Deathonomics

Let me tell you the story of an empire that began with a pencil. The story does not begin with a pencil. The story begins with colors: pink, purple and yellow, and how beautiful one pony looked….

Her name was Piera Pareta. She was the most beautiful mare in the world, and no stallion could view her face without falling in love.

This proved to be quite bothersome. Piera thought economics was a lot more interesting than stallions, and did her best to avoid them. That was why she was annoyed one day to see a stallion enter the library after almost a year of solitude. She would have to find a new hiding spot.

Piera was struggling to stuff her tent into her Edgeworth Box when she heard the stallion come up the stairs. She hid her face against the wall, but the stallion walked past her without even glancing her way.

The first fish to evolve legs and flop awkwardly out of the water probably wasn’t half as surprised as Piera. Hesitantly, she turned around and watched the stallion feel his way along the shelves. Eventually he selected a book and sat down at a table with it. A few hours later, he returned the book and left.

Piera considered running, but she had nowhere to go. The dusty upper floor of the library was her home—well, it was the cat’s home, but Piera had fought tooth and hoof for her corner, and she was keeping it. After a while she relaxed and started to read again.

Piera had the oddest habit. When she was thinking, she spoke out loud, carrying on a conversation with herself. This caused her no end of trouble, as she would often be nodding and mumbling, “Yes, yes, that works,” as a suitor or three knelt before her, jostling with each other and making promises, offers and declarations of their love. Piera tended not to notice these things while she was lost in thought, and she was often horrified to wake up the next day to find a severed dragon’s head and perhaps a suitor or two's laid atop a pile of bloodstained jewels outside her door. That was why she almost didn’t notice when the stallion returned.

Piera held her breath. The stallion climbed the stairs, turned past her without looking, and felt his way through the shelves again until he found a book he liked. Then he sat down, opened the book up, looked at it, returned it a few hours later, and left.

This continued for several days. Eventually Piera hardly noticed him anymore, treating him much like how a cat treats a human without a food-opener, i.e., not at all.. She read her books, argued with herself, and she screamed when he tapped her on the shoulder.

“Quiet down!” the librarian snapped from below. Piera’s face burned hotter than the sun. The sight of her blushing was like a sunset viewed through a lot of air pollution. It was deeply beautiful and profoundly moving, and it made her life very difficult.

“Excuse me,” the stallion said, “I heard you talking—“

“Sorry!” Piera whispered, wishing she didn't sound so much like an angel singing a lullaby to a little foal on Hearth's Warming Eve just as the first snow began to fall. “I’ll keep it down.” She hoped he wasn’t the sort who would try to fight an ursa major to impress her. Piera always felt vaguely guilty when she saw the smear on the ground.

“It’s fine, actually. I thought what you had to say about the natural rate of interest was very interesting.”

“Oh, that,” Piera said, blushing for the first time in her life without being afraid she might start a war. “Some ideas are just begging to be refute—wait, what?”

“It is an exciting time to be an economist,” the stallion agreed. “I heard young Frankie Knight speak a year ago about her ideas on the source of profits. It set my all my hairs on edge, and I have quite a lot of them.”

“Uh, hello?” Piera gestured at her face. “Anypony in there? Can you see me?”

“I can’t, in fact.”

Piera blushed again, hoping that a war might start to draw their attention away. “Oh, um—sorry. It’s just—I saw you reading. Um. I’m not ableist.”

“I never said you were. In fact, I like to look at books.”

“But you can’t read them?”

“No. But if I can’t see anything, I would like it to at least be a book. Generally, I strive to be as metaphorical as possible.”

Piera waved a hoof in front of his face.

“Stop that.”

“You can see!”

“No, but sighted ponies are incredibly predictable. Why does anypony think it’s a good idea to ‘test’ a pony’s blindness?”

Piera looked desperately out the window. “I think a war is starting—“

“Tell me more about the natural rate of interest.”

Piera did.

So it went. The stallion visited the library and Piera everyday. They discussed the latest economics research and debated everything from interest rates to the trade cycle. They even befriended the cat, marking their concord with a small crystal statue the stallion bought.(1)

They had one debate that never ended.

“I can make a pencil,” he said.

“From scratch? Alone? Commercial grade? You cannot.”

“I can,” he insisted.

Finally she challenged him to prove it. So the next day, he didn’t return. Piera shook her head wryly and began another book.

The stallion’s journey began in the cedar forest of Ostleregon. To cut down the tree he needed a saw made of metal. So he went to the iron ore mines of Whinnysota. He needed a shovel, and a pickaxe, both made of metal with wooden handles.

He was beginning to get the feeling the problem was circular.

While he scrabbled for ore with his bare hoofs, he began to get hungry. But he could not buy food without forfeiting the challenge. He had to make it himself.

He scavenged, but it was time-consuming and forced him to roam away from the mines. He dedicated himself to learning the seasons and the soil, planting crops and waiting to harvest them. He stamped on grain until it became flour, and added water he gathered to turn it into dough. This all became a lot easier when he finally had a shovel, but before he could have his shovel he needed a smelter and a mold. This took some time.

Finally he had his pick-axe too, and soon his saw. He gathered up his things and, carrying as much seed as he could, returned to the forests of Ostleregon. He cut down a small cedar tree and turned it into lumber. He knew he needed to cut the log into a pencil length slat not one-fourth inch thick. It took many tries to get this exactly right. Then he realized he needed to return to Whinnysota to make a kiln, which he hauled back to Ostleregon to dry the slat. He learned how to tint the wood, and then he kiln-dried it again. Then he learned to make wax from a plant, which he applied to the slat, and then dried it again in the kiln. Now he had a wooden slat the length and thickness of a pencil that looked pretty, like a commercial-quality one, instead of a natural sickly white. All this was complicated somewhat by his blindness.

Piera checked her watch.

The next part was difficult. He made another tool with the ore in Whinnysota and used it to cut eight grooves into the wooden slat. He made another slat and cut eight grooves into it as well. Then he went to Broncodale to gather graphite. He still wasn’t sure how he would glue the slats together. He mined the graphite and mixed it with clay from Marissippi. He went to Mexicolt and learned to make wax from the candelilla leaves, which he mixed with the graphite as well. He returned to find his wood, equipment and machines had all been stolen, including the wooden slats. So he started over.

When he had two slats again and the graphite, he laid the graphite in one of the slats. Now he needed glue, but he didn’t know how glue was made. When he found out, he decided to opt instead for a glue made out of wheat. He planted the wheat and waited.

He used the glue to hold slats together. From this he cut eight pencils. This proved to be important, as weather, accidents, mishaps and crime took seven of them over the years.

He learned to grow castor beans and refine the oil. He used them to make the lacquer, although getting it to turn yellow stumped him for a while. He learned to make a film formed by applying heat to carbon black to make a label on the pencil.

He mined zinc and copper and transformed it into sheet brass to make the ferrule. He built a ship—another long story—to take him across oceans to gather rapeseed oil and reacted it with sulfur chloride to make the factice, the ingredient to make the eraser (boy, was he surprised to learn that). Pumice and cadmium sulfide were also involved, and rubber as a binding agent. Finally he had his pencil.

A long time had passed. Piera was curious to see the result of the experiment, so she became immortal, still waiting every day at the library for the stallion to return. The cat had died, which was sad. Piera buried her at night when no pony would see her face.

The stallion returned. He presented the pencil to Piera, who frowned skeptically at it, but it looked close enough. She was willing to concede the point.

“Let’s get married,” she suggested.

“I don’t love you,” he said. “I just wanted to see if I could falsify your hypothesis.”

This story is mostly true, although some later historians disputed the point about the cat. But it is known to every student of economics, the story of how a pencil is made, the incredible vast amounts of knowledge and labor it takes to create a single, simple pencil.(2)

It is a solemn tradition in Equestria that when this story is told, everypony who hears it breaks a pencil in half. For the most amazing thing about a pencil is that for all the effort and knowledge it takes to create one, you can buy a dozen for a bit these days. Where are you shopping? Oh, yeah, the deals are pretty good there right now. Yeah, well, you know how it is when the school year starts up again. Hey, can I borrow your pencil? I’ll give it back—thanks. Hey, look, if I shake it like this it looks all floppy….

This story was on the mind of Twilight Sparkle as she prepared to draw up a contract with a scared mom-daddy forest trying to impregnate the sky.(3)

The price system wasn’t simply about allocating scarce resources. It was something more, something about…coordination. The first rule of economics is that ponies are diverse. They have their own principles of motion that are not parallel lines. So why aren’t they constantly bumping into each other…?

The answer was the price system. Ponies set prices by their behavior, and prices set the behavior of ponies. It was like a giant message board where all the ponies could gather to say, “I want this much of this,” “Well I want it more,” “Okay, I’ll try this then,” “I’m using it, but you can have some if you want it that much, and I’ll substitute for some of this instead,” a billion times a day, so fast and so wide-reaching, cooperation enforced on the margins by the promise of immediate rewards….

Twilight didn’t place her hoof on a tree trunk. The forest didn’t want to be touched, so she wouldn’t touch it.

“Statues,” she said, “Aren’t really the same thing as a promise.”

(She could hear Pinkie Pie pounding on the tree trunk like a drum.)

“But it’s good to have something concrete,” Twilight said. “Something you can see and touch. Um. I’m not very good at this, am I?” She glanced at the other ponies, who had useless-but-encouraging looks on their faces. Not what she needed right now. She turned back to the tree. Did it even matter? It’s not like she could maintain eye contact with a forest.

No…she didn’t need to. The most amazing thing about the price system wasn’t just that it coordinated ponies into a system of cooperation, but it did so with ponies who absolutely hated each other. Applejack didn’t sell her apples to ponies she liked. She sold them to ponies willing to spend money on them. Pinkie Pie didn’t make everypony undergo some kind of anti-muffin litmus test. The only qualification anypony needed to get their hoofs on one of her famous cupcakes was a wallet full of bits.

Ponies are diverse, but they are united under the liquid flag of money. If Rarity made dresses for half-a-dozen ponies, they would all have different tastes in style, material and cut, but the one thing everypony would demand is for Rarity to make sure it stays within their budget.

Appleloosans didn’t get along with buffalo, but that didn’t stop them from contracting out to buffalo firms that did the job faster for a lower rate. There were still plenty of old ponies who had some old-fashioned thoughts about cows, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t hire cheap cow labor when the opportunity was present. And if a bear wanted to pay for lunch, no pony would refuse her service.  The one species everypony looked upon with equal favor was specie….

Twilight firmly believed that the only thing stopping the market from expanding into space, bridging xenosystems like the ecosystems already united under it was shipping costs.

But…it wasn’t that simple, was it? It sure was bothersome living in a world where you had to ask permission to expel carbon dioxide from your snout.

Ohhhhhhhh.

“I get it!” Twilight said excitedly. “Of course you’re scared, forest! Gosh, imagine taking millenia-old survivor of the Snow and plopping her in the middle of a hyperactive modern market. She’d be afraid to sign anything, never take a taxi anywhere, always worried ponies are exploiting and cheating her, and let’s be honest, they probably are.”

“I didn’t do nothing,” Rainbow Dash said quickly. “I wasn’t even there.”

“There are costs to transacting in the marketplace, transaction costs. Coasepony is best pony,” she added automatically, like crossing herself. “That’s why we have property rights.”

Pinkie Pie drummed the tree trunk near Twilight. The forest was shaking, groaning, but Twilight was too excited to care about life and limb. On the margin, they were worth giving up for this.

“The forest wants to know what you mean, exactly,” Pinkie Pie said. “Hey, this is kind of fun! I always knew I would end up combining music and telepathy to help a forest learn economics. Say, Twilight—“

“I just need something leading,” Twilight said hurriedly. “Property rights say that there are some things we don’t have to contract for. I don’t need to pay everypony who likes my grass tall if I want it cut short. This keeps the marginal rate of substitution as to the extent of the market tolerably high, if you see what I mean.”

More drumming. “The forest says, not really,” Pinkie Pie reported.

Twilight didn’t even care that she was talking to an evil ancient murderous forest anymore. This was fun.

“I had friends, and then I got my hoofs on a scarce resource,” Twilight said giddily. “It was terrifying. I thought my life was going to be nasty, brutish and short.”

“We were going to hug you,” Fluttershy protested.

Twilight shuddered. “See? And they each had their reasons for wanting it. Pinkie Pie wanted to cater, Rarity to show off her dresses, Fluttershy wanted to…kidnap somepony, I’m not really sure—“

“Hug,” Fluttershy insisted. “But sometimes my knees cramp and I, uh, can’t un-hug, so I just sort of bring them with me….”

“—Rainbow Dash was looking to relax with her legally earned gains, and Applejack simply wanted a ticket because they’re valuable. And how was I supposed to decide which—which of my friends should have—who was more important—that’s a terrible thing to do to a pony, now that I think about it. I’m kind of mad, now. Allocating resources is a horrible, thankless task. To allocate them to one pony is to not allocate them to another pony—values go unfulfilled, and the loss is always felt more sharply than the gain—the cold touch of scarcity—the margin shrinks, and the margin is her blade—“

The forest quaked. Black vines shot out and slammed against her shield. Pain seared through Twilight’s horn and down her spine, shaking her hoofs. She stumbled, reeled back; her eyes rolled up; she saw Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Applejack and Rarity all grabbed, pulled toward the dark shadows behind the formidable trees; the Cerberus and sky serpent were too slow.

It hurt. Twilight set her hoofs on the ground. It hurt. She raised her horn. It hurt, and even so, with her magic she took all the vines, the trees, traveled down into the roots and was almost torn to mental pieces as the path split off exponentially faster than her reflexes—

(A part of Twilight, the part that was simply a scientist, remembered to try agent-based modeling again with Rainbow Dash's help.)

—There was a mind there, or something like it, some means of working purposefully with information. Twilight couldn’t understand it, but maybe it could understand her—

“I am not trying to hurt you!” Twilight shouted. “Get that through your dumb, wooden…roots! No pony is trying to hurt you!”

The vines stopped moving. The ponies they held were thrashing, shouting something, blurred distortions of noise and static. Twilight didn’t even care anymore. She was tired, something fat and wearing overalls in her nervous system was complaining about overuse and under-maintenance, something was broken, the budget constraint or whatever it was that kept your brain from being sneezed out through your ears….

It was worth it. That was the whole point. We give things up, and even though the loss hurts more than the gain heals, it’s still worth it.

“I get it!” Twilight snarled. “Everyday, you hear ponies saying, it’s like, ‘Ooh look at that forest she’s all wooden, no brains in her at all, blah blah look how much water she’s drinking I bet she weighs a hundred tons!’ And they laugh, and it sucks, and you’re afraid of friendship, but they aren’t your real friends. We are friends! Me and you and Pinkie Pie and everypony else who’s name I can think of which isn’t anypony right now because I don’t even know where they went all off to the Daughters and now I only see my family through mail which comes out of Spike’s stomach and goes back in it when I send things out send things out and things come in budget constraint consumption function of income endowments money profits minus voluntary defense funds liquidity constraint must obey the liquidity constraint AND WE WON’T EVER HURT YOU!”

Twilight tried to remember how breathing works. She only remembered the letters. “Talk is cheap, surveys aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, uncertainty abounds, an overlap of diverging outcomes and assumptions don’t matter only outcomes OHHH THAT’S WHY YOU NEEDED A STATUE then I will cut off my left hoof my right hoof horn tail ears eyes nose mouth sell my books lend my books—“

Twilight heaved as the automatic order to breathe overrode the backlog of speech commands. She took a breath, and in the silence—

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

“Um, I hope I got all that,” Pinkie Pie said. “That was a really weird speech, Twilight. I’ve never even heard a friendship speech like that before.”

“Coasepony is best pony,” Twilight said. It was all that was keeping her upright.

She didn’t see the vines drop her friends. She didn’t hear them land by her. She only felt them, the liquidity flowing into her horn, the focal point of the five full-sisters of friendship….

(For a Plank time, if even that, Twilight wanted a crystal—)

Twilight’s eyes focused. Her legs stopped trembling. Some of what had been given up was being paid back with interest.

The trees groaned.

“The forest says, um, the forest says, what now?” said Pinkie Pie.

There was a moment of very confused silence.

“Are we going to become friends with a forest that keeps trying to kill us?” Rainbow Dash said skeptically.

“It’d raise the value of our property if there weren’t any murder-forests nearby,” Applejack mused. “Friendly cuddle forests would probably be even better.”

“There must be some incredible dyes in here I can use to make stunning dresses,” Rarity said.

“And all kinds of naturally evolved organisms to play with,” Fluttershy whispered.

“Not so fast,” Twilight said, almost laughing, but the piercing pain in her horn put an end to that notion. “Ow—I’ve realized something. Hey, am I a good friend?”

Rarity, Applejack, Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash looked at each other.

“Yes?” Rainbow Dash guessed.

Applejack nudged Rarity. “Twilight, you’re friendly than a rattlesnake at a Mexicoltan dance. Ain’t that right, everypony?”

“She made us sleep on dirt for three days,” Rarity muttered. Applejack stepped on her hoof. “Ow—yes, all right, she’s a great friend.”

“You never listen when we talk,” Fluttershy whispered.

“Exactly,” Twilight beamed. “I’m an—ow—terrible friend, like all of you said. There’s a saying in economics: ‘you can’t become friends with a cat in a day.’ Of course,” she laughed, “It’s a tautology, as befriending a cat is known to be completely impossible—“

“Why is my hair made out of snakes, and why are the snakes on fire?” Pinkie Pie said from behind the wall of trees.

“But that’s not the point,” Twilight coughed. “The point is, we’ve been friends longer than I’ve been friends with anypony, and I’m still having a hard time getting used to the whole ‘listening when ponies who aren’t economists talk,’ and ‘don’t spend all day in the Mark II’ thing—“

“The what?” Applejack whispered to Rainbow Dash, who shrugged.

“It’s going to take a while for me to become a true, true friend. All we can do is keep trying our hardest to push the margins outward. Because, you see, what this big, cartoonish, world-threatening sequence of events has all really been about is me learning to be more comfortable and open with other ponies.” Her friends clapped politely.

“By the same token, we can’t expect the forest to become friends with us in a day. If we can keep her from destroying the world, that’s good enough for now. This story is really a story about a forest overcoming years of trauma and betrayal with the help of sincere friendship.”

“Now,” Twilight said, turning her attention to the forest. “Let’s complete our talk about the price system, which is what this story is really all about.”

“Hold on, I’m getting a psychic reading from the forest,” Pinkie Pie said. “It’s, um, wait a second…okay, the forest says, ‘No no please no anything but that please just make her stop talking about economics anymore I can’t take it I’m going crazy yeeeeaaargh.’”

“Uh…really?”

“Probably. The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad because there’s a constant background ‘Awww yiss more pollen mm nice pollen’ that I just try to block out.”

“Um. Uh....” Twilight tried to recapture her focus. “That makes sense, actually. To the forest, economics probably seems like a weapon. I think the original Edgeworth Boxes—you know, the ones that follow you around on little legs— were made out of her wood. Well, um—“ Twilight cut off as she realized the other ponies were talking to the forest.

“She talked to us for a long time about economics too,” Applejack said sympathetically. “Life can be hard sometimes. My name’s Applejack, by the way. I’ve been watering trees for years and still love it as much as I did my first day out among the apple trees.”

“She went on and on and on,” Rarity agreed. “It was awful. Oh, my, this bark is gorgeous. Who does your leaves?”

“I mean, it’s not like it didn’t make sense,” Fluttershy said. “But I didn’t ask for it, you know? I just wanted to plant my roots and absorb some water at the end of the day, not listen to a lecture on economics.”

“The forest, says, um, the forest says, ‘Purrrr,’” Pinkie Pie reported.

Twilight’s jaw dropped.

“No. This isn’t happening.”

But it was. A low rumbling built up from the forest. It sounded very much like an enormous wooden cat.

“No,” Twilight said. “No no no no no—“

Rainbow Dash flew over to her. “Accept it. Those girls can make friends with anything. I hear Pinkie Pie’s older sister can make friends with rocks.”

“…Sentient ro—“

“Nope.”

“Surely—“

“Uh-uh.”

Twilight stared. And reached a conclusion.

“None of this is fair.”

“Yup.”

They continued to watch.

“Is Rarity braiding that tree’s branch?”

“Just give in and admit they’re better at this than you.”

“I’m an economist! The science of friendship! Second only to Princess Celestia!”

“Oh, look,” Rainbow Dash said, “Fluttershy just gave it a kiss.”

“She’s a terrible murderous pony-eating forest that’s undergone the trauma of a thousand years of pain and fear!”

“Sure is. And now it’s also a forest that purrs when Applejack give it trunk rubs.”

“Graaaaaah!”

“Go take a nap in the sky serpent again. Rest your magic. Tank’ll draw up something in the meantime.”

“Stupid division of labor,” Twilight grumbled as Rainbow Dash helped her to the sky serpent’s mouth. “Dumb ol’ specialization and comparative advantage. Who needs it anyway, except for everypony who wants to live?”

The agreement Tank wrote wasn’t stirringly written or particularly imaginative, but it was pragmatic and robust, even if there were far too many subclauses involving lettuce. The forest walls parted, revealing a pink and flustered pony covered in dirt. Her hair was filled with leaves and dirt, possibly because her head had swelled to three times its size.

“I…I hear everything,” Pinkie said, staring wildly up out of the corner of her eye. She walked backward, dragging her head along the ground. “All the voices….”

After a bit of of panic among her friends, Pinkie managed to communicate a herbal bath ought to do the trick. Unfortunately water turned into grapefruit when it touched Pinkie’s coat. (“What’s that supposed to mean?” Applejack said angrily.) They agreed to wait for the effects to wear off.

Several hours later, Pinkie Pie’s head suddenly deflated with a zshwoop so fast it left a vacuum where Pinkie’s extra cranium had been.

“Whoa,” she said, pulling her head up and clutching at it with her hoof. “That was a blarf adventure.”

“Pinkie!”

“Oh, hey girls,” Pinkie Pie said as they grabbed her in a group hug, even Twilight, who didn’t quite realize what was happening until her forelegs were already around Pinkie Pie. It was an odd sensation, like her heart was being microwaved. “Hey, what happened to the pollen?”

It was true. No longer sustained by the will of the forest, the pollen was breaking up and falling away. It looked like the sky was pulling open the drapes. For the first time in days, Twilight felt the sun touch her face. It was still too bright to look at directly. But for a moment, she felt that she could.

“Ow!”

Pinkie Pie giggled. “Twilight, you can’t stare at the sun directly. Everypony knows that. So what happened?”

Twilight rubbed her eyes and looked at the others. “We established property rights, so the forest can’t make pollen over Ponyville or she’ll be fined, and ponies can’t go into the forest without the forest’s permission or they’ll be subject to criminal penalties.(4)” she explained. As the CEE of the Ponyville Daughter, Twilight felt it was within her right to decide these things for the town. It wasn’t threats, and it wasn’t promises. It was just…the market, somewhere in between obsequiousness and contempt, fertile soil for friendship to flower and grow. “Also some kind of complicated deal involving ten thousand bales of lettuce and half the equity of Equestria as far as I can tell. I’m too tired to figure it out right now.”

“Me and the other pegasi’ll clear the rest of the sky,” Rainbow Dash said. “We’ll need Rarity up there with us to—“

“NO!“

“—Kidding.”

“Who’s a good girl?” Applejack cooed to the forest, rubbing a tree on the trunk. “Who’s not going to murder everypony?” Behind her the Cerberus whined unhappily.

"Her name is Jackie," Pinkie Pie said laughed. "Jackie Viner."

"Nice to meet you, Jackie," the ponies chorused.

Twilight cleared her throat. “And I have an important friendship spee—no! I defy you, stars!”

Pinkie Pie glanced at the other ponies. “How long as she been doing this?”

“Ever since she sneezed her brains out through her ears,” Rainbow Dash grinned, clapping Twilight on the back.

“Sometimes it takes an exogenous shock to break out of a harmful equilibrium,” Twilight said seriously. “Then you can find your way to a new one. In marginal steps, of course.”

The forest rumbled contentedly.

“Pinkie—“ Twilight was nervous suddenly, like she was back in school about to be tested on her economics. “I—what I told the other ponies before, when we were planning the rescue mission—that is, I—“

Twilight was interrupted by a pair of hoofs that pulled her into a mass of pink bushy hair and quite a lot of dirt and sticks.

“Oh, Twilight, while I was under the effects of the Poison Joke, I heard every friendship speech in the world,” Pinkie Pie said. “I heard it.”

“It wasn’t a friendship speech,” Twilight protested, but it was muffled by a mouthful of hair.

“Everypony has a friendship speech inside of them,” Pinkie Pie said. She looked past Twilight, smiling at something only she could see, something beyond the other ponies, the forest, the world of Equestria and everything in it. “Who have you said a friendship speech to today? Exogenous shocks don’t grow on trees, you know!”(5)

Anyway, there was much hugging and laughter, a few tears, resolutions to not charge each other money for everything anymore, and other mushy stuff we can skip. Pinkie Pie returned to oversee her Sugarcube Corners to the exultant joy and immense relief of thousands of ponies who had been forced to contemplate a future where cupcakes were mere sweet treats with icing and sprinkles rather than something to build a life around. The skies cleared, the ponies of Ponyville were suddenly very receptive to a speech from Twilight about how property rights reduce transaction costs, and a guard was posted to the door to Twilight’s Daughter to make sure she didn’t relapse. A friendship schedule was pinned to her door, and her friends came by every day to make sure it was still there.

(But she didn’t need it.)

Twilight sent out letters detailing the re-framing of the full-cost pricing controversy. None of the lonely guardians of friendship responded. Twilight was saddened by that, but it was a different kind of sadness from before. She wasn’t thinking about herself this time.

Her thoughts kept coming back to one pony in particular. One letter came.

Dear Twilight Sparkle

I am very proud of you.

Love,

Princess Celestia

Twilight knocked on the bathroom door. “Spike? When you’re finished, I’m giving you a hug.”

It was, as usual, a happy ending in the land of Equestria. Though, to one mare, it was just another ending, neither happy nor sad. She watched the forest open at the close right beside Twilight Sparkle. Then she went a few hundred miles out to where a lizard had breathed its last.

She sat on the rock afterward, sharpening her scythe on values, beliefs and dreams, pushing the margin out by shrinking the marginal unit, cutting the world into picoseconds, femtoseconds, attoseconds….

She was good at her job. She had been doing it for a very long time.

She saw everything, as usual. She saw a dragon take to the sky for the first time in centuries, stretching its wings with a satisfied roar. She saw the FlimFlam brothers in their steam-spewing machines clank down the road to Ponyville. She saw Trixie Lulamoon, who saw her as well and wished she hadn’t as she trembled violently at the entrance to a cavern so deep and vast it could have easily fit a dozen full-grown earth serpents. And other things.

Zeptoseconds, yoctoseconds….

Getting closer.

One more.

Her blade was so thin it split photons.(6) But it snagged on one strand.

She looked along the line, not as thick as a billionth fraction of a single thread of spider silk. It pointed in the direction of Ponyville. She followed. It took her to the door of a treehouse. Inside the treehouse were six ponies, laughing. One of them had gotten a lot of cake on her face somehow. Beneath the icing was a purple coat, and the thin strand led to her heart and ended there.

Twilight Sparkle had put a lot of stress on her body and her magic that long night in the forest. Now she stood, and as she did, a damaged connection was stretched beyond its limits—snapped—

The mare had been doing her job for a very long time. In all that time, she had never considered that she might have her own...what was the word? Val-use? Val-you? (Val-ent-ine? Val-et-mine?)

The scythe hovered over the strand that ended at Twilight Sparkle's heart. The mare, for the first time in her...existence, followed the line to the other end. And back to Twilight Sparkle, wiping icing off her face and getting a lot of it on the floor of her library.

Death stared.

Grinned.

And left, rising into the air.

(Or did the universe fall relative to her? Or is it all just metaphor, chess pieces on a board itself a piece-three on the great board that exists in nine dimensions…? Or some such thing....)

She rises.

Some ponies take longer than others. Some ponies have lived—been longer than others, and seen quite a bit. Their liquidity constraint is harsh, and they will take awhile. But....

Everypony has a friendship speech inside of them.

And should you meet her, you might give her a hug. What’s the worst that could happen…?

1) Unfortunately the secret of how to befriend a cat was lost to economics researchers in the intervening years.

2) Some other things happened afterward. He died. She built an empire. And so on. Science continued its work.

3) “What,” she thought later.

4) A stern talking-to from a matronly mare, but it was nothing compared to the disappointed look on her face when the culprit turned to leave.

5) She was wrong. Deep within the Everfree Forest was such a tree. Perhaps it’s best Twilight Sparkle doesn’t know this.

6) Which gave pony scientists no end of trouble.