A Ponyville That Never Was
One day, Twilight saw an arcade machine. A large wood-paneled box just sat there in the middle of a field while a small colt played on it. What caught her attention was the odd colour scheme —neon green on black— and how the pixels seemed to move across the screen with a vitality of its own. A box darted across the lower end of the screen, firing projectiles at a horde of blocky enemies, each one a variation of the same three symmetrical shapes.
It was only at a second glance that she realized the connection between the young ponies frantic button-mashing and the movement of squares on screen. The colt tilted a joystick left and his avatar on screen mimicked its movement with machine-like precision. His other hoof was pressing a button that fired shots at irregular intervals, each of which hit one of the blocky enemies with a triumphant rumble.
The colt sat mesmerised by the display in front of him and scarcely noticed Twilight walking up to him. It was only when she took an inquisitive sweep across the screen and left a long smudge over the screen that he acknowledged her presence with an annoyed “hey!”
“Excuse me,” Twilight greeted, but found herself talking to a neck as the button-mashing colt once again fixed his eyes onto the screen. “I was just wondering where this... thing came from? I don't remember seeing it around.”
“I dunno,” the colt replied, pronouncing it in a sing-song matter without any hard consonants. “It appears occasionally. If you put coins in it, you can play a game.” And with that, one of the pixels from the horde above hit his vessel, which exploded amidst a pitchy squeal. “Arrgh damnit! You want to try, lady?”
The colt finally turned around to meet Twilights eyes, but by he time he got around to, she was already gone.
Magic disperses light in a peculiarly hexagonal way. You find traces of this pattern in the aura that appears whenever a unicorn works her craft. Even the most skilled of pony illusionists can't escape the fragmented edges that reveal her tricks to the trained eye.
As such, natural shapes are no problem to replicate magically. A unicorns thaumaturgical aura sparkles and sways in a way that mimics the shape of turbulent water and the rhythm of a gust of wind. But geometric shapes are more problematic. In the edges of squares, errant magic burn the air into angry sparks that can be concealed, but only with great difficulty and an intuitive understanding of gradients that only the most artistic of unicorns can claim to posses.
This is a long way of saying: There is no way in tartarus that any normal unicorn could store enough magic in the air to power a game centred entirely around shooting pixels.
Such was the conclusion Twilight reached after several hours of scouring the library for books on obscure magic, as evidenced by the piles of book that towered besides her in two rather unsafe stacks. Most of these was volumes made either before the advent of any standardized format or in direct defiance of it. This offbeat nature was mirrored by their content; in it ponies from all over Equestria would argue the possibility of things that ran against the central dogma of... well, any central dogma, really. But all of these intellectual dissenters could agree: programming stored magic is difficult. Programming stored magic to appear as neon squares on a black screen is impossible.
The door opened suddenly, with enough force to send the neatly stacked towers of books hurling towards the floor. Twilight instinctively yelled “Spike!” She turned around to chastise her long suffering assistant, who was taking a catnap in his basket, a long way from any doors that could be slammed and anypony that could order him to haul books around.
“Spike?” the visitor called out in disbelief with a voice belonging to the one and only Rainbow Dash. “He must've tucked himself into bed hours ago, like any sane pony.”
“More to the point, why are YOU up at this hour?” Twilight asked, prompting Rainbow to emit a startled crack.
“Eh? I thought you of all ponies would know, you really ARE an egghead, are you?”
Twilight only responded with a raised eyebrow, silently urging her friend to explain.
“There's the biggest party ever going on in Cloudsdale right now, it's starting at midnight and then it goes on all weekend! Everypony is there, earth ponies, unicorns...”
“Unicorns, in Cloudsdale?”
Rainbow gave Twilight an impatient look, as if she had expected Twilight to put two and two together by herself.
“Yeah, don't you remember when I was all nervous before the best young flier competition and you all came to visit. That cloud-walking thing you did?”
Still no sign of recognition in Twilights eyes and Rainbow began trying to guide her towards enlightenment using only frantic gestures, which worked about as well as one might expect.
“But I only taught it to a few ponies afterwards!” Twilight protested, and Rainbow made a gesture like hammering a nail into a wall with your hoof.
“...and they taught a few ponies that taught a few ponies and so on. And now everypony knows it, and they are having a big party. Cloudsdale's first inter-tribal celebration... It's YOUR party, Twilight, and you weren’t even invited?”
Twilight looked tentatively at the door, then back towards her ruined stack of book, lying in heaps that's just begging to be picked up. Rainbow noticed her hesitation and let out a groan.
“That's it! I'm not letting you sort books while the party of the century is happening above. You are coming with me to Cloudsdale and you will like it!” And with that, she picked Twilight up and practically carried her out of the library.
There is no weather above the clouds, only a clear night sky and moonshine. The air in Cloudsdale has a crisp quality that many non-pegasi aren't used to, but it didn't seem to bother anypony. Groups of three or more ponies, all an eclectic mix of pegasus, unicorn and earth pony, strolled down the pillar-adorned streets, engaged in conversation.
Twilight spun her head around, trying to take every impression in. The whole scene was all just so very surreal, a whole crowd stretching out into the darkness of ponies who just a few month ago would never have imagined ever seeing Cloudsdale except in photographs or from a hot air balloon.
The earth ponies all looked like an Apple family member, just off the bus to Manehattan. And the unicorns all tried their horn at using magic at this altitude, forming and dissipating whips of cloud with the gleefulness of a foal in a schoolyard sandbox. There was even a few older and wounded pegasi greeting the town like an old friend they thought was gone forever.
Rainbow pointed the way to the arena just outside of the city, which the crowd was already flowing towards. Smaller groups congregated and joined the mass of ponies pouring into the stadium. It was as if the ponies had just stormed the arena for lack of any other place big enough to host a party of this magnitude.
A unicorn DJ had taken over the sound system, blasting House-music from a platform elevated above the crowd. While most of the arena was only sparingly lit by lanterns and the occasional glowstick, the DJ had really made the platform her own space She had lanterns beaming trough the fog of a smoke machine and strobe-lights turning the nearby dancers into staggering still images of themselves.
The two friends split up. Rainbow Dash found a crowd of earth ponies she could impress with her tricks and Twilight was left staring at the DJ-table and the source of the music. Most people were too entranced by the beats to notice, but the device used to play the records didn't look at all like a record player.
Twilight had her own gramophone and knew very well how one is supposed to look like: a hoof-cranked clockwork machine with a brass horn that amplified the sound. It certainly did not look like the two sleek chromed rectangles like the ones on either side of the DJ booth.
Something about this aesthetic seemed familiar. The sharp edges, the slick light show and the stripped down repetitive music all shared the same inexplicable quality as the arcade machine that periodically appeared in Ponyville.
Not only where both based around an interplay of neon lights and shadows, clear tones and noise, but they both ran so counter to everything else in Equestrian culture that they seemed positively alien. There was no room for polka accordions, classical orchestras, syncopated jazzy drums or happy folk tunes on a fiddle in the tracks that was blasted out to the makeshift dance floor, unless the sample was chopped up, looped or transformed into a droning synth lead.
At first this concoction seemed to Twilights ear as an aural assault, but as the night went on and insomnia gripped her, she could more easily tune herself into the out-of-control mental space if these songs and ended up dancing to the break of dawn along with everypony else.
When Celestia's sun once again rose over Cloudsdale, more than a hundred ponies laid passed out on the arena floor. Most ponies had a place to stay, either in the nearby hotel or at a friends place, but many, like Rainbow Dash and Twilight had arrived on a whim and simply found a place for themselves and slept under the night sky.
Twilight awoke huddled together with Rainbow Dash and a dozen other ponies, locked in a chaste embrace to escape the chilly night-time air. After a needlessly long moment where her mental faculties locked in place one by one, a notion entered her mind. She rushed to the booth hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious DJ from yesterday.
She caught the diskjockey loading the spotlight rig into a hot air balloon. It still looked odd, Twilight had to note, seeing a unicorn stand firmly on the cloud and haul stuff into a basket that bobbed gently, whisking away the smoky clouds underneath.
“Excuse me?” Twilight began sheepishly.
“What do you want?” the DJ grunted back, clearly this was at least two hours and two caffeinated beverages too early for her.
“I was just wondering about the gear you're using,” Twilight said, with the same nervous stance as somepony stepping into a mine field. “I mean, I just have never seen anything like it, and I wonder...”
This simple request ignited something in the young mare and she instantly forgot about her previous early afternoon grumpiness. She dragged Twilight behind her wagon and proudly opened a reinforced iron chest. The turntables laid embedded in silk and cotton and glistened like treasures as the sun peered down on them.
“What do you think? I built them myself,” the DJ confined. “These bad boys got a chromed body and a brushless motor underneath, direct drive. You could throw these down the edge of Cloudsdale and still be able to play them afterwards... but if you try that, I'll kill you!” she added and shot Twilight a fierce look behind her purple mirrorshades.
With that, she backed away and left the floor open for Twilight to study the devices. The wheels were adorned by a multitude of dots that would appear static when seen under strobe light. She risked giving one of them a careful spin and watched how a spiral pattern danced across the surface.
“But, I don't understand!” came her analysis. “How do they move? I don't see a crank anywhere.”
The question made the disk jockey shift nervously, suddenly she became all too eager to close the lid of chest and load it back onto the balloon.
“Oh, look at the time!” she explained in an entirely unconvincing manner. “It was really nice talking to you, but I gotta be in Manehattan by six. See ya!” And with that, she jumped into the balloon and let her weight bring the airship all the way down to the ground. Right before the hole in the cloud closed, Twilight could see her hurriedly load her baggage onto a wagon.
“Huh?” Twilight exclaimed in response to this curious display.
At 18.45, the famous DJ PON3 played a gig in Manehattan while in an unusually flighty mood. She would avoid using the microphone, except for official announcement and she eyed everypony approaching the DJ booth with a suspicious eye.
On the other side of the room, a white earth pony stallion of the kind that seemed born and bred to serve in Celestia's army focused his attention on the DJ. He was dressed in a squares interpretation of the hip fashions on display at the club —a white collar with neon cuffs— and he blended in about as well as a wolf in a litter full of puppies.
For one eternally long second, DJ PON3 met the strangers gaze. And that was enough so send shivers down her spine. She made motions towards the door, but was stopped with an extended hoof by the club's owner. He shook his head and silently ordered her back to her station.
Her hoof trembled while she put it over the wheel of her turntable and when the cue for the next track fell, it was five milliseconds out of step, making the white-coated stranger in the back raise an eyebrow. She corrected the beat with a twitchy motion while the rest of her body were frozen solid.
The rest of the evening proceeded in a similarly nerve wrecking fashion, though DJ PON3 kept her anxieties hidden behind her mirrorshades and a frozen smile. Eventually she had lost track of the stranger and she could finally get back into the groove, launching tracks into her headphones and tasting them with the air of a wine-snob.
Last calls, and the few ponies left had grown tired of dance music. Smooth jazz were coming from a decidedly normal phonograph while DJ PON3 collected all her gear. She sang along to the tune of the gramophone while coiling a thick black cable around her front hooves. Wade in the water, fillies wade in the water, who's gonna trouble the water...
“Excuse me, miss Scratch?”
A hoof grabbed her by the shoulder, prompting an almost electric jolt. Her glasses fell to the ground and she closed her eyes right before they shattered. She did not need to see the reflection in her ruined mirrorshades to know that the hoof that held on to her was white....
At 06.45 the next day, an exited colt galloped trough a field. School was at least an hour away and a full coin purse rattled in his saddlepack. In his mind, blocks was already flying across a black screen and his hooves itched for a pair of buttons. His spirit was high, but it crashed down to the ground spectacularly when he arrived at the spot where the arcade machine used to be and found only the ghost of a square traced in the grass.
“Huh? But it was here only yesterday!” he protested to nopony in particular.
Twilight could determine —with absolute certainty— that the arcade machine consisted of 725 interlocking parts. All of which was strewn across the library floor, carefully labelled and diagrammed.
It was an investigation born out of two sleepless nights: One where curiosity and insomnia made her haul away the machine on a rented wagon at some stupid our of the night. And one where she spent hours carefully disassemble it in a way that allowed it to be put back in near-mint condition. In theory, anyway.
“Twilight....” Spike's voice, reminding her that she indeed had an assistant and wasn't alone with her mind in this hollowed-out tree.
“Mhmm?” she replied on autopilot, her face still deep in her calculations.
“Twilight, there's somepony at the door....”
“Thanks for the information, Spike.” He had bothered her almost the whole night, urging her to go to sleep. It was only when he himself couldn't keep his eyes open any more that he had stopped.
“...and he's looking pretty angry...”
“I'll deal with it later, all right?” Some noise or something must've woken him up around noon, because the nagging started again.
She was so close now, something incredible was lurking in these strange pieces of plastic and metal. The shape of it was dawning on her with the grace and speed of a glacier travelling across the tundra. So close now...
“Does this have anything to do with the box you stole?” Spike wondered accusatory. “And don't say you only borrowed it. It's in pieces!” Twilight furrowed her eyebrows, and all the vestiges of tact that held back her frustration dissolve at once.
“Shut up, Spike!” she roared, and in her mind, it was like something loosened and the last piece of the puzzle appeared from under a sofa cushion. Or something. Everything clicked into place: The cable, the strange illogical circuits of metal, the microscopic grooves... A complete blueprint of the machine formed before her inner eye, making her jolt up from her seat.
“In pieces? Has my beautiful device been hacked into pieces?!” a frantic voice came from the pony by the door frame in response to their conversation.
He rushed past Spike into the main room of the library, only to find a violet blur darting from each side of the room to the other. In the middle, all the scattered parts were being reassembled at a lighting phase. The owner of the machine stared with his mouth agape while Twilight displayed engineering skills that could match his own.
“I take it you're the pony who made this thing, right?” Twilight remarked, not even looking up from the circuit board she was piecing together. “Very elegant design, I must say. Using the flow of electric charges as a power source, that was a stroke of genius! There's just one question I want to ask...”
The stallion still hadn't fully recovered from walking into this scene, too much information to process at once. But this question forced him into the here and now and he extended his hoof begging for a pause.
“Stop!” he exclaimed, and when he finally had Twilights undivided attention, he needed to pause for a long breath.
“Look, this isn't as simple as you think it is. You really think you and I are the first ponies to realize you can use electricity to charge programmable machines?” he continued, and this made Twilights ear perk up with interest. Seeing that his word had the entirely wrong effect, the old stallion tried another tactic.
“I didn't make my machines to teach anypony the ins and outs of electronics, I just wanted to make ponies happy. That you managed to reverse-engineer my design from scratch is nothing short of extraordinary. But trust me when I say that you're better off just taking the arcade machines for granted, just an odd background flavour.
“Heh, it's funny,” he concluded. “You are probably the only pony I could actually talk about this stuff to and you'd understand... but I can't!”
“I don't see why not,” Twilight protested. “There are so much potential in these chips. Not just for games, but other things too! Just imagine...”
The stallion gave her a stern gaze and stepped one and a half step closer, locking Twilight between him and the half-finished machine.
“I have imagined!” he growled. “I've spent months fiddling with these things, you don't think it occurred to me to do something more than just a silly colt's game?”
“B-but...” Twilight protested, instinctively looking for an escape route.
“Listen, if you are still loyal to princess Celestia, you stop investigating this right now!” He turned around and walked with heavy steps towards the door.
Before he was out of the doorframe, he added “...and destroy that machine. Burn it if you need to, I don't care!” with a tone of voice that indicated that he indeed DID care. And before she could protest, he slipped out of the library and back into the streets.
Twilight watched him walking down the road and a hundred thoughts ran trough her head at once. She trotted up to the doorstep and nearly went out, then back to the machine. She ran her hoofs trough the green circuit board protruding from the unfinished control panel. As she felt every bump and line, she could trace a map of energy flowing trough the device. Not “magic”, but a force that came from the laws of nature itself. A reality completely separated from ponies. Wild but tameable.
A notion entered her mind, making her turn around and practically gallop out the door.
Dear Princess Celestia
I guess I have neglected to write you for quite a while, haven't I? It's just that lot of things have been on my mind. For the last couple of weeks, I've been living in a world of circuit boards, resistors and binary codes.
First it was purely theoretical; I didn't know how to get enough charge to actually power anything. Then I met somepony who taught me how to make a home generator. He told me that this would work for anything I might want to do, but after a few days of construction and programming, the generator had completely burned out.
This gave me an idea. I guess I could just have gotten two generators, just to alternate between them but that seemed like a waste. If I had somepony else who worked on this, we could divide the workload between us and alternate between each others generators. That way, no device had to be completely idle, but got to cycle trough periods of lighter and heavier work.
I gave a console to each of my friends. At first, they where pretty confused, especially Applejack, who didn't like the idea of some “newfangled thingamajig” invading her home. But they all adapted pretty fast.
Rarity uses her to keep a database over her customers. In neatly ordered punch cards she keeps information on the dress size, preferences and martial status of everypony that orders something in her show.
Fluttershy does something similar for her animal friends. I've told her that if she'd just give her information over to a biologist, he'd have invaluable data about the ecology of Ponyville, but she's reluctant. She says that it really wouldn't be nice to do such a thing without first asking the animals. And since last I checked, her list of “friends” numbered at least a hundred, not including the bees and wasps, it would take a while...
Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash really got into the whole “gaming” thing. I'm glad I found a way to copy that “Space Invaders” game onto cartridges, or else I would've had them lounging around my house the whole day, playing the arcade machine and aptly living up to the name of the game.
And Applejack... well, at first she didn't find much use for hers, but then I created a network between each of our homes so we could exchange information without needing to walk to each other. Using the “horsehoe-net” as Spike jokingly called it. It was a simple sound-based system: each day our consoles would emit a high-pitched sound, too high for ponies to hear and whistle a code for the other consoles to listen to.
One day, I found my machine spouting nonsense code, letters and numbers that didn't make any sense whatsoever. At first I thought it was just a glitch, but it kept happening over and over. So, out of curiosity, I copied the code over to a punch card and found to my surprise that it created the outline of an apple.
When I ran over to Sweet Apple acres, I found Applejack with a big grin on her face and Weeonas dog whistle dangling from her neck. Somehow, she had found the exact frequency to trick my machine into thinking it was time so share information and she just couldn't help showing off. I have improved the security of the network, and I am pretty sure that AJ is already working on ways to subvert it...
But I am gradually becoming aware of other forces in motion. At his insistence, I helped a pony in town called Gizmo build a console, and a few days later, I found that he had gone missing. Other ponies connected to our little project have gone missing as well, and it's hard not to see a pattern. There are more guards lurking around the town than usual, and I don't think I need to tell YOU why.
Tell me, Celestia, how long have technology bubbled just under the surface while you suppressed it? A year? Ten years? A thousand years? In a way I can understand you, I know in what sort of direction this cultural evolution could lead if we let it. But at the same time, I can't sit idly by with so much potential going to waste.
I have been working on something I haven't even dared tell my friends about yet. It began with a thought: Why be confined to these big bulky consoles?
I tried to make the machinery smaller and more elegant, but I still needed an exoskeleton to help with the extra weight. Once I had that, however, everything fell into place. My magic could control the suit and the computer in the suit could enhance my magic.
Ever since I arrived in Ponyville and my purpose became known, there have been rumours that I am to become the next princess. I do not know if that was your intention, but I can definitely feel my power grow. More ponies are joining our network every day, turning away from your reality to the world I helped create.
I still consider you my mentor –and friend. But I have to wonder if your methods still works in the era that is dawning. The next thousand years might not be the era of alicorns, but the era of silicon...
...and I'm not sure there's a place for you in that era.
sincerely
Twilight Sparkle
Author's Note
Allright, first of all. Owlor, what the hay are you doing writing this when you should be working on Dysphoria? Well the thing is, I write Dysphoria with a co-author, Lucefudu, who's a med student, a very debilitating condition whose main symptom is that all your free time suddenly disappear. So I'm just not gonna be able to get him on the gdocs except for a coupla times per month, slowing down a chapter that's already taking ages to write.
I needed some sort of break, cus when I'm writing on Dysphoria, I'm not really writing as Owlor, I'm writing as the left hemisphere of some sort of fanfic-writing Jäger called Owlorandluce". I needed a quick little story that was all Owlor as a quick break.
I've been wanting to write pony cyberpunk since forever now, because I've never seen that being played in a way that I liked. Most of the attempts I've seen have simply taken the cliche cyberpunk world in Bladerunner or The Matrix and dumped ponies into it.
The problem is that this setting is firmly rooted in a a human society at around the 80s, you can't just add ponies to it and expect it to work. In my mind, that's not cyberpunk, its simply a crossover with a generic cyberpunk universe. It has all the trappings of cyberpunk, but not the themes or the attitude.
The germs to this story came from reading "Mirrorshades", a cyberpunk anthology edited by Bruce Sterling. Only a small number of the stories actually took place in your typical cyberpunk future. The rest had settings as diverse as 1700-century France (Mozart in Mirrorshades) and a cathedral inhabited by human-gargoyle hybrids. (Petra)
I don't agree with calling either of those stories "cyberpunk", but it did inspire me to think of cyberpunk beyond cyborgs and trenchcoats. Altough I DID end up including mirrorshades, some elements you just have to have...
Some miscellaneous notes:
The nifty letters in the header and footer should be familiar to players of Minecraft.
I chose to go with House rather than dubstep for Vinyl, cus it fits more with my headcanon.
The song Vinyl is singing on is an old gospel standard. It's weird picturing Vinyl humming along to smooth jazz, innit?
