to you about right. All those voices I heard from the mirror portal?”
“Yes. And please hurry. I've got a meeting to go to five minutes ago.”
Twilight's eyes widened in excitement, her voice speeding up naturally, trying to fit in as much about her findings as she could in the short time she would have Celestia's attention for the day. “At first, I could only see silhouettes, shadows of these creatures, but now I'm hearing voices! Hours, I spent hours trying to figure out what the problem was with my magical spell, so I cast that probing one again just to get a feel for the otherworldly climates. And I found something different! I think it's some kind of gateway!”
“To what?” Celestia said, struggling to keep up with her. “What were we probing in the first place?”
“You don't remember operation Fiery Eclair? While I was on break, I fiddled around with that spell we invented and came across some interference.”
Celestia's eyebrows perked up. “Fiery Eclair went down in flames after our intern went mad trying to keep up with our coffee addictions.”
Twilight winced. “Please don't remind me, I still kinda feel bad about that. But just let me get it all out there before I lose you for the rest of your day. Okay? That interference, I managed to feel it because it shocked me. What is it called when you rub your fur on a blanket, and get shocked after touching metal?”
“Static?”
“Yes! It was some kind of static! Floating around in the aether. And back when operation Fiery Eclair was still a go, and we had our expendable interns, I could've sworn it didn't exist before!”
The sun princess gasped. “You don't mean-”
“I do mean! They're trying to contact us! Or at the very least, something changed about the way these bipedal creatures interact to make it easier for us to contact them. I did some versatile magic codifying to identify the patterns in this static, and it definitely looks like communication data. A small subset of that data makes sounds if you process it right.”
“You can actually hear them?!”
“Well, kinda. A lot of it's a bit muddled so it's kind of hard to hear.”
Celestia had to shake her head and tear herself away from the conversation. As she trotted off, she yelled out to Twilight. “Whatever you're working on that isn't related to Fiery Eclair, stop it. I need you on this ASAP. Hire as many interns you need to. If they have misgivings, give them the 'ol shortcut to nobility speech. I need contact with whatever it is that's out there. I can smell the sweet international collaboration money with the Griffon Tinker Institute from a mile away.”
Twilight tried to think of something witty to end the conversation. “The Griffons hate everybody, maybe they'll like us more after this.”
Celestia, stopped for a moment before rounding the hallway corner. “Don't count on it.” She made to step forward, but added. “Godspeed.”
Twilight couldn't bring herself to make the necessary changes to the spell she'd used to pick up the electrical interference. It wasn't so much that she was afraid of messing something up. It had more to do with the fact that she had no idea where to start.
It was a very complicated spell, and to suddenly allow for communication on her end would require a rework at the very core of what she created. She couldn't just scrap the whole thing either, since it had taken months to make only a small portion of the amalgamation that she could hardly consider a professional product.
The whole conjurance held itself together on stitches, and if she so much as pulled one of them, everything would fizzle out, and she'd have to find new paths for all the luminoso subroutines.
She sighed, thought about what to do for a bit longer, then decided to go against her better judgement and hack this son-of-a-gun into something halfway workable.
After closing her eyes, Twilight reached into the depths of her mind and rooted around for one of the many magical hooks bumping against her horn, labeled with various emotional impressions from absolutely terrified to more than slightly aroused. It took some time due to the clutter, since she'd been busy trying to demystify some of her less important pet projects earlier, but she eventually found the hook with extreme frustration attached to it.
“Good memories, Twilight. Good memories,” she mumbled to herself, trying to quell the side effects of latching onto that particularly potent hook. She rubbed her temples determinedly. “Remember how much fun you had?”
And with that she dived in, pulling at sparkle fragments here, re-routing luminoso, while considering the disastrous design decisions she'd been committing as she finished hack job after hack job to get at least a part of the functionality working. A feedback loop buzzed her for a moment and she almost lost her cool right then and there.
Calmly, she cut it and continued her work, grunting with satisfaction occasionally when her circuit checker spells decided to cut in with a nice peaceful chime letting her know that some parts of the spell were indeed starting to come into fruition just as she'd imagined. Of course, with every chime came the low disapproving chimes from the circuit spells checking other parts of the spell, quite angry that they'd been stirred up like a nest of hornets.
She had to occasionally turn them off since she'd set some of them to repeat every five seconds. No doubt for good reason way back when she'd been up for three days straight berating the interns because they couldn't walk across the city five times for a good cup of coffee since the espresso machine in the palace had gone kaput.
Which made her wince a little bit because Tipper Triple had been a nice stallion to hang out with minus his inability to get coffee in traveling salesman optimal times.
He'd also been a very good brick wall to talk to, in order to get her thoughts straight.
Twilight considered for a moment that she might in fact be one of the bad guys all the ponies kept going on about, but got distracted by another chime indicating that she'd done a good job. Or that she'd done a good job minus some obscure pieces of logic she'd forgotten to account for.
Oh the joys of demystifying.
Which hopefully, she'd never have to do, but it always became necessary eventually, especially for large projects like these, as much as she liked to quintuple check her work. No matter how many times you've looked at something, there's always some other way to think about the problem that you aren't thinking about at the moment. So when future you picks up the reigns with a fresh new perspective, they begin to hate you.
That didn't matter, though, since the spell continued to form itself fairly well under her intense gaze. Celestia hadn't exactly specified a time 'till completion, so as long as she just kept working for the rest of the day and allotted herself the three hours a day necessary to make sure that she didn't die, things would be fine.
Her hooves occasionally twitched from the brain overload as she visualized structures in the part of her brain usually used to decide whether or not she was feeling Magicrowaveable noodles for dinner tonight.
But her plans immediately came to a halt when a particularly twitchy and bedraggled Celestia slammed the door open behind her. Which could only mean one thing.
Slowly, cautiously, Celestia spoke up in a quiet tone so that Twilight wouldn't immediately lose it when she heard what the princess had to say. “Twilight.”
Twilight froze.
“Twilight? Don't shoot the messenger, but it isn't good news.”
“What?” the purple pony asked, her voice rising.
Celestia waited a moment for Twilight to untangle herself from the spell-in-progress.
“What?” Twilight asked, in control again.
“We've got a deadline. And before you say anything, I don't want you to kill yourself trying to meet it. I might've accidentally let the news about the electrical interference slip with the Griffon Tinker Institute, and they want you to demo whatever you can get done in the next three days.”
“Okay,” Twilight said, blood rushing to her cheeks. Her eyes lit up with a mixture of excitement and anger. The fur on her neck stood on end while cold feelings of dread seeped into her spine. All while she stood there pondering whether or not it was possible to OD on coffee and whether or not it would be a better way to go out than to come up with something worth presenting with the mess of a spell she still had lying in her brain.
“Okay,” Twilight said.
It hadn't occurred to Twilight in the three days previous to her demo that she was, in fact, allowed to have limits. Instead she made herself into a tenuous glass cannon of addled nerves and sleep deprivation.
It hadn't been fun, certainly, but she'd done it. She'd made contact with an other-dimensional species.
Granted, it remained very one sided. Her spell hadn't been built for two way communications yet, but Twilight had designed it such that this feature wouldn't be too difficult to add on later. What mattered was the fact that it worked most of the time and that she'd been able to hear some of the voices for herself.
The sounds coming out of the electrical field were still gibberish, but they appeared to have structure. She'd been able to pinpoint various cases of changing inflection in the speech she heard to verify her hunch that she simply didn't understand the language of these creatures yet, and hopefully, that would be enough for the Griffons tomorrow.
So, with nothing but a finished product, and zero actual preparation for the demo. Twilight found herself drifting into a fitful, nauseating sleep.
Four hours later, she woke up slightly stunned and even more tense than yesterday. Her mind tried to compensate for the drowsiness, and as a result pushed her further over the edge with a constant rush of adrenaline that made it hard for her to think properly. If a pony so much as sneezed behind her, she might hit them out of reflex.
Celestia's voice wafted from behind her in soothing and caressing arcs. “Are you ready?”
Twilight turned around and looked at her with wild eyes. Briefly, she broke eye contact, but immediately looked at Celestia again. Her head pounded with the onset of a migrane. For the past three minutes she'd been doing everything in her power to forget about the demo until she had her first cup of coffee. She had to get her hands on that perfect drug before she'd be able to pull her complicated life back together. And Celestia just had to go and remind her before...
“Twilight. You didn't push yourself too hard did you?”
“Yes. Wait.” Twilight facehooved. “Yes to the question before, no to the other one.”
A frown crossed her face for a second, but it got instantly replaced by a look of shock. “You haven't had your coffee yet.”
“If I'll just, scoot on over past you.” Twilight said as she stumbled her way past Celestia.
“I'm so sorry.”
“It's. Uhhhhh. Everything's fine.”
Celestia worriedly looked after Twilight as the purple pony slowly made her way down the hallway to the break room.
As Celestia sat in the Griffon Tinker Institute lecture hall, she steeled herself for the possibility that Twilight had dropped dead on the way to the presentation hall. Goddess knows that in the thousands of years during her rule, it would have to happen eventually. She began playing the events out in her head. Nervously stuttering to the white-haired Griffin profs about the fact that she liked to run her mouth and that sometimes she made promises she couldn't keep.
Then afterwards, a full scale investigation under the scrutiny of the Palace Workplace Union. Questions asked about why she'd been so irresponsible, giving her students impossible tasks and expecting them to deliver. Organized ponies had never been able to overpower her political prowess, but today could be the day. It had to happen eventually after all.
Thankfully, Celestia didn't have to worry about an inevitable overthrow since Twilight had just walked through the door.
Her fur was brushed, mane slicked to the side with gel. Somehow, Twilight had found it in herself salvage the rest of her sanity for a final push through a demo under the scrupulous glares to be set upon her by the arrogant Griffin professors.
With shaky sleep-deprived hooves, Twilight set her hastily scrawled note cards on the podium at the center of the classroom. One of the Griffons coughed, and for an Equestria shattering moment, Twilight felt the onset of a panic attack before she immediately quelled it. Tendrils of worry clumsily broken off at their root, a charred psyche left in their ruins.
“So,” Twilight said. “I've got a spell you might find yourself interested in.”
The Griffons remained silent. No workplace humor to lighten the mood. Nothing to work off of.
“It doesn't...exactly have visual capabilities yet, but I believe I've managed to gain auditory feedback from otherworldly beings. I first found out about this feedback through the use of a previous iteration of this spell, under an operation that is classified to the Equestrian Palace.”
Immediately, one of the Griffons spoke up. “Why don't you have visual capabilities yet?”
Twilight sighed. “It is a lot more work than it looks like. There are enough electrical signals out there to indicate the existence of something visual. But to actually decrypt these mysterious messages into a format that we'd recognize would take a significant amount of effort.”
The Griffon that spoke, nodded sagely. “I understand just as well as you how hard these things can be. Good point.”
The purple pony did everything she could to come up with a convincing smile for the Griffon. It came out a little half-cocked, but seemed to work well enough. The mood in the lecture hall lightened up considerably.
Twilight sighed again, but this time, she felt more relaxed as a result. “But, I think with enough resources,” she paused and looked as Celestia, “as well as time, we could come up with a solution that you'd be satisfied with.”
“Excellent!” One of the Griffons in the back exclaimed. “We've talked extensively about contact with otherworldly beings, and we have reason to believe that creatures of such an odd nature would have a significant amount to contribute to our society.”
Another old Griffon spoke up against him. “There are dangers to consider too.”
“Yes, yes.” The excited griffon said. “We have to consider that too. Do you know of a way we could observe them, without them observing us?”
Twilight's eyes lit up. “That's pretty much the basic premise of what we're trying to explore. All of the feedback I'm receiving is stuff that's been transmitted outward to whoever wants to intercept it. No need to contact them if we don't feel comfortable.” She shivered a little at that thought. Lonely creatures looking for something else to interact with. Unrequited love.
The grumpy gray old Griffon glanced downward in acquiescence. “Okay. It's okay by me then.”
A younger Griffon shrugged with his copper colored shoulders. “Naturally, we'd have to sort out the details, but the premise feels sane.”
Feelings of comradery washed over Twilight. Such a young Griffon, in an important position just like her. “And I'd be glad to work with each and every one of you to make sure that your needs are met.”
The old Griffon spoke up again. “However, you said that you figured out how to receive auditory signals. Could you show us an example?”
A bit of frustration jolted through Twilight, she would have gotten to that part if they hadn't been railroading the presentation. “Sure thing.” Hurriedly, she fished around in her brain for the hook that felt like death-by-overwork and found it immediately. The spell had been designed to practically run itself once she got it started.
Twilight breathed sharply and held her breath. White light crackled from her horn, and a vague amobia of purple light hovered above her.
Voices from an impassible wall of existence filtered through. Deep utterances cut out intermittently by clucking sounds.