Twilight Sparkle & the Idea Machine

by darf

Rating: teen
Tags: Twilight Sparkle, Profanity, Random, Lyra, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Science Fiction, Comedy
Length: 2798

Twilight Sparkle and her assistant Lyra build a machine to figure out the most important and original ideas left in Equestria. Results ensue.

Let's face it: ideas are a diamond dozen. You can stroll down the town square and meet fifteen ponies with ideas and life stories they'll sell you for whatever's in your saddle-bag. Holy Celestia that sentence took a long time to finish.

So anyway, I'm Twilight Sparkle, and I decided to build a machine to figure out which ideas were really real. If that doesn't make any sense, think about how confusing it was to write.

I mean, I built a machine that was supposed to figure out original ideas—either ideas that nopony had ever thought of before, or that maybe somepony or even everypony had thought of but had afterwards forgotten. And it. Uh.

Don't do that, by the way. Just in case you wanted my unsolicited advice on the subject.

Your faithful student,

T̸̡̡̨̧̨̛̥̹͚̠̼̻̝̱͙̰̝̮͚͙̣͖̟͖̥̙̣̼͖͓̗̬͓̬͍͓̤̹͇̦̻͉̩͍̘̅̎̈́͆̋̏͋̇͛̿́̈͋̒̐̔̀͋͆̄̉͐̀̆̐̔̏̆̌̉̆̊̔̋̍̽͋̍̾͑́̈́́͐̅̀͘̕̚̕͜͜͝͝ẉ̸̧̨̡̢̧̤̟̘̹͎̳̝̦͖͓̻̼̬̟͓̯͈̹̜̩͖̻̖̮̪͓̼̺̱͔͉̞̲̼͍͚͉̥͎͔̹̝͔̺̓͌͐͋̋͊̓̄̏̽͛͋͑̈́̊͒͛̄̉͂́͆͐̑̅̐̏͂͌̐͆̅̀͊̾̅͒̌͘̚͘̚͝͝͝ͅơ̶̧̨̨̡̡̢̛̻̹͍͓̤͎̺͔̺̱̪̠͓̲̤̹̝̝̞̭̘̯͈͙̘̦̥̪͖̙̘̝̖̞̬̥̩̱̥̩̙̻̹͉̖̬͚͎̳̣̟̖̼̖̺͎̇̊̿̇̔͗͗̂̄̊͐̇̀́̈͐̅́̐̊̔̂̄̍̔͘͝͠g̷̨̨̧̡̨̥̯̮̦͖̰̯̳̫͈̱͚̩̰̬̹͈̬̤̬̼̩̹̐̀̊̌̈́͋̆̒̄͂̾̓̀̈́́͑̓ͅļ̷̛͔̰̲̯̙͉̰̬͚̤͉̭̱̇̒̈́̇̃͂̾̉̑̾͂́͊̂̎͐̀̈́̍͂̽̾͌̍͊͆̈́͋̽̆̊͛̈̔͆̈́̐́͑̾̈́͑̈́͗͋̐̋̈̿̍͌̑̈̍̂̿͂̈́̕̕͜͠͝ơ̶̧̢̡͎͎͈̩̩̫̮̠͙̣̠̖̱̯̤̰̠͕̭͚̐̈̑͂̀́̋͊͊̐̆̂̃̌̎͛̐̆̈́͌̋͐̀͑̇́̈́͗́̚͜͠͠͠ͅt̶̨̡̧̢̧̡̛̻̲̙̻̠̭̦͇͈̙̦̞̠͕̦̠̭̥̮̦̩̺̥̙̮̪̝͓͇̺̦̰̲̱̙͚̤͓͚̬͔̯̐̆̐͒̿̌̅̂͗̀̔̋̎͒̕̚͜͠ ̷̛̥͍̫̬͇̞̱̫̺͆̄̃̆̆̍͛̈́͐̿̈́̈́̿̌̌́́̆̋̄͛̏̎̈̎́̉̀͊̄̕͝͝͝S̷̡̢̙͖̩͕̪͓͓̲̻̦̗̭̮̳͓̫̝̭̻͇͇̯̻̬̳͎̙͍̙͛̽͛̽p̶̟͕̦̙̊̋̿̀̋̌̋̕̚ǫ̴̜͈̝̻̻̉͘̕͠͝͝͠ř̶̢̢̘̩̞̭̫̺͖͖̱̳͚̥̤̗̣̰͕̼̥͚͔̟͓̳̝̝̖͔͙̰͎̩̠̪͔͎̫̳͉̭̰̟̱̈́͊̽́͛̿̍̈͌̓̒̍͆̽̆̔̐̿̄͋̆͘͘̕͜k̵̢̡̛͙̪͉̤̠̲͈̟̦͇̭̺͍̤̫͚͓͎̼͐͌͑̋́̈́͂̈́̔̊͗̊͊̌̀́̆̄̀͑͌̆̽̉̽̃́̚̚̕̚͜͝͠͝͠͠ļ̶̨̧̨̨̟͈͔͙̬͇̞͖̗̲̰̣͎͎̥̱̩̝͖̘͚̥͓͎̬͕̫̭̳̺͈͇̠͔̰̲̳͍̤̞̲̲̘̼̘̝͈̦̻͓̃̊͊̃̐͂͆͛̽̑̆́̓̾͒̿̌̂͊̈́̂̓͒͂̍̏̈́̃͆̈́͊́̆͋̄̕̕̕̕̚͜͜͜͜͠͝͝͝͝ͅͅe̸̡̞̗͖̮͚̻̘͙̰͈̬̖̟̩̦͙̜̲̙̥̩͈͓̠̣̗̙̖̣̟͓̟̙̜̫̲̖͔͙͉͔͈̱͆̎͒́̇͊́̅̊̋͜ͅ

Start of a commission for COMMISSION UNNAMED UNTIL PERMISSION GIVEN.

Published 2020-03-01 07:50:01 UTC
Last updated 2020-03-01 07:50:01 UTC

What did the farmer say when he lost his tractor?

"Try turning it again, maybe it needs another start," Twilight said.

Lyra nodded and began to turn the large crank beside her which was attached to a large, blocky-looking contraption which took up the majority of Twilight's basement. Well. It had started out as a small box about the size of a bread-basket. I'm going to control+f for 'breadbasket' in ten thousand works of literature and if I find it in even a single one I'm going to leave that instance of 'breadbasket'. But if I can't find a single one then I'm going to replace it with something more jovial and contemporary. Maybe an iPad.

So the breadbasket. It started out about that big. Think about a pocket computer. Twilight thought about them a lot. She thought about them obligatorily, because her brain was made of them, and thinking of thinking of thinking is a lot of the process of becoming eternally alive, and also what electrons do when they are bored.

Breadbasket. Computer. It started as a small, grey box.

Then other things had happened.

Lyra came over. She was Twilight's assistant. From the 'Helping Hands' Temp Agency. Twilight said 'Hooves'. Lyra shrugged. That was introductions.

They had poked the breadbox/computer and attached a few buttons and knobs and blinky lights. They poked the buttons and turned the knobs and watched the blinky lights. A piece of paper, fed into the paper tray, was yanked slowly through the mechanism, strips of runes embedded into its surface with tiny fragments of ink.

"'Metanarratives'," read Lyra, holding the piece of paper at fore-leg's length, mostly to keep away the smell of ink. Scrunkle-face. Smooshy nose. Lyra turned herself sideways for posterity.

"I think we need to do more work," Twilight had said.

That was when more bits had shown up. This one was a calculator, for... calculating things. It looked exactly like the one Twilight had in primary school, except attached to a breadbox. Then the breadbox became bigger. Ten breadboxes. A whole pantry. Twilight said more computational power required more finite physical resources. Lyra went downtown and came back with a box of fluorescent vacuum tubes. Twilight tried to find a bug repellent that worked on the moths without damaging the vacuum tubes. Lyra had suggested adding a translation output. Twilight had reorganized the breadboxes. Somepony (hopefully) had added the thing that went 'parp'. And a section for Roman numerals (despite the concrete in-universe non-existence of 'Rome). Twilight found herself staring at an etch-a-sketch with a crude imprint of her face on it.

She frowned. The etch-a-sketch grinned back at her.

"Are you still turning?," she asked.

Lyra, who had been distracted by a picture of a glove, hastily shoved the Polaroid inside her pony-pocket (we're not talking about that) and turned the crank as suggested. It took a few full-body heaves to get the thing going, but once it did, the wheels practically span by themselves. A bit of lightning at the top... oh, heck, two lightnings. And a soft-serve ice-cream machine, for good measure.

Lyra slowed the winding of the crank as the last few words printed out onto the new sheet of paper. The thing that went 'parp', went 'parp'.

"'The real treasure was the friends we made along the way,'" Twilight read out, in something of a deadpan.

Lyra shrugged. "Beats me. Any guesses?"

Twilight sighed and threw the sheet of paper over her head, adding it the layer of carpeting that was the day's previous 243 attempts. It's funnier if you pick a specific number. Kroog compressor.

"It's just making me want to rewatch One Bit," Twilight said grumpily. Adverbs are back in, tell a friend, tell them quickly, tell them Joyceanly, ahuehuehue.

"Can we do that instead?" Lyra asked, raising an eyebrow to the general heap of debris and DIY science fair that Twilight's basement had turned into. For the purposes of this canon universe, Twilight's library requires a basement. Not any particular other elements are necessarily relevant. I mean, we're talking about character archetypes here. Twilight is figuratively first because she's the Magician in the show's archetype. Show? In the grand Equestrian narrative that is our lives, it is to say. Were we narrating? Three quarks for muster mark. I think the reason most people didn't enjoy reading that style of prose is because you're supposed to put a concerted effort in to ensure that a given paragraph contains information contextually related to previous paragraphs, and that the sentences are causally intertwined in such a way that they lead satisfyingly to a conclusion. The inherent difficulty in writing, therefore, is not to edit, but to decide before you have spoken that anything you are going to say is worthwhile.

From there, you enter the point of translation apex which we can term gnosis at least for the sake of this comparison if not objectively and eternally. And if we return to the kabbalah, we understand that the archetype of the Magician is inherently fallible, because I'm going to stop using big language at which things become more important. If you are the first being to do anything, you will be looked at and thought about in ways you have never imagined before. You will be unable to know what to do with these thoughts and feelings. While you will compare some parts of your experience now to parts of your experience previous, many of the comparisons will come up short, and particularly in instances in which you are unable to find a sufficient amount of similarities, you will recede into a regressed-competency-state. This will be as though you were a Magician suddenly without his wand, or suddenly with the knowledge that his wand no longer worked, or suddenly with the knowledge that his wand had been just a bad trick of the light the whole time, or just a fancy use of a thesaurus, or just an incredibly long sentence mimicking the prosody of long-dead post modern magnum oppai and that pun will conclude this elongated mimicry in the middle of our otherwise boring but still tangentially related story. Fanfiction is a crime against the threshold of creativity. An idea is rinsing material for the one doing its work. You throw them into a bucket like old chicken bones and anything that dredges up from the sewers to collect the gristle is good enough to publish. This entire chunk made it through edit, didn't it? God fucking damn it.

"Scene," Lyra said, panting and clutching at her stomach for breath.

"What? I've been sitting here waiting for you to say something interesting for five minutes."

"At one point the amount of minutes would have been exact but also approximated. Now it's a round number five."

"Do you want to have an entire dialogue over whether or not ponies are in the habit of accurately reporting the amount of time they've been waiting for something?"

"I think it deserves at least a paragraph or two."

"Well we're putting it in the footnotes.1"

"You can't start with footnotes. You're going to decay the entire interactive principle of the narrative here."

"It's a narrative. It's not supposed to have interactive principles."

"But it's a post-modern narrative, in a digital multimedia format. Of course it's going to be interactive."

"Which one of us is speaking?"

"Did you just say that sentence?"

"Did you just type me saying that sentence?"

"Did you just read a sentence containing the words "Did you just type me saying that sentence?"

Help.

Author's Note

1: They didn't put it in the footnotes.

ACK

"Read me back what we've got so far," Twilight said, exasperated. That's what we're doing now? We're just putting how ponies feel in a single word? This is outrageous, they said, outraged.

"Okay," Lyra said. Her voice was shaking. She reached towards the pile of papers and took the one from the top.

"'Mcguffin'," Lyra read, hesitantly. She closed her eyes tightly and shook her head.

"And we're... we're still reasonably sure that's not a type of breakfast?"

Lyra shook her head again. 'No', she mouthed. Do ponies have lips?

"Okay. Just put that one aside for a sec. Okay?"

We've been putting all of them aside for a sec, she said. Go away please.

Current music...

"Someone please stop it before it kills again."

"What?" Twilight snapped up from the piece of paper she was reading. It said "'You are currently reading a piece of paper'." Punctuation. Period. Letter. Letter. Word. Sentence.

Paragraph break.

Lyra shook her head.

"What does the next one say?" Twilight asked.

"'Copyright law mandates that 70 years after the creation of an idea, it is returned to the public domain—paraphrased'1," Lyra read. "I think some of that was in Equestrian."

"It wasn't written by anypony who understands what they're talking about in a technical or legal sense, that's for sure."

"So do we care about it?" Lyra held the piece of paper above the garbage can.

"It's trying to tell us something. Put it in the 'translate again' pile."

Lyra sighed and threw the piece of paper over her back, where it landed in a giant stack now bigger than the machine that had generated it. Space loomed to accommodate the necessary ambiance and mood lighting. The thing that went 'parp' went 'parp'. Current music...

"I'm going to stop it every time it does that. We are not in a multimedia storytelling format. We're not. We're not. We are not. We are ponies in a fictive narrative about the nature of reality."

"So why so far have we just been sitting in your basement reading weird pieces of paper and arguing about them like second-year English majors?" Lyra asked.

"Because we're trying to prove a point."

"We're probably doing a very bad job. If I was reading what we were saying, I'd be pretty unconvinced."

"What exactly is it you'd be unconvinced of?" Twilight asked.

"Well... that it was a good idea to pay money for this story, for one thing."

"Lyra!"

"Come on. We have to address this issue. The only time words come out is when somepony is paying for them. That's not art."

"There's somepony sitting in a room with their hooves at a real, physical typewriter, somehow also watching what we're doing and recording every bit of it as accurately as possible."

"So why do they keep butting in with bits that aren't related to us at all, or that mostly just seem like excuses to masturbate and fill up word count?"

"Do you have any idea how much practice it took to translate that sentence into text without adding all the extra stuff? The pony watching us is listening just to our voices, even though it keeps trying to butt in with 'Current music'... I feel like that one might be important, Lyra."

"Stop using my name. I'm trying to confuse it and you're not letting me get away with it. Uh. Lyra."

Twilight sighed, and looked obliquely at a bowl of oranges sitting on the table next to her. It reminded her of some song lyrics she had eaten for breakfast once. Spent the whole morning bridging in a minor key.

Let's get to the heart of the matter.

"What is the point of a story, Twilight?" Lyra asked.

"You can't just make your characters say exactly what you would say," Twilight said.

"I'd like to see you do any different," Lyra said. "It's literally impossible to say something without imaginging yourself saying it first."

"No it isn't. Listen."

Lyra listened.

There was no music.

Mostly the hum of the machine they'd built up over the last twelve hours.

Scraps of paper mingling with each other.

If, she was very careful, breathing, a soft, little sound.

And... a clock?

It was definitely a clock.

Hmm.

"Can you please stop assuming you always have to do the best you've ever done?" Twilight asked. She struggled for an adverb, but came up short. It was okay to say things like that sometimes. Don't you dare, she thought.

"I'm here on loan from a temp agency. We haven't addressed how much I'm getting paid, or what my physical worth is, or if I'm even trained for the job... frankly, I think I was a self-insert to begin with."

"You can't be a self-insert, because Twilight Sparkle, aka me, is clearly the stand-in self-insert for everypony in existence who watches the show and assumes they're the main character of their own life. Everypony has to give up their single-minded pursuit of what supposedly makes them happy away from everypony else and instead focus on the fact that being with other ponies is what makes them a pony in the first place, and if they run away and hide in their rooms and do nothing but write stories or watch movies or watch World War II educational documentaries, holy shit, can you believe I completely forgot what the end of my giant sentence was going to be? Oh, right. And as a pony who has been medically identified as on the autism spectrum and still doesn't know the correct or inoffensive way to say that and as somepony who has seen the ravenous thirst of another community to label their characters as on the spectrum understands the disquieting nature of labeling fictive beings with medical diagnoses in order to foster a parasocial sense of understanding and relationship, still feels there is a metaphor somewhere in all of this about the single-mindedness of that particular diagnoses, and the way that Twilight's obsessive, introverted personality seems sculpted specifically to cater to a certain demographic, and how Touhou as a parallel set in a universe entirely populated by kawaii female characters establishes the precedent that a cast of female characters can be adored or even worshiped by a fan-base not in its normally telegraphed demographic. Gasp." Twilight took an overarchingly important and pivotally paragraph breaking pause to breathe.

Current—

"Stop! Telling them the song you're listening to won't accomplish anything! It's dead air! It's subjective! It's a radio filler! It's five minutes of someone's life they won't remember ever again! It's nothing of importance to anypony whose priorities are grounded in reality and commerce and having enough food to eat for next month that doesn't come printed on a compact disc or Amazon MP3 code."

You're really mixing your metaphors here. And we keep saying 'pony'...

This has divorced reality a long time ago. Hold please.

No, literally leave this part blank.

Hold please.

Author's Note

1: Bottom Text

The Sound and the Fury

'Parp'.

At some point I, Twilight Sparkle, Was Obligated To Test the Number of Characters Allowed Per Chapter Title. Much to My Surprise, It Vastly Exceeded My Initial Expectations and Stretched Long Into Unfathomable Lengths, At Which I Could No Longer Maintain

"Lyra, did you just say 'parp' out loud?"

"No, but wouldn't that be funny if I did?"

Twilight sighed. Her horn was still glowing a little, and it ached, which would theoretically be as difficult to perceive to anypony from the outside as any pain relatively might be. Take a paragraph to describe this, the abstract nature of pain. No. Out.

The two ponies (Lyra & Twilight) (No, Twilight & Lyra) (& & & & &) (They're Called Ampersands) had gotten rid of most of the papers. They'd dismantled the machine. The experiment was a total failure.

"We didn't manage to produce even one single coherent piece of text," Twilight said, rubbing a hoof across her horn to ease some of the soreness. It was quite swollen.

Lyra took a deep breath and shrugged. "I still think this one is pretty close." She held up the piece of paper in question, not much bigger than the size of her hoof—it looked as though she'd torn it off the corner of a much larger sheet, but that was simply the way the machine had printed it.

'k e e p g o i n g'

"I mean, it's readable," Twilight conceded. "I'll give you that much. But it doesn't mean anything. For one thing, it's cliche. It's the moral of literally every single story that has ever existed. And for another thing, how do we know what it applies to? If I'm in the middle killing of some pony, and I read this, do I keep going with that too?"

"Has anyone ever told you you're the least fun pony to talk to in existence?"

"Yes! Several! It was the theme of my entire life up until the end of... it's still the theme of my entire life!"

And.... scene!

Author's Note

—the Length of My Sentence.