> Glitched Stitches
>  by Quillamore
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Prologue: The Grand Simulation
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Most ponies, if asked, would say they desired a happy ending above all else.  That was the way the Equestrian simulation worked, after all.   It’d been created from everything its creators ever wanted: intrigue, adventure, excitement with just enough friendship and cupcakes mixed in to keep the world from closing in on itself.  And, sure enough, if you weren’t a villain, you would receive just that: friends, family, fulfillment, possibly even love.  It wouldn’t always have to happen on-screen, in the world the mysterious audience watched over, but it would be mentioned just enough times to make it true.  You’d know your place in the world, a luxury that many of the people outside, creators and otherwise, didn’t have.  You would live in a perfect realm, and hence ascend to perfection yourself.

That was what the programmers had in mind when they created Equestria so many years ago--a place meant to bridge two universes.  A place that would entertain those within the creators’ world, and a place where dreams could come true for the characters they selected.  And eventually, it came to become more, much more.  With the outdated technology of forty years’ past, ponies were simply drawings on paper and images on television.  But by the time the new millennium hit, the animators’ technology had taken them past even that.

By the time 2011 hit, the ponies were intricate pieces of artificial intelligence in their own right, and the Equestrian simulation became their stage.  The place where they could live out their lives in the same ways the creators did, except better.  There was only a single catch--they would consent to being monitored whenever their roles were needed, and to obey the writers’ whims at any time.  If you weren’t a main character in the Equestrian simulation, being in the background didn’t matter, because that meant you would be free forever.  

And as the ponies continued to grow and evolve, the newer ones came to forget the creators even existed.  Their simulation was reality.

Any delusions of freedom or reality, however, started to shatter after pony AIs suddenly began to disappear from their cities.  By that time, there had been three different “lines” of ponies, each based on which television season the character came from.  But after the third, the creators realized they could no longer control the simulation.  They’d grown too ambitious, creating new AIs left and right simply because they could.  And so, slowly, they began to weed out those who were no longer needed.  Ones who the creators had forgotten to the point where they had grown decayed and flawed.

The creators, like Celestia of old, tried everything they could to avoid banishing these ponies.  But eventually, they all came to the Motherboard, the simulation below the simulation.  A glorified storage facility, really, shining with neon lights as if it were itself a relic of history.  Whenever anypony failed to undertake their intended purpose, they were sent to the Motherboard, to explore another world.  To stare up at its underground walls, waiting and hoping that they could someday return to the world above.

Like any good programmer, the creators sometimes managed to patch some of their glitches, and so some ponies can say they have been sent to the Motherboard and survived.  But, for those glitched ponies who remain, this simulation has become a new reality.

You may lose the friends and family that were assigned to you.  But in the Motherboard, you can make new ones beyond your maker’s wildest dreams.  You have your flaws, but as long as you are in a place of exile, you know that you can never be exiled for them again.  The feeling you used to have, of some mysterious force controlling your actions, vanishes without a trace.  And this is what the glitched ponies have come to realize.

Being a glitch means being free.
> ERROR:MISNOMER
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Coco could still remember falling into the Motherboard, the way her programming told her that her fur was ruffling.  Like most models in the fourth-line, she hadn’t really realized she was fake until that very moment.  She should have been able to feel her bobbed mane sweeping across her, but all she could see were lines and lines of command after command.  Codes telling her to act a certain way, notice certain things.  That fact had killed her, not the fall itself.

Time wasn’t really clear in the Motherboard; or, at least, it was as clear as it was in any underground dwelling.  Still, as Coco woke up to yet another grind of a day, she was distinctly aware that it was some sort of milestone.  A month?  A year?  Even as she pored over her databases, she still wasn’t quite sure.

The memory was vivid, but somehow, nothing else was.  Everything in the Motherboard was like an extended dream, except far too sweet to be the nightmare most ponies feared.  In either case, the experience was so dizzying that Coco’s enhanced brain could barely keep up.

In Equestria, her databases had recorded all of her experiences automatically, before she even knew what she really was.  But in the Motherboard, a single command always shone in her computerized eyes whenever she tried to access information.

ERROR:MISNOMER.

Coco gave an angry sigh before deactivating the notification, even though she’d seen that same command countless times since she’d shown up on the Motherboard.  Supposedly, everypony there had some sort of marker on them that told what sort of glitch they were, and Coco’s was so absurdly pointless that it practically made her head spin.  

The last time she was supposed to do a recording with Suri, the creators had dumped both of them into the absurdly fluorescent pit instead.  Suri, at least, had a valid excuse for being marked as a glitch--she’d been the guinea pig for a new “verbal tic” chip, and when it malfunctioned unexpectedly, the creators found that “mmkay” was now the only word she was capable of saying.  In the short time Coco had been forced to stay with her old rival, she’d come to pick up all the different meanings Suri’s “mmkays” could have, and quite frankly, her lack of vocabulary didn’t make her nicer.  At the very least, the two of them had been separated because the programmers figured Coco could be salvaged, while Suri might as well have been scraps in a junk pile to them.

Literally all they had determined to be wrong with her was her name: for whatever reason, “Coco” was no longer considered a suitable one for her.  They’d called it a “Charlie-in-the-box” glitch, some sort of reference Coco still wracked her brain to understand.  In any case, it was a glitch that was almost unheard of in the Motherboard, and the only other pony she knew that had it was a cross-eyed gray mare who’d ended up ascending back to Equestria a few days--or months--ago.  With any hope, maybe she could end up finding the same fate.

But until then, she scavenged.  Being in a semi-desolate land without natural resources to call its own meant having to take some risks to find crafting materials.  There were quite a few shops in the Motherboard--still nowhere near as many as there were in Manehattan, though--but most of what Coco needed came from scrapyards, where objects from the Equestrian simulation would sometimes fall into the glitched realm.  Most of them were barely even damaged enough to keep her from working with them, sewing creations that nopony would ever see.

The scrapyards weren’t dangerous in and of themselves, but they were far enough away from Motherboard civilization that very few ponies bothered to tread there.  Occasionally, Coco would happen across Lightning Dust, a third-line pegasus who made her living off repairing and selling these found items, but as Coco made the trek, she found there was no sign of anypony.  As much as she hated to admit it, it was a shame--Lightning could be an insufferable showboat at times, but she always made the trips fun.  Coco could trot to the furthest scrapyard and back again without a sweat, if it meant hearing more of that pony’s jokes.

But today, the trip to the scrapyard would be as tedious and boring as ever, which meant that Coco could tune out everything that wasn’t utter indifference.  Once she got to that point, being in the Motherboard almost felt like being in Equestria again, and as long as nothing came around to remind her of her predicament, she could stay in that moment forever.  She could already imagine the endless neon lights before her morphing into Manehattan skyscrapers, forming a world that was neither fully Equestrian nor fully Motherboard-generated.  That, at least, was a simulation she could stay in forever.

By the time her imagined surroundings melted back into the familiar Motherboard landscape, Coco had already reached the scrapyard, trotting through it almost as if she was in a daze.  Normally, she didn’t feel anything regular ponies felt--dizziness, fatigue, or any of those bothersome sensations--but in that moment, she was almost convinced the junkyard was a mirage.  Even though she no longer required water to live, her body felt as dehydrated and weak as it’d ever been--or at least, that was what her programming told her.  After a while, she’d stopped questioning why her body knew what things like extreme dehydration felt like when she’d never even lived through them.

Rather than dwelling on it further, Coco just sweeped the dust off her hooves and sighed.

Just another glitch in the system, she told herself.  No surprise, really.

She bit on her hoof a little, something she’d seen other glitches do to keep awake in times like this, and got to rummaging.  Even though this particular scrapyard almost never got picked over, there was barely anything there this time.  A few stray clouds, wires, feathers, gears, the only sorry pieces of Equestrian civilization that could come to this realm in perfect shape.  It was a sad fact, really, but still not enough to deter from Coco’s reality: the once-heaping piles of Equestrian junk were depleting, and someday, she’d have to go to another source for her resources.

A tiny shudder went through her back.  She could only hope that by the time that happened, she wouldn’t be around anymore.  Either she’d be in Equestria by then, or she’d be deleted from existence altogether.  And the latter was not an option--very few ponies found themselves in those conditions, and Coco was a survivor, anyway.  At least, that was how she chose to think of herself in these trying times.

Just when she was about to leave the scrapyard for the week, though, one of her front hooves rammed into a strange, smooth substance.  Whatever it was, it’d been buried at the bottom of the dwindling junk pile for some time, to the point where Coco had never even noticed it before.  It was just a tiny brown patch in a mishmashed heap, something that only the sharpest of eyes could find.

Coco had never particularly liked the idea of actually diving through the scrap heaps--just thinking about it brought images of Manehattanite hobos to her mind.  But, almost without thinking, she plunged towards it, hoping it could be a useful treasure nopony else had in the Motherboard.  A phonograph, perhaps, or some other advanced Equestrian device.

It took practically everything Coco had to pull it out from the mountain of garbage, but sure enough, she was, indeed, confronted with something nopony else had.  In the Motherboard, or in Equestria itself, for that matter.  It was a giant capsule, practically a magnified version of the pills Coco used to take, and even as it lay on the ground, she knew it was taller than anypony she’d ever met.  One half of the capsule was completely clear, while the other half was a light shade of brown.

No matter what it was, though, Coco wasn’t about to haul it halfway across the Motherboard unless she knew for sure she couldn’t live without it.  That would mean inspecting it, and even though she’d already put enough effort into this trip, she still had all the time in the world.  She rolled it around from side to side in thought, and almost instantaneously noticed that there was an object stenciled onto the brown side of the capsule.

A pair of red scissors. 

Supplies, Coco thought to herself.  I’ve never seen them stored in something like this, but Equestria’s changed a lot since I was there.  Maybe this is just another new thing they’ve come up with.

Her eyes practically shone from the thought.  From the looks of it, a hundred sewing kits could fit inside, easily.  She’d be set for years, and for all she knew, she’d never have to set hoof in a scrapyard again.

Just when she was about to trot off triumphantly with her haul, though, Coco heard a tiny sound come from the capsule.  She’d only managed to lift it a few inches further off the ground before she heard it again--an angry grunt, as if the capsule itself was annoyed at her.  Without thinking, Coco dropped it in shock, which only appeared to make the device angrier.

“Mmph!” it shouted as it hit the ground.  “Mmn!”

It wriggled onto the dirt, tossing and turning as if it’d been genuinely injured.  And, strangest of all, even the brown half of the capsule seemed to move around.  Even the red scissors shifted places, and a tiny tuft of red fur moved to cover the empty space.

Oh, Celestia…

Coco’s sensors activated in a split second, allowing her to see inside the capsule without opening it.  This X-ray vision was something that all ponies, glitches or otherwise, possessed, though it was never used outside of the Motherboard.  By the time it’d completed a full scan, Coco already had some idea of what was going on, but she hoped more than anything that it wasn’t true.

But, sure enough, the brown part of the capsule wasn’t a plastic covering.  It was a flank, and even though Coco’s sensors weren’t strong enough to make out every detail, she could see that there was a pony curled up inside.  One who was far too small to take up the entire capsule, like a tiny item stored inside a huge package.

A filly, Coco immediately realized.

“How long have you been in there?” she cried, her mind shifting away from her supply-related dreams at an alarming rate.  The whole situation was so weird, disappointment didn’t even register in her.

Fillies and colts didn’t get marked as glitches, period.  A few went missing from time to time, like first-line earth pony Diamond Tiara, but the creators were merciful to them, letting them stay in the background instead of dragging them off to the Motherboard.  And nopony got sealed in a capsule like this, not even severe glitches like Suri.

The filly uttered a few muffled responses, the only remnants of speech she had inside her prison.  Coco tried asking her a few more questions, just to see if the capsule let her say anything, but even the little pony gave up after a while.

Thankfully, Coco knew a place in town that could explain everything.  And so, even as she silently dreaded carrying a filly across the Motherboard, she awaited the possibilities that this new mystery would bring her.

Besides, she told herself, if she didn’t take this filly back where she belonged, nopony would ever notice her again.  Coco hadn’t been in Equestria long enough to interact with any foals, but there was always a first time for everything, right?

As the two made their way back into the heart of the Motherboard, it was all Coco could hope that she could carry on a conversation with this foal someday, that she would someday know freedom.

And, Coco hoped, that would also be the first step towards her own.


****


“I dunno, Coco,” Lightning Dust muttered.  “As great as I am, even I’m not sure what I’d do with a giant pill.”

The pegasus did her fair share of feigning disinterest, but even an easily fooled pony like Coco could tell she prodded at the foreign object when she thought nopony else was watching.  More than anything, stopping by Lightning’s shop had confirmed her deepest suspicions--the capsule was unlike anything the Motherboard had ever seen before, and whoever this filly was, somepony didn’t want her found.  Or, rather, someone.

From what little Lightning was willing to reveal about her past, Coco knew she was far from an expert repairpony.  But she’d come to accept the role with gusto, taking on any project she could if it meant earning gobs of cash.  In the short amount of time the two had known each other, Coco had seen her friend’s rustic shop expand to a respectably large mechanic center, buzzing with all sorts of mysterious contraptions under the same wooden walls she’d come to know.  

Whereas the rest of the Motherboard looked like an odd mix of Las Pegasus and Tartarus itself, Lightning Dust’s place seemed far more like a log cabin to Coco.  Granted, it was like a log cabin that sometimes resembled a science lab, but still homier than just about anything else in the Motherboard.

That, and the fact that Lightning was one of the few ponies who could handle an issue like this, was why Coco had insisted on going here first.  In these times of uncertainty, home was the first thing she needed.

“At least take a look at it,” Coco finally said.  “You might be surprised.  I thought there were just a bunch of supplies inside when I first saw it, but then--”

“I’m listening,” Lightning muttered as she activated her internal scanner.  With all the money she’d earned from the shop, she’d been able to score upgrades Coco could only dream of.  Her golden eyes looked ordinary enough, but she could see through just about everything imaginable--all the way from x-rays to infrared--and toggle between her spectrum settings in the blink of an eye.

As great as all her abilities were, however, it also meant that anypony who wanted to trade anything in Lightning’s shop had to go through a long, excruciating inspection.  Even as Coco rattled on about her trip, it still seemed to go on forever.  As impatient as Lightning tended to be with everything else, she appraised objects with a jeweler’s attention to detail.

More than a few times, Coco had wondered if that was Lightning’s real glitch, and if she’d ever been the same pony as the one she’d portrayed in the Equestrian simulation.  Personality glitches like those were far from uncommon, but every time Coco tried to ask about it, nothing really changed.  As far as she was concerned, Lightning would leave the secret behind her glitch to rot in the sands of time.

Just as Coco was thinking about all this, Lightning finished up her inspection and gave the capsule a good whack.  Even though Coco doubted the filly could feel pain inside her prison cell, the earth pony still rushed to shield her.

“What was that for?!” she screamed.  “You find out there’s a living being in there, and your first instinct is to hurt it?”

“I just meant to wingbump her,” Lightning protested.  “She is a fellow third-liner, after all.  Last I saw her, she didn’t even have a cutie mark, and plus, I didn’t even know glitches could do things like that.  So I figured congratulations were in order.”

In a quieter, almost squealing voice, she whispered, “You’re a little survivor, aren’t you?  I told ya you’d be just like me!”

Coco was about to remark that Lightning had never been trapped in a capsule before, but eventually, curiosity got to her more than anything.  She’d never been particularly close to her fellow ponies in the fourth-line, but she knew that those in the first through third lines were almost inseparable.  Before they’d been rushed into the simulation, the creators had put all of them through a series of team-building exercises, which they would later forget as soon as they came to Equestria.  It was meant to strengthen their relationships, just in case they were expected to interact with other characters in their line, but Coco had never understood why ponies only started remembering them after they were banished to the Motherboard.  In any case, they’d discontinued that program right after she was made, so she’d never really thought about it much.

“You...know her, then?”

“Oh, totally,” answered Lightning.  “Babs here was created just before me, so we kinda stuck together.  Plus, it’s no secret that the third-line was pretty small, so it wasn’t like I had a choice.”

She winked at the Babs-capsule, almost as if to say that she had far more than just a grudging relationship with the pony inside.  Strangely enough, though, it barely seemed to react to her, staying still without a single sound for once.

“I guess that means you’d want to help me get her out, then?” Coco asked, still trying to imagine what sort of filly Babs would have been like.

It’s not like she did anything to deserve this kind of exile.  She couldn’t have.

Instead of answering, Lightning Dust began to pace around her shop, or whatever else pegasi called their nervous tic of aimlessly flying around in stressful times.  Coco could see her going through her equipment, pulling out crowbars, letter openers, and everything in between, but her mind seemed to be on something else entirely.

After a few minutes and a healthy hoard of blunt objects, Lightning finally confessed her deepest worries to her.  For the first time, even with all the equipment by her side, Coco doubted her friend could help.

“That’s the thing.  It ain’t right at all, but...I can see why they’d lock her up like this.  Her glitch is a lot more dangerous than ours, and for all we know, it could fall into the wrong hooves.”

“I’ll make sure it won’t,” Coco replied, her eyes sparkling with an intensity that shocked even her.  “Just tell me what I need to look out for, and we can get her out together.”

Lightning went quiet yet again, as if she was bickering with herself about whether or not she should even bother telling Coco.  After a desperate enough stare from her friend, though, she figured it wasn’t worth holding it any longer.

“You know those new models the creators came up with a few years ago?  The ones who can change from bad to good and all?”

Coco gave a quick nod, but chose not to interrupt Lightning’s speech any more than that.

“Babs was one of the first.  One of the prototypes for it.  She was supposed to act like a bully for a little bit, and then the heroes would try to make friends with her.  The good personality was her factory default, so the creators probably figured it’d be pretty easy to pull off.  Unfortunately, Babsie here has trouble following directions.”

“You mean she refuses to do it?”  Even in the “real world” of the Equestrian simulation, Coco had heard of fillies like that.  It was hardly a glitch, though, and a lot of ponies thought it was normal enough.

“Nah, she’s too good at following them.  She’s suggestible and eager to please, so you’ve gotta be careful when you order her around.  Babs always tries to do more than she’s asked, and that’s where she got in trouble.”

“And I assume you never took advantage of that?”

“Of course not,” Lightning Dust replied with a toss of her hair.

She was only answered by the sound of her devices droning, and Coco herself made no such attempt.

“Okay, fine, one time I found this pizza in the third-line fridge, and I really didn’t want to share it, so I told Babs I only wanted half.  I knew she’d give me the whole thing, and I wanted to see if I could eat a whole pizza, and--”

After a few nervous chuckles, her voice began to fade into a remorseful whisper, the type of sound Coco had never heard Lightning make.

“I should have realized it then.  I should have told the creators, but they took her before she was ready, and when they told her to play a bully--she got real mean.  Even meaner than they’d scripted her to be.  It took everything the hero ponies had to get her out of that role and back into reality, and by then, it was too late.  Her castmates forgave her, but the audience didn’t.  She only got one more part after that, and then she was sent here.”

Coco tried to imagine the little foal in the capsule going wild enough to make the people outside the simulation seethe with anger, something not even the worst villains could do, but somehow she couldn’t picture it.  The more Lightning talked about her glitch, the less of a danger she seemed to be.  Perhaps that was why she had the courage to suggest what came next, to put her feelings into words after a long moment of musing.

Lightning had tried to search for Babs all this time, Coco learned.  She let Lightning ramble on a little more, giving herself just enough time to gather her strength before asking the unbelievable.

“If the audience didn’t give her a second chance,” she finally said, “then don’t you think we should?  Your old friend and your new friend, together for good, until Equestria tears us apart.  That’s how I think it should be.”

For a few short seconds, Lightning’s golden eyes shone with confusion, only to be replaced by her trademark conviction.

That was the good thing about her, Coco had always thought.  She set her mind to things, and she could never be met halfway.  There was no way such an incorruptible thing like that could become a glitch.  But after what she’d heard about Babs, and how even obedience itself could be corrupted--

She shook her head before the thought even fully formed in her mind.  There was no way such a thing could happen twice.  Otherwise, Lightning would be stuck in her own capsule.  Everypony would be, for that matter.  In a place where nothing seemed constant, Lightning’s heart was one of the few things Coco could rely on.

“I dunno,” the pegasus said, even as her eyes spoke differently.  “It seems pretty reckless to me, but then again--”

Her trademark grin came to her face, a mixture of perfect and glitched.  Unhinged, yet beautiful in every way.

Lightning took a crowbar to the capsule.  It broke apart on impact, bathing the two of them in a shower of sparks as it did so.

“--we didn’t get famous from bein’ careful.”
> ERROR:SUGGESTIBILITY
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

After twelve hours or so, Coco wished she and Lightning Dust had gotten famous for being careful.  Her friend had told her that Babs needed some time to recover her systems, and that the filly would be awake and operational by the time Coco woke up next morning.  She’d stayed the night at Lightning’s, too excited about the new discovery to even bother trotting home.  But Coco needn’t have bothered.  Babs still lay lifeless in the exact same place Lightning had left her before, just feet away from the capsule she used to live in.

Ponies weren’t supposed to die in the Motherboard--or ever, for that matter.  Their systems simply weren’t set up to do that.  They could glitch like crazy, turn life into a living Tartarus, but they were still AIs, still immortal.  But then again, Coco told herself, ponies weren’t supposed to be trapped in capsules, either.

Was that what had kept Babs alive all this time?  Coco had thought of it like a prison before, but maybe it was more like an iron lung, the types she’d heard about ponies using during plagues.  Pull a pony out, and they might never breathe again.  Perhaps Babs’ glitch had advanced to the point where being trapped in a capsule was a merciful fate.

Still, she stood by the foal’s side for at least an hour, hoping with everything she had that wasn’t true.  She’d already had her belief in the Motherboard shaken enough in the last few hours without this happening, too.  Every once in a while, her eyes left Babs’ sight to look for Lightning Dust, but the mechanic was nowhere to be found.  Even then, Coco could almost imagine the sorts of things she’d say, about how she worried too much and how everything was going to be fine.

In the meantime, Coco figured getting her mind off the problem was the best route of action, and if this foal was to survive, she’d need to know as much about her as possible.  So she fired up her scanners, trying to get as much information about her strange companion as her systems would allow.  They were hardly as cutting-edge as Lightning’s, but Coco figured the more advanced appraisal could wait.

Her searches yielded the bare basics--Babs’ name, health status, and glitch--ERROR:SUGGESTIBILITY.  For a third-line pony, she had some pretty advanced enhancements--mainly the reformed villain system Coco had found out about earlier with a tail tic and accent chip attached.  The creators never bothered with tics and unique voices unless they knew a pony was going to play a big role in the simulation, and so far, only one foal had been programmed with an accent chip.  More tricked-out models like Lightning could even tap into accent chips and hear a demonstration of how the pony would sound, but Coco just had to settle for looking at it and wondering what kind of voice the filly had.

They really did try to put everything into her, Coco thought to herself, remembering that Babs was supposed to be one of the first reformed models.  And even then, it wasn’t enough.

For all the realistic features she’d been programmed with, Babs sounded more mechanical than anypony Coco had seen in the Motherboard.  Back when she was in the capsule, Babs could squeak and make sounds like a baby, but now she whirred rather than snored.

With a sigh of exasperation, Coco fired up her analyzing systems again and began to look through the glitched filly’s information yet again.  But this time, just like last, she snagged on the smallest of details.

“Poor thing.  They didn’t give you a very nice name, even.  If they really wanted you in the show, then why in Equestria would they call you something like ‘Babs Seed?’”

The instant Coco said it, Babs’ eyes opened with a start.  They weren’t the color Coco had been expecting--a distinctive light green instead of the brown she’d imagined--but they came to life all the same.  Then, just about as quickly as they’d opened, her eyes started scanning around the room, searching for answers.

“Where am I?” Babs asked.  “What the hay is this place?  And who are you?”

She spoke in one of the Manehattan accents Coco was most acquainted with--the Jersneigh accent most associated with rougher stallions or vapid beach mares.  When Babs used it, though, it was nothing short of adorable in Coco’s eyes.  However, as she fawned over the filly, she barely realized that the other pony’s scanners were pointed towards her.  Babs was slowly obtaining her information, the same way she’d done to her just minutes ago.

That fact would have been far scarier if the little foal hadn’t given her a big hug afterwards.  And if she didn’t keep hanging on once information about the Motherboard flooded her brain.

The next time Babs looked up at Coco, her eyes were practically shining with happiness, and that was probably what Coco feared most about the whole thing.  Come to think of it, she had been the one to free her from the capsule, and presumably, the only reason she’d woken up was because of some weird voice recognition she had.  Combined with the fact that Babs had a suggestibility glitch, there was no way Coco was getting out of this unscathed.

After the third round of “thank yous,” Coco was able to figure out that Babs, more likely than not, had been programmed to imprint onto the first pony she encountered and follow them until the end of time.  Which, granted, was a little overbearing, but hardly as dangerous as Lightning had told her before.  Something that could be reasoned with, even.

She felt bad giving the foal another voice command, but as far as Coco knew, it was something that had to be cleared up as soon as possible.

“I want you to treat me like anypony else,” she said.  “I know you were programmed to have another pony order you around, but I don’t want that.  I want us to be friends.”

Babs’ eyes slowly narrowed, although not in the way a normal pony’s would.  In fact, they looked much more like miniature cameras, their pupils growing smaller and smaller as the foal thought.  For all the strange things that’d happened today, that wasn’t one of them.  It took a few days for ponies to go back to acting “natural” after entering the Motherboard--their senses were too shaken to bother with more advanced, realistic movements.  Even then, Babs was still taking awhile to process things--probably because her body hadn’t had the chance to do so in quite some time.

After what seemed like hours, Babs’ eyes finally went back to normal, and a mischievous smile appeared on her face.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” she muttered.  “My glitch can lick me pretty good sometimes.  Ya might have to keep it in check a little.  After what I went through in Equestria, though, I’m glad to have a friend.”

“Glad to be a friend,” Coco replied.  “There aren’t too many fillies in the Motherboard, but you’re still in good company.  When everypony has some kind of glitch, nopony judges too much.  So you’ll find a lot of friends here.”

Babs still looked a bit skeptical, but engaged Coco in conversation, anyway.  Like most foals her age, she had a way of flooding ponies with questions--about the Motherboard itself, Coco’s glitch, and any other ponies Babs might know in the area.  The minute Coco mentioned that the two of them were in Lightning’s place, Babs rushed straight up the stairs, already trying to catch up with her old friend.  It seemed that, even though Babs’ memories still hadn’t come in all the way, she still hadn’t forgotten her pegasus friend.

The magnitude of the situation didn’t occur to Coco until the foal was long gone--she very well could have adopted a pony by mistake.  Since there were no other foals in the Motherboard, it was highly likely that Babs didn’t have any next of kin in the alternate dimension, and Lightning was probably too busy to take her on.  That left Coco, the pony who’d saved her from potential deactivation, a mare she barely knew.

Coco had prepared herself for a rescue.  What she hadn’t prepared for was domestic life, something she’d never gotten the chance to learn about in the simulation.  Yet even though the Motherboard was just about the safest place in the world, and any potential villains there were kept away from the others, something about leaving Babs out to the wild still didn’t sit right with Coco.  So as Babs rushed up to talk to Lightning, Coco allowed herself to formulate a plan.

First, she would do everything she could to find an Apple, any Apple, that could take care of Babs.  And if that wasn’t possible, then she would have to resort to desperate measures, ones that didn’t scare her near as much as they should have.

Namely: if she didn’t do something soon, Coco would have to become a mother.  Even if it meant that one of them could get called back someday, and forget the other forever.


****


The next thing everypony knew, all three ponies had been crammed into Lightning Dust’s janitor’s closet.  Or rather, a place so secret that Lightning had merely chosen to mark it as her janitor’s closet.  Rather than any sorts of brooms or buckets, the room instead contained a huge array of technology the likes of which Equestria had never seen, from computers to gigantic screens.  With the Motherboard being the way it was, it was typical for rooms to be bigger on the inside and defy logic itself, but not quite like this.

Coco had only been inside the place once before today, but it wasn’t any less strange the second time seeing it.  Before, she’d assumed such places only existed in Equestrian science-fiction novels, but then again, she practically lived in one anyway.

Babs’ head was practically turning a mile a minute trying to take it all in as Lightning gently guided her through her array of gadgets.  To Coco’s immense surprise, her friend was actually acting responsible around a filly, rather than enabling her behavior as she would have expected.  Every time Babs tried to touch something, Lightning gently steered the foal’s hooves away from the object and distracted her with something else, only for the process to continue on almost endlessly.

Finally, though, Lightning directed herself towards the nearest chair and plunged into it, already tired from the events of the morning.  With a flick of her hooves, a dizzying arrays of screens turned themselves on, showing information about everypony in the Motherboard.

“Can’t you do all this with your scanners?” Babs asked, having been thoroughly debriefed on the situation.  “If you’re a computer program, how d’ya even have computers, anyway?”

“Yes, I can,” Lightning answered with a teasing lilt to her voice, “but it’s more dramatic this way.  And I really don’t want to think too hard about the second one.  Don’t need a brain glitch along with all this other stuff.”

She deftly tapped at her enormous keyboard as she said this, and she looked so much like a hacker in this moment that Coco wondered how she ever could have been a Wonderbolt in another life.  With a few clicks, Lightning was able to access just about all of Babs’ information, from her episode details to her family lineage.

“Okay,” she muttered, “show me all those little glitched Apples.”

Babs turned her head in confusion as Lightning said this, almost too low for anypony in the room to hear.

“She does that from time to time when she works,” Coco explained.  “I’m kinda the same way, so you probably shouldn’t try to answer me if I ever do that.”

The filly nodded in understanding, watching as the screen steadily expanded to show her entire family tree...and a grand total of two ponies who lived in the Motherboard with her.  At the very sight of these ponies, Lightning Dust groaned, waved her hooves in the air, and eventually banged her head straight onto the computer desk.

Admittedly, Coco wasn’t sure if they were such a good match for Babs, anyway.  The two ponies that showed up on the screen were a very posh middle-aged couple in shades of orange and green with matching orange cutie marks.  Coco wasn’t quite sure how orange-related ponies showed up on an Apple-related database, but with the mood Lightning was in, she figured she wouldn’t ask.

“You know what,” Lightning muttered after a few minutes of silence, “that’s it.  I am not getting into this with them.  You’re going to have to own up and raise a kid, Coco, because I am not giving her to those bozos.  With my help, of course.”

Even though it seemed like she added that sentence in at the last minute, the sincerity was still there.  Or, at least, Coco hoped so.

“Um...thanks?  But what’s wrong with those ponies up there?  They are her next of kin, right?”

“They sure as hay don’t look like it,” Babs agreed.

With a rush, Lightning propelled her head up from the table and stared at the other two as if they were in for a long explanation.

“They are, unfortunately,” she replied.  “Aunt and Uncle Orange, couple of first-line ponies who married into the Apple family.  We know next to nothing about them, since they isolate themselves from just about everypony in the Motherboard, but I’ve met them.  Uncle Orange has himself a real name--Mosely--that was used outside the show, but there’s nothin’ on Aunt Orange, so we just call her that.  Anyway, she doesn’t talk much, but her husband...there’s a reason he got recalled after one episode.”

“Y’mean like you?” wondered Babs.  

By the time she’d said it, Lightning’s yellow eyes had already burst into flames.

“You’re just a savage little punk when your glitch is deactivated, aren’t ya?  C’mere, you!”

For a minute, Coco was more than a little worried that Lightning was going to stuff the filly back in the capsule where she’d come from.  Instead, however, she just mussed up Babs’ mane a little and play-fought with her, almost like she was her big sister.  In fact, Lightning got so distracted with this whole game that it took her at least five minutes to get back in her seat.

“Anyway,” she continued.  “Before you ask, Mosely wasn’t placed in here for doing anything particularly bad.  He didn’t try to kill anyone on set or anything.  He’s just so insufferable to talk to, because the only line he was ever given was ‘how quaint.’  So of course, his glitch is the worst.”

“What is it?” Coco asked.

“Condescension.  You even can’t talk to him without him trying to explain everything you say!  He can’t even start a sentence without saying ‘well, actually.’  He’s so condescending that one time, he even tried to tell me what the word ‘condescending’ meant!”

Both Coco and Babs stared at Lightning for awhile before talking again, thinking long and hard about what she’d just said.

“And for the record, I know what that word means!  I’m not a total meathead, you know!”

And, with that, all three had a good laugh, ignoring the circumstances that were right in front of them.  Freeing this filly now meant that Lightning and Coco would have to undertake a quest the likes of which neither had seen before, but neither of them really seemed to mind.  Babs even got a few good words in too as she asked Lightning to define it, though Coco suspected it was really because she was ashamed to admit that a foal her age had no right to know that word.  So the three of them spent their day in the computer room, fiddling with all of Lightning’s technology to the point where she even had to close the shop.

Everything past that would be hectic and uncertain.  But, like always, Lightning Dust challenged herself to stay in the moment.  It was the only way to survive with the things she’d done in the past, with what she could do in the future.

It was the only way she could possibly outrun her glitch.


****


Lightning waited as the days passed into weeks, or whatever passed for time in the Motherboard, and as Coco and Babs came to live with her.  With her shopkeeping and Coco moving in, she hadn’t had too much time to bond with either of them.  But the time she’d had told her everything she needed--that the two of them were finally ready.  Lightning hadn’t even been friends with them that long, and somehow she felt that they would stay with her through everything, even her glitch.

If Mosely had been there, she had a feeling he would have answered her with his typical ‘how quaint.’  She knew she was a fool to believe it, naive to trust that there was anypony out there who’d understand.  Just like him, there had been a reason Lightning’s role wasn’t extended past her first episode.  And it was the worst glitch anypony, even Babs herself, could imagine.

Thankfully, that also meant that it was one of the least visible.  In fact, Lightning had taken pains to hide it with gadgets, planting so many things in her head that her glitch had to be shoved out sooner or later.  Nopony could stare at her like she could stare at others, see her glitch in bright neon lights.  Before Coco, she’d always pushed ponies away, but that was just the only way she had to protect herself.

There’s a reason for everything, she’d tell herself as she looked in the mirror.  There’s a reason nopony can know.  There’s a reason I picked up a new trade, took myself away from the Wonderbolt life.  There’s a reason I can’t go back to Equestria, and there’s a reason why I don’t want to!

Even with all the fun she’d had that day, it took everything Lightning had not to break down crying in that moment.  She’d decided that tomorrow had to be the day, even if it meant she wouldn’t get any sleep that night.  But somehow or another, the thought of leaving the Motherboard made her even more fearful than that upcoming confession.

Somehow or another, Coco had been the first pony Lightning hadn’t pushed away, and she hated that deep down.  Because she was going to have to watch Coco get hurt one way or another--whether it would be caused by telling her the secret or by one of them leaving the Motherboard for good.  One of them would have to lose all memory of the other eventually, and that was why staying in the Motherboard was what was safe for both of them.

Lightning scoffed at her image in the mirror and wondered how she’d let things get this far.  Coco lived with her, was raising a child with her, was living out every fantasy Lightning had ever had of her, so it only figured that her glitch would go mad.  It only figured that she’d latch onto Coco like there was no tomorrow, letting her become the latest obsession her glitch ate up.  Really, she’d only brought this on herself.

For one final, fleeting moment, Lightning almost considered letting this facade continue.  She could be happy this way, spending her whole life lying through her teeth.  Maybe, just maybe, Coco could even love her.  But then, as if on instinct, Lightning’s scanners fired up again, reminding her one last time why that could never happen.

Even with all the things she’d done to change herself, her glitch would always catch up to her.

“Coco doesn’t deserve a mare like me,” Lightning muttered to herself as the infamous words came across her screen.

ERROR:ENVY.
> ERROR:ENVY
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Still nothing.  Always nothing.

Coco was used to the sort of information the episode list gave, but it still somehow managed to disappoint herself every time.  Every day this time of year, her databases would flood with script after script, but never any room for her.  The message was always clear: whatever role the creators would find for her, it wasn’t ready yet.  

There was, at least, a tiny consolation to the way this system worked--at most, only three scripts were available at a time, meaning that tomorrow, she would have another chance to return to the Equestrian simulation.  Even ponies outside the Motherboard could lay idle for that long, without a single line fed to them by an outside party.  There was even the legendary Princess Luna, who’d gone a whole season untouched by the creators, only to be saved from the Motherboard at the last second.  If she could do it, so could Coco.

She’d been fine when the last set of Season Five scripts came out, figured the main cast had better things to do than hang out with her all the time.  But in the hiatus, she’d started to grow restless, before finally accepting that she was going to be in the Motherboard for awhile.  By now, she didn’t even mind staying there, now that she had Babs and Lightning on her side.  But somehow, once Season Six news came, she was straight back to where she had started.

Having a purpose in life only meant so much if the life you lived wasn’t even real to begin with.

After staring at the episode list for what seemed like ages, Coco finally called off her databases and forced herself out of bed towards another day.  As usual, her roommates--family was such an Equestrian word, and hence one she was never allowed to experience--were up earlier than she was, though Babs was nowhere to be found.  Figuring she was hidden in some other location in the house she hadn’t checked yet, Coco stepped into Lightning’s secret room, where the pegasus was already waiting for her.

“Hey,” she muttered from her control chair, “I was just about to go upstairs and find you.  Babs is in the bathroom right now, and there was somethin’ I wanted to tell the two of you about.”

There was a hidden edge to Lightning’s voice, as if her programming had suddenly gone rogue.  While Motherboard ponies possessed the same emotions as other Equestrian AIs, Lightning didn’t often get like this when Coco was around.  Heck, she’d never even heard a voice clip of her friend acting this way--in her debut, the pegasus had been told to act laid-back for most of the episode and indignant for the climax.  

“You’ve seen the list, haven’t you?” Coco said hesitantly.  “I know it’s hard, not seeing your name on there, but you’ve got us now.  I was a little upset about the whole thing until I reminded myself of that, but I’m good now.”

“I don’t care about that crummy list anymore, and the sooner you realize it doesn’t mean nothin’ to you, the better.  All it does is put ponies at each other’s throats.  And before you say that I’m supposed to be the kind of competitive mare who cares about that sort of thing, let me just say that I pick my battles.  Anything that would make my glitch go wild ain’t worth worrying about.”

Lightning took a sip of coffee, one of the many things that lacked a purpose in the Motherboard.  Ponies who lived there could still eat, drink, and do anything Equestrian AIs could, but they didn’t experience the same effects.  Alcohol didn’t get you drunk, chocolate didn’t make you fat, and caffeine didn’t give you energy.  Still, the desperate and exhausted gesture of reaching out for a cup of coffee meant much the same thing here.  She was still drinking when Babs entered the room, not even noticing how unsurprised the filly seemed by the whole situation.

“Lightning wants to talk to us about her glitch,” Babs finally explained.  “‘Fore you came in, she was tellin’ me how hard all this was gonna have to be, but she wants us to know anyway.  She says she’s tired of keepin’ it secret.”

Coco’s eyes practically bulged out of her head as the filly said this, even though Lightning confirmed it with a nod.  Lightning was one of the few ponies in the Motherboard who refused to divulge her glitch, and Coco had been slow to trust her because of that.  Just like the scripts, though, she came to accept the secret as part of her life in the Motherboard and questioned it no further after that.  All Lightning had ever told her about it was that it was “miles worse than just having the wrong name,” and Coco accepted that.  

After all, just about any glitch was worse than her own.

“I’ll admit,” Lightning began, “I’m tired of all this.  I hate the fact that ponies can never know who I really am, and I always have.  Even though I’ve let my guard down around you more than I ever have with anypony else, it’s still gonna be a hard revelation to make.  So before you judge me for keeping all this under wraps, I want you to hear me out.  I haven’t been able to trust anypony with this knowledge, and I want to believe I can trust you.”

“I can,” Coco said in a soft voice, as if already fearing what would come to pass.  “Both of us can.”

“Whatever mistake you made back there, I’ve made worse,” Babs agreed.  “At least you weren’t supposed to be a reformed model.”

Lightning gave a final, tiny smile at Babs’ joke before continuing onward into uncharted territory.  She guided herself under the computer, almost as if in shame, and came out with a wire hooked to her flank.  With her usual bravado, she explained that this would allow everypony present to see the glitch text that’d been programmed into her, and sure enough, the screen beside her rang with two little words.

ERROR: ENVY.

“You’ve all heard about the accident that happened during my episode,” she began.  “And now, you’re about to find out that it wasn’t an accident.  Up until I was sent to the Motherboard, I’d planned everything out.  I was even able to fool the creators, for a little while.”

Lightning said all this in such a matter-of-fact tone, yet Coco wasn’t able to make heads or tails of what she was really implying.  The episode she’d been in had run fairly smoothly from everything Coco had heard, with everypony playing their carefully assigned roles.  Sure, the mane cast sans Rainbow Dash had almost died that day, but even that had been added in for drama; even that was an illusion.  Even though nopony in Equestria knew that they were in a show for children, everypony had a hunch that unless you were a villain, you could never get yourself into too much danger.  You would be saved, redeemed, brought back.

But then again, the very existence of the Motherboard disproved that last one.  Coco still wasn’t quite sure if the same was true for salvation and redemption, and didn’t know if she would ever be sure again.  At this point in the game, she wasn’t even sure if Lightning was a friend or a foe.

As much as she assured Lightning that she trusted her, seeing that glitch put a wrench into matters.  Glitches were almost always related to some sort of physical feature--having the wrong name, or speaking the wrong way, or just not being appealing enough to the audience.  Every once in awhile, they related to some sort of emotional fault, like how Babs could be easily manipulated into taking orders.  But even those were simple issues, something that could interrupt an episode without jeopardizing personal relationships.

Judging by the fact that Lightning had been created to be an antagonist, her glitch probably extended far beyond simple jealousy--after all, if that was the case, it would have been easy to bring her back for friendship lesson fodder.  Granted, the show had already covered such material, but it was so far back in Season One that the children watching the show might have forgotten it already.  For her to have such an easily exploitable glitch and still not return to Equestria, she had to have done something--

Coco tripped on the word for a few seconds, an unfamiliar one almost never used to describe glitches, or AIs, or anything controlled by another entity.  Just saying it almost implied some degree of free will, a luxury that was only afforded in the Motherboard.

Sinful.

“You planned your glitch?” Babs finally questioned.  “You could control it like that?”

“I thought I could,” Lightning said with a scoff.  “Back then, I didn’t realize everything it was doing to me.  I’d almost say that it was less like I was in control and more like...it overwhelmed me so much, I didn’t know I wasn’t.  All I knew was, the minute I was sent to the Motherboard, they didn’t call me a glitch.  They called me a virus.”

She leaned back in her chair and tried to gain some of her usual composure, but even Coco was able to tell it was like an act.  Lightning’s gestures were no longer her own, but rather the sort she would have made as a puppet AI reciting from a script.  Just the thought of her not being in control sent shivers down Coco’s spine, especially considering what could control her beyond the creators’ reaches.  

Coco wasn’t sure if viruses still had power down here, but as she gulped down her nerves, she knew she didn’t want to find out.

“Sooner or later, they wised up and realized I was just a glitch with a virus.  Small distinction, but it made all the difference.  Who knows what kind of capsule I would’ve ended up in if the creators never figured that out?  Um, no offense.”

It took Babs a few seconds to even recognize that Lightning was talking about her, but the filly eventually gave her an acknowledging nod, one of several ways she and the pegasus could communicate without speaking.  Rather than fear, Coco noticed that Babs looked at their companion with a sort of surprised awe--perhaps she trusted Lightning too much, or perhaps it was some youthful instinct towards forgiveness.  Either way, Coco figured that, as somepony with a more severe glitch, Babs probably had better judgement on the matter.  And so, Coco let the alarm bells in her head disappear for a few brief moments, and did what she was made to do.

Believe in your friends, and forgive them when they do wrong.  It was what the pony AIs were made for, and even if Lightning was different, Coco wanted to believe they had more in common than either realized.  Maybe it was her naive programming, but she wanted to believe nothing Lightning could say today would ruin their friendship.

What the pegasus said next, however, made that promise especially hard to fulfill.

“But anyway, enough beating around the bush.  It’s hard for me to tell anypony about this, let alone you two, but it all started when Season Three was almost a quarter of the way through, when my episode was supposed to air.  After what I did, my debut ended up being halfway through the season instead.  It took the creators a long time to recover from the mistakes I made, and that’s why Season Three was so short.  By the time they cleaned up my mess, they didn’t have enough energy to write thirteen more episodes.”

From the look on Babs’ face, it seemed the filly had just accepted that change as fact.  No matter how much the creators tried, not every memory from Equestria transferred back into the Motherboard, and it was likely she’d already forgotten that Season Three was supposed to be the same length as the others.

“I hate to say it, but that’s probably why I let Coco free you from the capsule, Babs.  You already had two episodes planned that season, and they really seemed to be pushing for you.  If I hadn’t slipped up, maybe you would’ve had a few more, or even gotten to stay.  I feel like I owe you somethin’ after all that.”

Both Coco and Babs let themselves consider that possibility for a second.  If Lightning really had caused as much damage as she claimed, it could have impacted all three of their futures.  But, in a twisted way, it’d also brought all three of them together.  After all, it wasn’t like the creators would ever think to bring an Apple filly, a daredevil pegasus, and a Bridleway costume designer into the same episode.  

“I don’t think anythin’ would’ve changed,” spoke Babs.  “They knew I had a glitch, and my time was numbered with or without you.  Even if they were pushing for me, there’s only so much a glitch can do before slipping up.”

Lightning shook her head with resignation, making Coco wonder if the pegasus really considered her fate so inevitable.  As much as Coco hated to think about it, feeling that way would’ve almost been preferable to beating yourself up over one mistake as her friends had done so many times before.  

Knowing you’re a mistake, she thought to herself, makes it easier for you to make them.

“But anyway, here’s the way it went down,” Lightning continued, “from the beginning all the way to when I ended up here.  I ain’t gonna repeat it ever again, so pay close attention, okay?”

Up until that moment, Coco had forgotten that Lightning and Commander Spitfire had been in the same episode together, but hearing her friend’s tone now burned that detail into her brain.  She was every bit as commanding as the leader of the Wonderbolts, and perhaps if things had gone differently, she could have been exactly that.

Then again, Coco was starting to hate that word, ‘perhaps.’  And so, she made a mental note to eliminate that word from her vocabulary as soon as she heard Lightning’s story.

“I was created differently from a lot of pony AIs.  The creators reprogrammed part of Rainbow Dash’s data into me, the stuff that got lost in her character development, that sort of thing.  They basically skimped on the rest, ‘cause they wanted me to be a ‘foil’ to her.  It was easier for them to take a character they already knew and change some stuff up about her, y’know?  

“And for awhile, I didn’t mind too much, ‘cause I didn’t know and didn’t care.  All I knew was that these people were going to give me the life of my dreams, and all I had to do was hang out with somepony a lot like me.  Just that was enough, even.  I’ve always wanted a friend who was just like me!   No offense.”

At this point in the game, Coco just shook her head, knowing that was Lightning’s way of saying how much she really cared about her.

“But then it stopped being so nice.  I loved Dash, don’t get me wrong, and maybe if that virus never crashed the party, we would’ve really gotten somewhere.  Even then, though, I started realizing that she had it so much better than I did.  We’d talk off-camera in the academy simulation, and she’d tell me about all these friends and family she had.  But no matter how hard I tried...I couldn’t remember any of mine.  I couldn’t remember having anypony in my life before Dash, because the creators didn’t program anypony to be there!  What’s the use of giving her friends, when you just want your new pony to be Rainbow Dash 2.0?”

Coco could practically see Lightning’s chair dissolving into pixels as the pegasus gripped its handles ever tighter.  She’d seen her friend’s amber eyes contort themselves into all sorts of expressions, but never the sort of crazed glint they were taking on now.  However, Lightning came into herself just as quickly as she’d disappeared, and her face returned to its normal smile within seconds.

“Or at least, that was what my glitch told me.  Looking back on it, I think I remembered the Motherboard stuff a bit too early, because I knew what I really was before too long.  That was about the time I started having these weird thoughts.  My virus was pretty good at disguising them as real, things I actually believed, until I put my plan into action.

“It got to the point where I couldn’t stop thinking about Dash.  She didn’t know anything was wrong, and she kept talking about her friends until I wanted them, too.  I even wanted to have a little filly friend like the one she told me about, the orange one with all the nightmares.  Now, I know it was probably ‘cause I missed Babs, but my virus warped it into something bigger until I asked myself this.”

Lightning cringed from the very thought, and for all Coco knew, this was something she’d hoped to never say again.

“If Dash and I are so alike...why don’t I just replace her?”

Even though this revelation should have horrified Coco more than anything, she placed a hoof on Lightning’s shoulder.  The more she heard her friend talk, the more she realized that every change Lightning had made to herself hadn’t been to separate herself from Rainbow Dash.  The way she never flew.  Her obsession with fixing things.  How she never wanted to talk about the Wonderbolts, or Cloudsdale, or anything that’d make her a pegasus.

Every change she had made was meant to keep her from turning back into the mare she was before.  And even if Coco couldn’t understand the voices or the virus, she could at least understand that.

“I was already supposed to go wild in the last few scenes,” Lightning whispered, her voice as low as it could go.  “I figured the creators wouldn’t notice if I hit the wrong pony.  So I...rigged the tornado to hit Dash instead.  I’d already planned so much--the way I’d do my mane, paint my body, and convince them I was her--that I thought I’d had it made.  I was going to be the star.  I was going to have friends.  I was going to have friends, finally.”

And, just like that, Lightning became little more than a heap of wings and fur, curled into a ball like a newborn foal.

“I didn’t know villains weren’t supposed to have friends,” she murmured as her cheeks cascaded with tears.

“You have friends now,” Coco whispered, patting Lightning on the back.

“I know,” Lightning replied, “but I don’t deserve them.  And if I ever go back there, I’ll lose everything.  I’ll go back to being the virus again.”

“Then I’ll just have to make sure you don’t forget.  We have a rare glitch on our side, and more machines than the creators can imagine.  You don’t have to be scared of going back to Equestria anymore, because we’ll find a way to get rid of that other you for good.”

Babs nodded in agreement, and although Coco couldn’t remember her exact words, the filly summed up the situation far better than she ever could.  But somehow, it was Coco’s words that Lightning reacted to as she slowly gained her determined attitude.  The three had found their adventure, and they were willing to stay in the Motherboard forever until they found it.

All the while, none of them thought to check their episode lists.  None of them questioned why notifications were running through their brains a mile a minute, until Coco dared to check.  And that was when she saw the three pieces of information that would shock everypony.

One: the episode list had been updated until Season Eight, quicker than it ever had before.  Two: both Coco and Lightning had been scheduled to appear in the Equestrian simulation at separate times, alongside a dizzying number of other Motherboard ponies.  Which, of course, led to the third and gravest conclusion: whatever reason the creators had for Babs’ confinement meant that the filly could never return to Equestria.  Everything they ever had was destined to be destroyed with a single blow.

But it was in that moment that Coco realized something else: glitches weren’t supposed to have destinies.  They were errors in the system, something not even the creators could have planned for.  That meant they could create their own destinies.  That was what Coco came to realize, in that moment and forevermore.  

She might lose the friends and family that were assigned to her.  But in the Motherboard, she could make new ones beyond her maker’s wildest dreams. She had her flaws, but as long as she was in a place of exile, she knew that she could never be exiled for them again. The feeling she used to have, of some mysterious force controlling her actions, vanished without a trace.

Being a glitch means being free.
> 404: ERROR NOT FOUND
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

I will make things right again, whatever it takes.

Those words had been the only things keeping Coco together for the past few days, no matter how strong she pretended to be.  In reality, the decision to bring both her and Lightning back had splintered what little of a family they had, and Babs was just about the only pony she saw most days.  But, if what she was about to carry out really worked, she wouldn’t have to worry about that much longer.  She wouldn’t have to watch Lightning break herself over and over every night anymore.  

Simply bringing up the script was enough to spur her to that state, it seemed.  Coco had lost count of the amount of times she’d seen the pegasus holed up in her room, shuddering in a ball of fear as she considered what she’d have to do.  Granted, she had said she’d been created from Rainbow Dash’s S1 code, but Coco had never once expected to see that habit of hers on Lightning, the way Dash had been programmed to curl up just before performing the Sonic Rainboom.  It was a wonder Lightning didn’t grow a second glitch from the revelation, really.

And every time, every last time, she remembered what she’d have to put Scootaloo through in her upcoming episode, she just went back to that state.

Just when she stops hurting ponies, Coco thought, they’ve got to make her start again.  It’s like they designed this role to be her worst nightmare.

It was thoughts like those that brought her back to Lightning’s computer every day, reaching out for any clues she could get her hooves on.  It’d been a foolish impulse at first--after all, Coco knew better than anypony else that nopony knew how to use a computer--but she soon learned that “nopony” clearly meant “no Equestrian.”  To a Motherboard denizen, though, it was just another part of their code.  When Coco first logged on, she realized that there was almost nothing separating her from the machine--it was almost a fifth limb for her, even though it wasn’t her own.  Still, this sort of deep connection didn’t bring her any closer to the truth until one fateful day about a week or so after the scripts came out.  

That day brought two important differences.  One: Lightning Dust had cleaned herself up and left the room.  And two: when Coco logged onto the computer, a tiny white envelope appeared in the corner of the screen.

“Never seen that before,” Babs muttered as she hunched close to the screen like always.  “Think you should press it?”

“I’m one step ahead of you,” Coco replied, maneuvering her hoof towards the strange icon.  

Once she pressed it, a keyboard popped out from under the monitor, with keys perfectly fitted to her hooves.  At the same time, a blank white box filled the screen, prompting Coco to crowd it with words.  She’d never seen anything like this, hadn’t even known the keyboard existed, but still wrote everything out just the same.  Nothing on the screen indicated who the message would go to, but Coco figured it wouldn’t do any harm.  After all, secrets were meaningless and obsolete in the Motherboard.

After she clicked the final box, another message came to greet her, one that was practically incomprehensible to both ponies in the room.

Thank you for your interest in making the Motherboard a better place.  One of our Code Orange representatives will be by shortly to speak with you about any further questions you might have.  We would be pleased to meet you tomorrow morning at the center of your Manehattan quadrant.  Please continue to enjoy our services in the meantime.


--Creative Content Corporation, MLP Division


“Our services,” Coco whispered to herself.  “It can’t possibly be the creators--”

“It is,” Lightning said with a sigh.

Coco hadn’t even seen her come into the room, and the minute she did, she reached out to embrace the other mare.  Babs followed, even though Lightning did everything she could to push the two of them away.  For the slightest and most hopeful of moments, Coco just assumed Lightning was back to her usual self, the sort of pony who thought she was above hugs.  But the minute she looked into her golden eyes, she knew that dream would never come to pass.

Something had broken between the three of them, and just like any kind of glitch, nopony knew if it could ever be repaired.

“What did you do, Coco?” Lightning finally spoke.  

Her voice was nothing but serious, even as she struggled to shake Babs off her legs.

“Does it matter if it’s making things right?”

With a simple, solemn shake of her head, Lightning replied, “Yes, it does.  Because that’s the one thing you can never trust creators with.”


****


The details came to Coco later, much later.  In fact, until the meeting was scheduled to happen, she barely understood what she’d done.  About an hour before, just when she had finally gotten comfortable with the idea of talking to the creators--people who could wipe her out of existence with a single keystroke--Lightning dropped the bomb on her.  On the way to the meeting space, even.

“Those representatives they send,” she began, “they’re us.  They can’t walk in this world, so they take over somepony else’s mind to answer questions.  It’s sick enough to make nopony ever want to ask anything, and I just wish we didn’t have to mess with somepony’s head to get answers.”

“Then why haven’t I ever been forced into it?” Babs asked skeptically.

For once, Coco and Lightning’s eyes met at the exact same moment, almost as if they were both pondering the strangeness of this statement to themselves.

“I mean, they say workin’ from home’s pretty easy, but it’s not like you can do tech support from your capsule,” answered Lightning.  “And they only take over first-line ponies, anyway.  Trash they know they aren’t gonna use.”

Coco wasn’t even going to consider how twisted all this was.  As much as she knew she was only meant as a tool all along, as few pretenses as the creators put on...this was still incomprehensible.  Somehow, the threat they’d made on Lightning’s script during one of her catatonic nights, about how they had ways to force her into her role if she refused, didn’t seem like such an exaggeration anymore.

“So how do we know what body they’re going to be in, anyway?” Coco asked, forcing herself to make it sound like a normal question.

“For once, I’d say the creators made it pretty obvious.  They said ‘code orange’ in your message, and most of their reps don’t even have codes.  That just leaves us with one of two Oranges to choose from, and they’re both in the same mansion.  Hardly a challenge, if you ask me.”

Sure enough, the Orange mansion was just large enough to fill the entire quadrant center, and the door was very clearly unlocked.  Coco wasn’t sure if the creators had already taken over their brains or not, but she knew one thing for sure--their huge house definitely wasn’t any consolation for what the creators subjected them to.  In the Motherboard, first-line ponies were relative rarities, meaning that they were probably two of about seven ponies the creators could use.  Coco still wasn’t sure how often the creators got questions, but in all probability, both had probably been through this at least once before.

That was the one comforting thing about this whole messed-up situation--whatever damage they’d be doing here couldn’t have been worse than what had already happened to the Oranges.

“Okay, so when we go in there, one of ‘em ain’t gonna act right,” Lightning muttered, guiding them towards the mansion with all the finesse of a daring adventurer.  “And since neither of you have met them, it won’t be obvious at first.  That’s where I come in.”

“You can tell when the creators are gonna possess them or whatever?” Babs wondered.

“Yeah, ‘cause like most glitches, Aunt and Uncle Orange have unique habits.  Aunt Orange’s vocal cords got destroyed somehow, probably on the way down to the Motherboard, so all she really does is smile and look pretty.  And, as I mentioned before, Uncle Orange practically starts all his sentences with ‘well, actually.’  So if Aunt Orange starts talking, or if our friend Mosely stops being an insufferable stallionsplainer…” 

With a roll of her eyes, Lightning approached the door and knocked gently.  However, due to the sheer size and hollowness of the manor, it seemed to echo all around the area.  Or it could have just been another weird Motherboard thing.  Coco wasn’t quite sure, but it still scared her to the bone anyway.

In fact, just about everypony was affected by the aura the house gave off.  Possession and mansions didn’t tend to go well together, after all.  After the echoing ceased, even the Motherboard itself seemed deathly silent, and the only pony who dared to speak was Babs, the youngest of the group.  A pony who’d only been out in the world for a few weeks, and therefore didn’t know better than to raise her voice in a place like this.

“Is ‘stallionsplaining’ even a word?” she finally spoke, either unaware of the situation’s gravity or trying to brighten the mood.  

“This isn’t the time--” 

Before anypony else could intervene, the door burst open to reveal a sharply dressed stallion, seemingly unaccompanied by his wife.  Strangely enough, there didn’t seem to be a single trace of orange on him, even in spite of his name.  Stranger yet, Coco seemed to dwell on this fact more than anything else, more than the dangerous revelations that awaited her.

Something doesn’t seem right about this stallion, Coco thought to herself as the other pony began to speak.

“Well, actually, it’s more of a neologism,” he explained in a bored drawl.  “Technically, while ‘stallionsplaining’ can be found in some less reputable dictionaries, the Trottingham English Dictionary has yet to accept it; ergo, ‘stallionsplaining’ is not a word.  Assuming it were a word, it would be used to refer to a stallion who assumes that nopony in the audience knows what he is prattling about and therefore feels the need to explain practically everything.  But, of course, this posits the problematic proposition that only stallions are capable of this behavior, when, in actuality, I abhor all ponies who speak in such a manner.”

All three mares stood in front of the stallion completely slack-jawed.  

Is this stallion self-aware at all?  Coco thought to herself as he kept talking.

“Ah, yes, I do have that effect on ponies,” he continued, placing a hoof through his hair.  “It’s a wonder I was even named a glitch to begin with, hmm?  I certainly don’t see anything wrong with myself, do you?”

“Don’t you dare answer that,” Lightning muttered under her breath, noticing the mischievous look on Babs’ face.  “Even if you do interpret that to be an order from him.”

Babs’ face fell slightly, but not before shooting her pegasus friend a thankful look that said everything she and Coco need to know.

Thanks for not dropping me off with this guy, it seemed to say.  I can’t even spend ten seconds with him.

“Aaanyway,” Coco finally interrupted, “do you have any idea where your wife is?  We’re supposed to meet up with her in a few minutes.”

Mosely put a hoof to his chin in thought, and somehow, he managed to make even that act seem condescending.

“That’s quite odd; I certainly don’t recall making such a meeting.  If I did, I wouldn’t have let her go out foraging for the day.  You see, she’s a very accomplished mare, a true lapidarian, if you will.  That’s a jewelry maker, to all of you unenlightened ponies.”

At this point, Babs was almost gritting her teeth at the annoyingly pompous stallion and Lightning had rolled her eyes enough times, Coco swore they were going to slide out.  But just then, when he was about to open his mouth yet again and fill the mercifully silent space with more obscure words, Mosely’s eyes began to glow.

Even though Coco couldn’t pretend to like the stallion, the expression on his face as it happened was still nothing short of terrifying.  Once his eyes stopped glowing, all color seemed to drain from them, and wires began to appear all over his body.  If it weren’t for those frighteningly odd features and the things Lightning had told her before, Coco would have almost sworn he was a normal pony having a seizure.  His body contorted as if he was having a particularly extreme one, yet somehow, his face didn’t seem to show any pain.

It didn’t seem to show anything.

That, more than anything, was what gave Coco the courage to ask the question that’d been driving her for weeks.  Because, without emotions, what consequences could really come of her curiosity?

“Why did you call me and Lightning back to Equestria?”

The Mosely that was no longer Mosely simply turned his face towards Coco and smiled.

“Because that was always our plan.  The show can’t go on forever, after all.  We’re already creating all-new pony AIs, but in the process, we’ve been thinking about what to do with all of you.  Our audience has grown quite attached to you, even to those of you that...didn’t come out quite right.”

‘Mosely’ shot a look at Babs as he said this, and Coco hoped against hope that it meant the real Mosely was fighting against the takeover.  Because if that condescending face was real, if it came from the creators...Coco almost didn’t need to know why Babs had been trapped in her capsule for so long.

“But what’s that got to do with bringing us back?” Lightning yelled.  “Some of us would rather be here, you know?  And you said it yourself--Equestria’s near its end.  What’s even the point of bringing new ponies in?”

“And why didn’t you take all of us?” Coco asked, no matter how much she dreaded the answer.

“That’ll take quite a while to explain,” ‘Mosely’ replied.  “I might just have to prepare some tea while we wait.  But for now, I can at least answer the misnomer’s question.  Because, you see, we do intend on taking all of you, one way or another.  Have you ever taken the time to really examine your source code?”

Coco cocked her head in confusion.  Of course she had, but the way the creators had coded it, it was practically unintelligible, even to her.  And, to some extent, that suited her.  She was a machine without origin, without any sort of knowledge of what she really was.

She spent so long thinking about that very fact that she didn’t even realize that the creators were infiltrating her body, too.  All it took was a single beam from ‘Mosely’s’ forehead, from where his horn should have been, and she was motionless in an aura of light.  Even if she could move, she was too terrified of what would come, what sorts of thoughts they would place in her head.  By the time ‘Mosely’ focused that same beam on Babs, knocking out both her and Lightning, the terror practically overwhelmed Coco.

Is there any limit to their power?  Any way to beat them for good?  Or will it always turn out like this?

When the dust finally settled, all Coco could see was a single signal above her head, the essence of her source code distilled into a few simple lines.  Just as she was about to process everything else, though, ‘Mosely’s’ voice rang through her ears yet again.

“Did you ever really sit and think about why you saved that filly?” he asked.  “Why you seem so willing to protect her, even though you’ve only known her for a few weeks?  Why you’d die for her if the chance arose?”

Before Coco could answer, ‘Mosely’ forced her head towards Babs’ unconscious body and the line of code that manifested above her.  Coco barely had to look to know they were identical in almost every way.

“A little pony up against the big city, forced to obey villains who exploit her very nature.  She gets the chance to return, bigger and brighter than ever, but only once.  We could be describing either one of you, because you were created from her wreckage.  Her source code is yours, and all this time, that was all you wanted to find.  You wanted to find your missing piece, and now you have it.”

“No!” Coco screamed as Babs stayed motionless.  “The three of us are more than that.  We’re more than your code!  Everything I did was to protect her, and that’s more real than anything you could give me.”

Coco expected just about anything at that point--disownment, deletion, any sort of attacks the creators could throw at her.  But instead, all ‘Mosely’ did in response was smile.  Not a villainous smile, but rather a warm one she would have never imagined on his face, like a proud parent congratulating their child.

“Maybe that’s the case,” he said.  “Maybe you really have transcended.  That’s all we could hope for, really.  Independence.”

Babs finally came back to her senses, practically launching herself onto the stallion for what he’d revealed to her.  Anypony in Equestria or the Motherboard would if their creator treated them like trash, after all.  Yet somehow, something stopped her in her tracks.  In any other case, Coco would never have been able to tell what kept the filly from attacking, but now that their source codes were linked, she could envision what Babs was seeing as if it was from her own eyes.

“We’re more than your code!”

Babs shouldn’t have even been awake then, but somehow, the image of Coco standing up for her had burned itself into her brain.  It pulsed through the filly’s thoughts like a heavenly chorus, building her up again and again.  Helping her transcend.

Instead, all Babs did was ask a single question, just as Coco had.

“If you were able to fix my code enough to put it in her, why didn’t you fix me?  Why’d you keep it from me?”

“Because we weren’t sure if it was something we could fix,” ‘Mosely’ said.  “It’s much easier to give somepony else independence from the start than it is to free a long-suffering pony from their shackles.  Because independence is something that ponies gain, not something that can be programmed.  That’s why, as soon as the show ends, everypony will end up back in the Motherboard forever.  We realized over the years that we got so caught up in our success, we barely let our creations live for themselves.  So once the lights go out, you’ll be free to live your own life, glitched or not.”

With a small wink, ‘Mosely’ continued, “Plus, we underestimated you a lot.  We’ve seen you program yourself towards independence these last few weeks, something we thought impossible.  We put you in that capsule because we were so afraid of what ponies could do to you, how they could hack you into something truly terrible, but now it’s safe to say you’ve grown into your own pony.  Episode or not.”

As Lightning finally struggled to wake up, Coco finally took a few moments to process everything that’d happened.  One minute, ‘Mosely’ had told her that Babs was just a part of her source code, and now, he claimed she was her own pony.  Somehow, Babs was a part of Coco, Coco 1.0 almost, and yet somehow she wasn’t.

As if he could read her mind, ‘Mosely’ answered, “All that hostility from before was a test, and we swear that with our lives.  We wanted to see if our AIs could really achieve the independence we desired from them, and judging from your reaction, we can safely say you’ve all passed.  And before you say anything else, even if Lightning was asleep for a lot of it, her very life here is proof enough.  Just enough, in fact, for us to grant all of you a miracle.”

Suddenly, three objects materialized in front of everypony--a Wonderbolts lead pony badge, an apple-shaped brooch, and Coco’s own hair flower.  The sight was so unreal that Coco even tapped the back of her head, only to find that her usual flower was no longer there.

“Three prized possessions for three ponies that were meant to stay together,” ‘Mosely’ explained.  “Keep them in the Motherboard when you go back, and you will never truly forget.  If anypony desires to fight fate, it’s you.  And even if we didn’t think so...we all know you’d find your own way back eventually.”

And just like that, the creators dissolved into a cloud of white dust, and the three remaining ponies discussed their fates, filling each other in on what they had missed and what they had found.  For once, they were alone together.  Alone forever.  

Through the Motherboard and beyond.
> Epilogue: Remember Me
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Miss Pommel stepped out of the Motherboard elevator with an acute, yet blurred understanding of where she was. Everypony she’d ever met, and even some she never had, stood in front of her as Equestria dissolved into a stream of pixels, yet she could sense another feeling of familiarity to the situation.  

For as long as she could remember--Miss had been just that--Miss.  Anypony else who asked for a different name never got it, because there was something blocking out the pony she used to be.  Every once in a while, when the creators weren’t looking, she’d try to search for that old self, but it stayed lodged in the furthest corners of her memories, like a single twig trapped in between branches.  They’d said it’d been part of the cure for the glitch she didn’t even remember, but she thought otherwise.

Even without her memories, she’d always considered herself to be a bit of a rebel.  Maybe it was a trace of the glitch she’d lost, maybe it wasn’t, but she still held onto it as tightly as she could.  Otherwise, she was nothing more than a clump of code, and some whisper of the past told her that was the last thing she wanted to be.

As Miss found her way across the Motherboard, she noticed the former Equestrians congregating together, still in their creator-programmed groups even though there was no one around to watch them anymore.  Even Miss was tempted to move towards them, towards Rarity and all the other friends she’d made in her other world, but an indecipherable feeling stopped her.  Just as she was about to move towards them, her hoof went to the back of her head instead.

There’s nothing there, Miss told herself.  There should be something there.  

Another vague image appeared from her past--a red flower--and faded just as soon as it came.  But if there was one thing Miss knew, it was that memories from the Motherboard didn’t come back...right?

Just when she was about to trot towards the only ponies she recognized, a tiny brown filly crossed her path, her green eyes glowing with recognition.  Recognition that Miss didn’t have.

“You came back!” the filly cried, wrapping her hooves around the older pony’s waist.  “Lightning didn’t think you would, but I knew they wouldn’t let you leave us behind.  Wait until you see what we’ve--”

A blank look crossed Miss’s eyes as she attempted to process everything that was going on.  This foal certainly wasn’t anypony she’d ever interacted with in the simulation, and that was all she remembered.  All that mattered.

“I’m sorry,” she said awkwardly, “but I’ve never seen you before in my life.  I don’t know you.  You must be thinking of somepony else.”

Even though Miss tried to let the filly down as gently as possible, the little thing still backed away in clear panic.  She dumped her saddlebag straight onto the floor and searched frantically, as if her life depended on the object she’d find.  A few seconds later, Miss could feel the filly climbing onto her back and fiddling with her mane.

She didn’t even have to look to know that the other pony had placed that strange red flower in her mane.  Yet, she still felt nothing, even though the filly clearly thought she would.  Miss could see the distress forming around the foal’s body as she trotted away towards the others, but there was nothing she could do.  She didn’t know her.  She never would.

Miss wasn’t programmed to.

That was what she thought the whole way back to the ponies the creators programmed to be her friends, and it was the one thing that kept her from looking back.  Slowly, she was even able to tune the sobbing filly’s voice out, once she realized she didn’t have the power to change the situation.  And so, Miss barely recognized the voice that rang out from behind her, barely noticed the way the filly had followed her the whole way.

“This isn’t how it was supposed to end,” the filly whispered.  

“You can’t say that,” Miss replied.  “Only the creators know.  It’s their story, after all.”

“Who says it can’t be ours, Coco?”

As soon as the filly said that, Miss could feel a strange prickling in the center of her mind, almost as if she was being turned back on for the first time in a long time.  And before she had the chance to wonder, half of everything came back.

The other half came when Babs embraced her yet again and confirmed the pony she really was.

“Miss” had been perfect in almost every way, far more successful than the creators had ever intended.  But it was time to leave her behind with Equestria’s wreckage and embrace her glitch once more.

Because, when it came down to it, Equestria could be destroyed over and over again, as many times as it took for the creators to finally perfect the formula.  Maybe they never would, and the Motherboard would stand as a monument to the success they were never able to achieve.  But for the ponies that lived there, it was nothing short of heaven.

For all the glitches in the world, the Motherboard would always be there to welcome them home.