Chapter One: Amber Rigging

Jars filled with fireflies and ire
Such a fragile light to guide us
The ignorant will fail to see the path
Fumbling, screaming and fighting
Jar after jar breaks into darkness
The fireflies leave, the spleen stays
Everything we love we leave behind
Dead grasp
Light's out

Pale Explosions -The Moth Gatherer

“Maybe it needs a new vacuum tube?” Amber Crown asked to nopony, talking to herself as she tried to work her way through the all-too-familiar troubleshooting steps of small electronic repair. “But that wouldn’t make sense… You’d blow one of the capacitors before you blow a tube.”

She was hunched over a work desk inside of Bunny & Crown, the small-electronics repair shop that she operated with her friend, colleague, and business-partner Bunny Sunbeam on the north side of Fillydelphia; working on an antique radio that kept getting sent in for repairs.

“Might as well just replace it anyway, with how many times this radio has come back we’ve practically rebuilt this thing from scratch. What’s one more part?” She complained to herself before calling out. “Hey bun, do we have any more vacuum tubes? Maybe in the back?”

“We used the last one two days ago on the Flankerson’s terminal,” a voice answered from the back of the shop. “we’re supposed to get a new shipment in sometime next week.”

“What do you mean next week?” Amber called back. “We’ve been behind on this order for a month now. First the output transformer, then the speaker wires, then the antennas. We’re losing bits on this order!”

“Well, what can you do?” Bunny’s voice said casually. Amber could almost hear the shrug in her voice.

“Scrap it and tell them it’s unfixable?” Amber groused. “Sell them one from this century?”

Bunny didn’t respond. She must’ve tried that already.

“I keep telling you to stop accepting these antique radios.” Amber said against the silence. “You know these old mares don’t like change and replacement parts get harder and harder to come by.”

Still Bunny didn’t respond, knowing Amber would eventually run out of steam and return to her work.

Amber looked at her reflection in a nearby mirror and threw her hooves into the air in a way to suggest she was asking ‘Can you believe this?’, as if the coffee-colored mare in the reflection could do anything but copy her movements. If it could however, it would most likely shake its head and say ‘no, I can’t. I’m tired of fixing this fucking radio’.

She sighed and moved all of her components to her soldering station at the end of her workbench. She turned on her soldering iron, and while she waited for it to warm up, she debated if she wanted to turn on the light to her magnifying glass as well. Even though there was enough ambient morning light coming in from the shop’s front windows, the building ultimately faced away from the sun and she wouldn’t be getting any direct light for six more hours at least. She shrugged and flipped the switch on her magnifying glass and her work area was completely illuminated by the intense light.

Finally, she slipped on her pair of Unicorn Gloves, a piece of arcano-technology made by The Ministry of Arcane Sciences that allowed earth ponies and pegasi to facilitate the small and precise movements granted to unicorns by their magic. Amber didn’t really know how they worked. Something about magic gemstones amplifying the wearer’s natural magic and focusing their intent, or some other unicorn jargon like that. All she knew was that it allowed non unicorns to perform tasks once thought impossible and opened them up to new professions. Ones like surgery, fire-arm manufacturing, jewel crafting, or in her case, electronic repairs.

Amber picked up her soldering iron, which levitated in front of her hoof as if held by some kind of invisible hand, and began to heat the solder holding the legs of the capacitor that she suspected to have been faulty.

The radio didn’t have a printed circuit board, nor was it constructed in any way similar to what she was familiar with. It was too old, and made well-before Equestria began ramping up its production to compete with the zebras; so, nothing was standardized yet. To say it was a mess would be an understatement. When Amber first opened the back panel, everything sort of just fell out of the back like somepony had spilled a plate of Spaghetti. Bunny had nonchalantly whistled her way in to the back of the shop so the radio, by choice or not, became Amber’s project.

Even the electrical diagram was faded beyond recognition., Amber could barely make out the symbols of the components and how they hooked up to each other, but as for any legible writing or voltage information?

it took her the better part of a week to sort everything out. There were so many tangled wires and unlabeled components that she pretty much had to take the entire thing apart and rebuild it. Resistors and diodes were just directly soldered to the wires. Most of the components didn't even have ratings on them. Some of the capacitors were so old they just had the word ‘Condenser’ written on them in aged hoof-writing. The most frustrating thing of all though was the fact that all the components were just crammed back into the chassis and closed up without a second’s thought.

Amber didn't know who worked on this radio last, but she wanted to push them down a well.

She pulled the capacitor off the wires once the solder had melted but paused for a moment because she didn’t actually know what to replace it with. She took a peek at the electrical diagram, but the writing was unsurprisingly illegible so she couldn't see the ratings on it either. She could make out the number seven, maybe the V for voltage, but that was about it.

She was flying blind and had to think hard about what to replace it with. A larger than needed capacitor wouldn’t have any real effect, but If it was under voltage it would fail faster; or if it was undersized it would throw off the radio’s tuning. She nickered in frustration and soldered on a capacitor that she believed would be a suitable replacement and switched the radio on…

Silence.

Annoyed and out of patience, Amber shouted ‘to Tartarus with it’ and began to jerry-rig the radio; using parts from the three separate junked radios she had laying nearby to supply parts for this project. She began Frankensteining them together. Swapping out components, bypassing certain transistors, jumping resistors, even shorting a few problematic sections of circuit that had been giving her trouble all month, until eventually, after an hour’s worth of work, she flipped the switch again.

Silence still. Amber pursed her lips in frustration and glowered at the radio, and after a few moments of seething silence, the warm orange light of the radio’s ammeter began to flicker and glow, followed shortly after by the loud brassy cacophony of an old jazz song.

♫Keep your spirit way up high, Look up to the sky,

Stand up and shout "Hallelujah, oh-oh! Hallelujah, oh-oh!"♫.

Amber always heard jazz coming out of this radio whenever she turned it on. The old bat always tuned it to this station. Always. No news, no talk shows, no entertainment, no live show. Just jazz. The radio was on this station for so long, that Amber wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the reason why the dials were stuck when it was first brought in.

♫If that Nightmare Moon should grab your hand, Here's one thing that she can't stand

Shout sister, shout sister, shout! Oh Celestia! Shout! Oh Celestia!♫

Amber had heard these songs so many times over the past month that by now she knew almost all of them by heart. Worst of all, she actually was starting to like them. She didn’t even know why either. Maybe it was the high-timber sounds of the trumpets, saxophones, and trombones, maybe it was the otherworldly feeling the music seemed to inspire in her, or maybe it was just that it sounded like an old record player. Amber didn’t know. All she did know was that the sounds of these songs were the sounds of victory, and amber began to sing along victoriously as The Hoofswell Sisters crooned from the radio.

“Just tell old Nightmare Moon how you feel, Get that old Devil right off your heel! Shout sister, shout sister, shout! Oh Celestia! Shout! Oh Celestia!”

However, Amber had to stop herself from celebrating too much. Before she could officially declare the radio to be repaired, she had to perform her final quality inspections, a procedure put in place by Bunny as a way to ‘ensure the efficacy of the repair’. Amber always hated the tedium of quality inspections. She felt it was an unnecessary step, or a just a way to bill more time to the customer, but they were partners, so they had to compromise somewhere.

Amber let out a small nicker.

At least in this instance, all she had to do was to check if the radio would consistently turn off and on and tune to other stations. So she flicked the switch, turned to a random frequency, and flipped the switch back on.

There was another delay in activation, same as before. Amber’s ears drooped, wondering if she used too many resistors, and began to feel a flash of fatigued anger begin to rise in her at the thought of yet again having to open the radio back up, but the ammeter began to glow again and Aber exhaled a sigh of relief as the radio picked up a broadcast from a local radio station; albeit with very high gain.

“...just to go out for an entire night, they were all right there behind her, and after all that time her horseshoes were on backwards. Anyway, good morning and welcome back to WHNY, The Whinny, here at the top of the seventh hour. Coming up next, we’ve got ‘Ain’t Misbehaving’, the newest single by the one and only Sapphire Shores, but before that a bit of local news. A police carriage got stuck in a tree this morning in downtown Canterlot after a demonstration of local zebras turned violent…”

It wasn’t perfect, there was a low grade static in the signal and the sound was about twice as loud as it was supposed to be, but Amber figured out loud “that old hay-eater wears hearing aids, she won’t notice it anyway.”

Even if she did, Amber didn’t care, she wanted to be done hoofing around inside of that radio. As far as she was concerned, it was good enough to go out the door, and if it burnt out, they had a perfectly functional modern Honeybee Radio they could offer as replacement. They were not accepting this job again... At least Amber needed to convince Bunny that they weren’t going to be accepting it again.

Amber turned off her equipment, removed her gloves, and triumphantly cantered into the backroom. She was about to tell Bunny about her victory over the radio, but when she rounded the corner into Bunny’s workshop, she found the cotton-colored mare tinkering with her own project. Her honey-gold mane was tied back in a ponytail and she wore a pair of goggles equipped with several magnification lenses, and she was staring through them with a practiced attentiveness as she placed tiny components into some kind of device that Amber had never seen before.

“Hey Bun,” Amber said, maneuvering past Bunny’s stacks of testing equipment and leaned backwards against the workstation. “I got that radio working.”

“I can hear.” Bunny said without looking up from the device. Amber could get a better look at it from this angle now, and it seemed to be some kind of terminal device attached to a hollow gauntlet.

Bunny was wearing her own pair of Unicorn Gloves to fit a tiny microchip onto a circuit board inside of the terminal device. Her hooves moved in a steady, almost mechanical, motion as she delicately fit the component into place and affixed tiny beads of solder to each of its legs. She was always the more meticulous of the two, and it showed in her work.

“But uh…” Amber continued. “If that thing comes back in, don’t take the job.”

“Why?” Bunny said without looking up from her project. Instead she continued to look through her eyeglasses, following the copper traces on the board to another section of the circuit. “Did you Amber-rig it?”

“...maybe.” Amber replied meekly.

“You know a tube’s gonna blow in like, a week tops, right?” Bunny said in a more knowledgeable tone. “Or a capacitor is gonna pop, or some other component is going to break and the whole thing is gonna be fried?”

This clearly wasn’t the first time they had a discussion like this.

”Well what was I supposed to do?” Amber bristled. “That thing is over a hundred years old. The diagram is so faded that I can’t even figure out what kind of capacitor to use.”

“How hard is it to fix a radio?” Bunny responded with a sassy chuckle. “It’s a loop antenna running through a couple tuning capacitors, then into an oscillator, then the vacuum tubes and I.F. transformers, a potentiometer for the volume controls, an output transformer connected to a loudspeaker, a rectifier tube, a dial lamp. And a switch…. And a bunch of wires, diodes, and smaller capacitors in between.”

“I know how a radio works.” Amber grumbled. “But what I don’t know is what that schematic says, because all the writing has faded away. I also don’t know if anypony besides us have been inside that thing in the last hundred years. I replaced almost every single component in that thing and couldn’t get it to work until I amber-rigged it.”

“Maybe it was a capacitor inside one of the IF transformers.” Bunny probed around inside the terminal with a voltmeter. “They are inside a metal casing afterall, did you try checking there?”

Amber’s shoulder’s sunk, she obviously didn’t. “I guess that would explain why it worked after I rigged it, I must’ve changed out the bad part without even realizing it.”

A silence formed between the two. Bunny was too engrossed in her project to maintain the conversation. it was clearly much more advanced than an antique radio, and so Amber looked around the room while her friend worked rather than continuing the conversation. Knowing not to disturb her once she was wrapped in focus.

Bunny’s work-area was practically filled, floor to ceiling, with electrical testing equipment. Boxes on top of boxes covered in nobs, input jacks, and dials. Some had tiny, graphed screens on them, while others had analogue gauges to measure… something with. Truth is, Amber had no idea what any of those boxes did. She would watch in awe as Bunny spent most of her time messing around with these bulky grey things. Looking at the graphs they made, performing mathematical calculations that related to electricity in some way that was so far over Amber’s head that it gave her a headache just thinking about it.

Bunny had so many of these boxes in fact, that the only light in the room was a single fluorescent fixture she had hug over her main work bench and the back door she had propped open for additional light. There weren’t even any windows, or there might have been, but they were converted by these measuring monoliths. Amber always asked her why she chose to work back here, as it was such a stark contrast to the picturesque city scenes Amber could see from her workstation at the front of the shop, but always got the answer that Bunny just preferred the seclusion. Something about how there were less distractions, so it helped her focus on her more difficult tasks; one of which she seemed to be working on at that very moment.

“What are you working on anyway?” Amber finally asked.

“It’s some top-secret contract from that Stable-Tec corporation on the other side of town. “They sent out this test kit to work on as part of the preliminary screening process.”

“What kind of contract?” Amber balked. “What the hell is that thing?”

“It’s called a pip-buck, has something to do with the vaults they are building.” Bunny answered matter-of-factly. “They sent the thing over in pieces, almost like one of those build-your-own-circuit kits that foals would get, and they said if we’re able to assemble it and get it working according to their specifications then they’d award us with a permanent contract. There’s some pamphlets and other information in the safe they sent it over in”

Bunny motioned her hoof towards a bulky blue safe that sat against the wall by the back door. The safe looked more like a steamer trunk than any traditional safes she’d seen, except it had some kind of digital keypad lock on the front instead of a clasp and padlock.

“But why us?” amber asked. Ignoring the safe.

“I guess it’s because of how close we are to their headquarters? They didn’t say much in their correspondence but if we do it well enough then we could become ‘Pip-Buck Technicians’, as they call them. We’d be repairing the broken ones they’d send in, or aid in the manufacturing of the terminal computers inside of them.”

“But why you?” Amber said more to the point. “How come I’m not working on one? You keep saying ‘we’.”

“Oh shit, sorry.” Bunny apologized. “I was more or less repeating back what the email said.” She then went on to explain how she was contacted though her connections from graduating the Canterlot Institute of Technology.

“I’m still pissed they wouldn’t let me into that school.” Amber groused.

“Don’t be so down.” Bunny said looking up from the Pipbuck for the first time. “At least you got accepted into one of the stables. Have you been assigned to one yet?”

“Yeah, Number 54.” Amber said, still in sour spirits. “The one they’re building into the hills outside of town.”

“At least you got accepted.” Bunny said compromisingly, flipping her goggles up to her forehead, revealing her emerald-green eyes. “I haven’t even gotten word that my application has been received yet, at least if we land, haha sorry, if I land, this contract, then there’s a pretty high chance they’d make me a technician inside your vault!”

Bunny smiled reassuringly but Amber only sighed.

“I mean, you have a point.” Amber sounded defeated. “But that’s not what I’m mad about. It still would have been nice to go to school with you. But they wouldn’t let me in.”

“They wouldn’t let you in because you bombed the entrance exam. Literally.” Bunny’s tone sharpened. “You Amber-rigged that securitron.”

“I got the thing working didn’t I?” Amber snapped back.

“It blew up!” Bunny exclaimed, “you cratered that auditorium!”

“It took a few steps first!” Amber said empathically “All we had to do was get the thing to POST, activate, and walk around, which It DID!.” Amber thrusted her hoof at the air to emphasize her point. “So as far as I’m concerned, I passed the test!”

This wasn’t the first time they’ve had this argument. Bunny knew how passionate Amber was about this sort of thing, but a small part of her wanted to put this argument to bed once and for all.

“I’m not trying to be mean, but that’s probably why I got contacted for the contract and you didn't.”

Amber stared hard at Bunny.

“I mean, you can’t even properly fix an antique radio.” Bunny elaborated. “Something so simple with parts available to everyday ponies. This is a Stable-Tec creation!” She motioned to the Pip-buck. “A blended fusion of Archano-technology, Unicorn tech, and electricity. These things are designed to survive a Balefire Bomb, could you imagine what would happen if you Amber-rigged something like this?”

Amber didn’t respond, she simply scowled at Bunny.

“And the contract isn’t to just simply repair it.” Bunny continued. “You have to follow their schematics, service the parts up to spec with specialized tools and limited supplies, because if we ever end up inside one of those vaults, Celestia forbid, we can’t really order new parts.”

Still Amber did not respond. She simply kept staring, shooting daggers with her eyes as she looked from Bunny, to the Pip-buck, and then various other things in the room. The whole while Bunny’s words bouncing around inside her head.

“Do you know how stupid you make me feel sometimes?” Amber finally said. “I know I didn’t go to CIT like you did, but do you have any idea how this kind of shit makes me feel?”

“How what makes you feel? Bunny said stupidly, thrown off-guard because she was expecting a more explosive response.

“THIS!” Amber motioned to Bunny and the Pipbuck. “Your lecturing, you getting all these advanced projects…” She paused to breath. “Do you know how many opportunities I’ve missed out on? I couldn’t get a job doing this stuff while you were off getting your Masters at CIT. I had to do hard labor.”

Bunny blinked, listening.

“Dock work,” Amber continued.” field service, carpentry, warehousing... I could never learn the things I wanted to learn on my own, like how any of these boxes in your office work.” She did a wide sweeping gesture at all of the testing equipment. “I couldn’t go to school for it, it was just a rehashing of what I already knew, like basic circuits and components. There weren’t classes for somepony who knew what they wanted to do, they were for ponies fresh out of High School who thought “electrical engineering might be cool, I wanna try that!’” She imitated; her tone venomous. “I wasted so much time chasing degrees and certificates that didn’t suit me and working jobs for ponies that didn’t value me that sometimes… Sometimes it feels like I missed my chance, like it’s too late for me. Like I’ll never again get that runaway excitement that made me want to do any of this in the first place.”

This time Bunny was the one who didn’t respond. She was stunned into silence by her friend’s ranting. This wasn’t anything she hasn’t heard before, she heard bits and pieces from different conversations, but having them all fit together at once painted a very grim picture.

“Like, that entrance exam was my only shot.” Amber started again. “and bombing that exam and being barred from ever applying again… “She paused, searching for something to say “It was like I just fell off, and everypony just continued on without me.”

Bunny was silent for a long time, processing everything Amber had just said. They both sat in relative silence until Bunny finally spoke up.

“For what it’s worth.” She said. “For all the shit I give you about Amber-rigging everything, I do think it’s kind of impressive how you can do it.”

“Oh yeah?” Amber said, skeptically.

“Yeah, like, you’re not dumb, you clearly understand how things work on a rudimentary level, which allows you to quickly put things together, and somehow… somehow they work!” Bunny was getting a little more emphatic. “It’s fucking amazing really, awe-inspiring if I’m exaggerating. Like you said, you got it to work. That Securitron all the applicants were supposed to build? You got it to POST, activate, and walk around an hour and a half faster than anypony else did! I mean, you missed all the ancillary stuff put in there for user safety, which is why it exploded, but that’s just it. You saw past all the extraneous components and systems and were able to quickly accomplish your task.”

Amber opened her mouth as if to say something, but Bunny continued.

“You’re not stupid. You clearly have the capacity to understand, you just need to practice.” Amber’s ears perked up at hearing this. “That’s why I asked you to open this shop with me. That’s why I made you work on that radio all month because I know you. I know eventually the pieces will fall into place.”

“Well thanks for being one of the only ponies to believe in me”. Amber said darkly, looking past Bunny, thinking about something that made her feel world-weary.

“I mean it.” Bunny persisted. “Your amber-rigging? That’s a skill in of itself. I’d never be able to do something like that because safe circuit design has been beaten into me. I’m sure in a pinch, some kind of survival situation maybe, it’d be an invaluable skill. But for normal everyday ponies? Longevity is more important. They want their stuff to last.” Bunny looked at her workbench for a specific example “Like this Pipbuck, it’s supposed to last, a long time, so understanding every component and how they interact with each other is crucial for what this device is designed to do… You get what I’m trying to say?”

Amber let all of her frustration out in one large exasperate sigh.

“Yeah, I guess.” She said.

Amber then went a long time without speaking. She simply stared at, or rather, stared past the Stable-Tec steamer safe, her gaze a thousand yards away. Clearly thinking about something distressing, as every once in a while, she sighed again, but still she did not speak.

Bunny was no stranger Amber’s moods. Growing up together, going to high school together, running a shop together. They’ve spent a great deal of their lives together, save of courts attending CIT together, so Bunny fully understood why her friend was upset. She knew from experience there wasn’t anything wrong with Amber, well, there might be, she could be suffering from some anxiety-induced depression, but she understood that Amber’s shutdowns were a simply a way for her to process whatever she was currently thinking about. Bunny sometimes likened Amber to a Terminal that didn’t have enough RAM or was running a program that was coded incorrectly and created some kind of error, causing a memory-dump. Sometimes the whole system simply becomes unresponsive, halting all unnecessary process while the processor tries to catch up with itself.

Bunny scoffed darkly, surprised by her the comparing of her friend’s emotional issues to an overloaded Terminal, but just like an overloaded terminal that was given enough time to process, Amber finally spoke again.

“...Could I try it on at least?”

“Of course!” Bunny said to Amber’s surprise. “I actually need to test to see if the modules I just installed work like they’re supposed to.” Amber grabbed the Pipbuck and carefully slipped it over her left hoof, fastening it tightly and then immediately slapped Bunny across the face.

“Awwwhatafuck was that for?” Bunny reeled.

“I don’t know!” Amber yelled. “I was frozen in place for like ten minutes. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t move!”

“Well what the fuck did you hit me for? What were you thinking?”

“I said I don’t know!” Amber’s eyes were crazed, like a frightened deer. “You were glowing green, and something on your face said 100%. Now you’re glowing red!” Amber rubbed her eyes vigorously with her hooves, trying to blink the Pipbuck’s effects out of her eyes “What the fuck is this thing?!”

“No, literally” Bunny said, trying to contain her rage, “Like, literally what were you thinking? Before you put the pipbuck on.”

I was thinking about the conversation we just had and started getting angry about my life” Amber said in a defensive stance, seeing the glow around her friend turn from red to yellow. “about everything that’s happened in my life, how everything seems to come so easy to you and sometimes I want to hit you for it…”

“Well I guess I know I assembled it correctly.” Bunny rubbed her sore cheek, and began speaking in a calmer tone, subsequently changing from yellow to green in amber’s eyes. “You somehow managed to trigger S.A.T.S. right as you put it on, it’s thought activated, and the colors you see are part of the Eyes Forward Sparkle system.”

“The what?” Amber asked.

“Eyes Forward Sparkle.” Bunny elaborated. “They are like digital contacts. It shows any nearby ponies and whether they are friendly towards you or not.

“Pipbuck? Eyes forward sparkle?” Amber questioned. “Unicorns sure have some of the dumbest names for their technology. I swear to Celestia.”

Well, Pipbuck is an acronym of sorts. Personal something device? Hang on, it’s on the pamphlet somewhere…” Bunny picked up a nearby paper. “Personal Information Processor.” She recited. “And I guess ‘buck’ because horses. But yeah, they’re kinda dumb.”

Or unicorn glovers? Amber continued to joke “like come on ya egg heads, come up with more creative names than the kind of horse you are!”

“You’re buying me lunch for that slap.” Bunny picked up her goggles that flew off her head when amber slapped her, ignoring her friend’s dumb, or possibly species-ist comment.

“I’m really sorry for that, I didn’t mean to actually hit you, I was just angry.” Amber said. “what do you want?”

“It’s okay. I'm just glad it worked cause it was such a bitch to put together.” Bunny re-situated her goggles on her head. “I hate spell matrixes, and anything with romaine lettuce. The super-market downtown has really good sandwiches, I’ve been craving one all day!”

“Yeah sure thing.” Amber said, going to take the pipbuck off. “I’ll go right now, I’m hungry anyway.”

“No don’t take it off” Bunny protested. “I need to see how well those modules hold up under load, so just do some field testing on your way there and back. You know, toggle them on and off a bunch of times, see if it fails. You know, normal QA type stuff.”

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Footnote:
New Perk: Amber Rigging-- Repair any item, ignoring it's repair check, at the cost of reduced durability