Progress
“So, Sunset Shimmer isn’t coming to the coronation?” Starlight asked, looking over the guest list laid across the cutie map.
Running down one of three checklists floating in front of her, Twilight shook her head. “She’s really sorry she has to miss it, but her back-to-school orientation is the week after. She’s got enough on her plate without fitting in time to visit me.”
“That’s a shame.” Starlight sighed. “I wouldn’t mind seeing her again.”
“You could pop over and pay a visit any time,” Twilight said. “Just write and ask her if it’s okay. The journal is up in the library.”
Starlight nodded. “That reminds me, will you be taking the journal with you when you move to Canterlot?”
Twilight paused and considered the question. “I suppose so. I would like to keep in touch with Sunset as much as any of you. I’ll likely be taking the mirror, too.”
“Which leads to my next question.” Starlight hopped off the throne and approached Twilight. “Do you think you could create another pair of magic journals?”
“I probably could. Why?”
“For me and Sunset,” Starlight replied. “I mean, if you’re going to take the journal with you, I’d need some way to keep in touch with her across dimensions.”
Twilight gently lowered her checklists. “That seems fair, but what if we just added a third journal?”
“Third journal?”
Twilight nodded. Her horn lit up and drew a magic crest in the air, lines tracing out from it to two journals “The spell matrix is pretty simple, it should be easy to just expand it to encompass messages passed between three journals instead of two.” As she spoke, a third journal appeared in her image and lines from the magic crest weaved out to entwine it.
Starlight tilted her head. “Yeah, but then if I wrote something in my copy, you’d both see it. What if Sunset and I want to talk about stuff without you seeing?”
Twilight eyed her suspiciously. “Like what?”
“Anything!” Starlight said defensively. “I mean, even if you don’t care if I found out, you wouldn’t want me sitting in on every conversation you had with your other friends, right?”
Twilight’s expression softened. “Fair enough.” She peered at the spell matrix in the air and rubbed her chin. “What about this?” Beams of magic from her horn drew runic symbols on the three journals. “We tie each journal to a specific rune, then when we write a message in our journal, if we want it to only go to one other person – or, pony – we sign it with the rune for their journal.”
“That could work…” Starlight slowly smiled. “But, what if we made the spell tie each journal to a specific name instead of a rune?”
“That should be fine.” Twilight nodded. “And it’ll be a lot easier to remember.”
Starlight looked at the spell matrix, walked around it while keeping her eyes on it. “How many extra journals do you think this spell could support?”
Twilight tilted her head and thought. “It doesn’t require a lot of magic. I’d wager at least a dozen could be interconnected like this.”
“And if the spell got more complex than that, we could always just anchor it to a spell crystal or some other continuous source of magic to maintain it, right?” Starlight grinned.
“I don’t see why not.” Twilight looked at her student curiously. “Why, what did you have in mind?”
“Exactly what you just said.” Starlight quickly stepped up to Twilight. “What if we all had our own journal? You, me, your other friends, Celestia and Luna? What if we could all communicate with each other at any time using a magic journal?”
Twilight’s eyes lit up. She gasped and shared in Starlight’s wide smile. “That’s a brilliant idea! We could keep in touch any time, no matter how far apart we grew!” She hugged Starlight tight. “You’re amazing, Starlight.”
Starlight laughed softly. “I try.”
Twilight looked up at the spell matrix again. “Although…” She pulled a chalkboard over from the side and quickly began scribbling down calculations with a piece of chalk.
“What now?” Starlight asked.
“By my rough calculations, a spell crystal the size of a pony could probably support a matrix of a hundred journals without any trouble. But even without a spell crystal, just three or four journals would be no problem.” Twilight looked back at Starlight. “Why keep this to ourselves, when we could make journals for everypony?”
Starlight’s jaw slowly dropped. “I’d never even thought of that!” She cupped her hooves to her mouth. “I could keep in touch with all my teachers any time! If I had a problem I could just write them and ask them a question instead of needing them to come in! Each teacher could have a master journal she wrote in that gave each student a copy of her lesson plan! Or the students could write their tests in a journal and all their answers went to the master journal, the teachers could mark them and the students would immediately see their grades!”
“Not just the school!” Twilight said excitedly. “Pinkie and Maud could talk to their parents any time! So could Rainbow Dash and her parents, and Applejack and her entire family.” She gasped loudly. “The Apples! What if they could get orders for their products from further away? What if each business had a journal and you could write to them to place an order?”
“You could write Mrs. Cake to ask for a cake, then drop by an hour later and it would be ready! Or you could write all the way to Appleloosa to order some cherries and have them delivered!”
Twilight skipped in place. “Starlight, this type of magic could revolutionize Equestria! Imagine instant communication with anypony anywhere in the world!”
“We could do business faster and easier, be closer with our friends and family, be better informed about events in other cities and towns!”
Twilight nodded firmly. “Starlight, head down to Quills and Sofas, buy every blank journal and notepad they have. I’m going to get Sunburst.”
“Roger!” Starlight ran out of the room.
Twilight inhaled deeply and looked up at the spell matrix. “I’d liked to have hoped my reign could be a new era for Equestria. But I never imagined anything like this…”
“Done!” Sunburst smiled proudly and turned over the journal in front of him, a blank page with a horizontal line across the front. “Each journal can now be designated with a three-digit alphanumeric code that anypony can write on the first page when they receive it.”
Twilight gave a small frown. “I like it, but what if two ponies happen to choose the same code?”
“If we give each town its own central spell crystal to anchor the journals, that shouldn’t be a problem, a three-digit code like this would have almost fifty thousand possible combinations, and if two ponies did choose the same one, the spell matrix would reject it.” Sunburst gestured to a chalkboard showing a map of Equestria with various cities and towns marked. “There’s a much higher likelihood of conflicts across the national level, if you want to implement a network across Equestria. For that, I was thinking we preface each town or city with a specific three-digit code. When sending messages within your own town, just use your friend’s code, but for someone living further away, you’d also have to include their city code.”
Twilight nodded. “I like it. There may be problems if somepony moves to another town and wants to change their book’s main spell crystal and they have the same code as somepony already living there. Once we have everything in place and are ready to launch the system, we can start setting up spell crystal centers in each town and instruct their workers on how to change that sort of thing. Oh, reminds me.” She turned her head. “Starlight, how are things going?”
On another side of the room by a floating blue crystal the size of a chair, Starlight circled around examining the crystal. “Its almost been an hour and there’s no sign of spell matrix breakdown or crystal fracturing.”
“How many journals are connected to it?”
“One hundred and fifty.” Starlight looked Twilight’s way. “I’m fairly certain we could go for double that and still have no problems.”
“Great news, but hold off on the increase. Let’s leave it for a day and expand the network tomorrow once we’re sure everything is holding.”
“You got it.” Starlight looked at a stack of notebooks and floated two over to her. “I’m going to send a few messages back and forth and see how things react, but it should be just fine.”
As Twilight turned back to Sunburst, the door to the throne room was flung open. Wearing a pair of gloves and an apron, Spike jerked his claw behind him. “Twilight, I just went to sweep the front stairs, and there’s an angry mob that wants to talk to you.”
Twilight jerked. “An angry mob?”
“Yup. They’ve got signs and everything.”
Twilight frowned. “Starlight, Sunburst, you two stay here, I’ll go see what’s happening.” She followed Spike to the doors of the castle and pushed them open.
There was indeed an angry mob outside, a crowd of dozens of ponies shouting and yelling. Signs depicting various slogans and pictures of journals and notebooks on fire waved in the air.
“Everypony!” Twilight called, holding her hooves up. The crowd slowly grew quiet. Her mouth open, Twilight looked among them. “What is going on here?”
A grey pegasus with a blonde mane stepped to the front of the crowd and pointed a hoof at Twilight. “Why do you hate the post office!?”
Twilight recoiled. “W-what? I don’t hate the post office!”
“Then why are you putting me out of work!” The pegasus stamped the ground. “If anypony can get letters instantly, what point is there to mail delivery?”
“Er, well, not every piece of mail will be delivered by journal, we’ll still need direct mailing!”
“But you’ll need a lot of less of it,” another pony said. “The post office will get less business and that means less need for it, and they’ll get less funding and have to fire employees!”
Twilight swallowed heavily. “That is a possibility, yes. But everything will be better and more convenient! If you write a letter to somepony, they can read it instantly instead of waiting for it to be delivered!”
“And it’s horrible!” A stallion called. “My daughter Lilac Dew only ever came to visit me and my wife once a month, but now she says to get one of these journals she’s been hearing about and she doesn’t have to come see us! You took my daughter from me!”
“I did not!” Twilight protested. “Now you can talk to her anytime, anywhere!”
“Assuming she answers, she used to have a room just down the hall and would ignore me at her door!”
Another stallion raised their hoof. “I heard businesses will be able to take and fill orders using these journals. Is that true?”
Relieved at the voice of optimism, Twilight beamed at the speaker. “Yes, very true. If somepony in the Crystal Empire or Manehattan wanted to order something from Sweet Apple Acres, they could write a message to the Apples here and arrange to have it delivered. You see, this means more and new opportunities for businesses!”
“Well that’s great for the Apples!” the pony wailed. “What if I can’t afford a journal to keep up with them? I’ll be run out of business!”
“No need to worry, the journals will be given out free!”
“Free?” A mare scoffed. “Then where is the money going to come from to make all these journals?”
“Uh, well…” Twilight smiled awkwardly. “I may need to talk to Princess Celestia about government backing for this project.”
“I knew it!” Some stallion’s voice came from the back. “This was all a scam to raise taxes!”
“I didn’t say anything about raising taxes!” Twilight protested. “Look, you’re all focusing on the negative impacts, but they’ll be a lot of positive impacts, too! New business opportunities, easier communication with loved ones, faster response times to emergencies, more access to information. All of your lives will be better!”
“And how are you going to pay for it without raising taxes?”
“We’ll find the funding from other sources!”
“Like what, schools and hospitals?”
“Of course not!” Twilight lifted her eyebrows and shrugged. “Actually, if they’ll be doing less business, we could divert some bits away from the postal service.”
The entire crowd groaned and booed. Twilight slapped her face. “But once all these journals are out there and the infrastructure to support them in place, there’ll be plenty of new job openings! We’ll need ponies to monitor the spell crystals in each city, to oversee distribution of the journals, to make new ones, and more.”
The grey pegasus began to lower her sign. “Can I get a job doing that?”
“You specifically, no, that kind of magic work is something only a unicorn could do.”
The crowd’s boos grew even louder. “Race wars!” Somepony screamed.
Twilight slumped. “I don’t think I’m handling this very well.”
“So, let me get this straight.” Sunset gestured a hand cross the table. “You tried to invent a magical email-slash-telephone-slash-internet system for Equestria.”
On the other side of the booth, the straw of her milkshake angled into her mouth as she let her head rest on her hand and her elbow on the table, Twilight mumbled an “mm-hm” without letting go of her straw.
“And everypony got upset that you were gonna flip their entire system of national communications upside down.”
“Mm-hm.”
“And then you shut down the project, and to reassure everypony you were giving it up, publically burned all the journals except for a few you put aside for your friends and you.”
“Mm-hm.”
“And now you’re here moping at Sugarcube Café and slurping down a chocolate shake.”
Twilight let the straw out of her mouth. “I am not moping. I am engaged in melancholy contemplation of my mistakes.”
“In this world we call that moping.”
Twilight’s response was to reach to her milkshake and pull the straw back to her mouth.
Sunset held up her hands. “Hey, you tried, and it didn’t work out. But maybe you just need to try introducing this stuff on a small scale. I’m sure the royal guards in Canterlot would appreciate a system to make them more useful.”
“I’d appreciate them just being useful,” Twilight grumbled. “I really thought I would be improving lives, Sunset! You know what it’s like back in Equestria, what if you could do all the stuff in that world that you can do with your phone in this world?”
Sunset looked at her phone on the table and shrugged. “Given what you told me about publishing the friendship journal, maybe Equestria isn’t ready for social media yet.”
“I guess.” Twilight sighed. She reached into her bag and held a journal out. “By the way, here. This journal can send messages to me, Starlight, Princess Celestia, or any of my other friends. Just preface the message with their name.”
“Awesome.” Sunset took the journal and looked at the rainbow-striped star on the cover. “This is kinda cool.” She chuckled. “Now if you could just figure out a spell to send messages from one of the journals to the messenger app on my phone, and we could cut out the middleman.”
Twilight glanced down at the cell phone in front of Sunset. Her eyes widened and she sat up, her mouth open.
“What if—”
“No.” Sunset covered her phone with her hand. “Go back to moping into your milkshake.”
Twilight did as she was told.
