For GaPJaxie
Admiral Biscuit
Like most ponies, Birria had spent her formative years being slowly exposed to human culture. Besides schoolyard gossip, starting when she was a filly movies would often feature a short documentary about Earth after the newsreel and before the main feature.
A few woodcut-illustrated tour guides arrived at the local library, and then glossy photobooks and eventually issues of National Geographic. The magazines weren’t in Ponish, but each one had a separate pamphlet which was.
Her village was sort of out of the way, but that didn’t stop enterprising merchants and craftsponies from making and selling Earth-themed merchandise, and they eventually got the real thing at the general store: actual Matchbox cars, sleek and shiny and free-rolling; individually packaged in cardboard garages with a painting of the car, a series number, and on the back lots and lots of tiny writing that she couldn’t make heads nor tails of.
She got a shiny black carriage called an Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser.
Some ponies thought a toy wasn’t worth as much if she took it out of the package and played with it, but what was the fun in having a toy if it couldn’t be played with? Nopony bought something just to leave it in the package, unused.
It cost her a week of foalsitting money, and it was totally worth it. While her Matchbox car was small, on Earth the real thing was big enough that several people could ride in them; they had small locomotives inside which ran on coal oil, and they didn’t need rails laid down for them. The really sleek ones preferred cobbled roads, while others could drive nearly anywhere. She wasn’t sure what her Vista Cruiser would prefer; it wasn’t as boxy as the bright red Pierce Dash Fire Truck, but also not as sleek as the 61 Jaguar E-Type.
Ʊ ❤❤❤
A decade later, Birria percolated through an unassuming stone building, enduring a barrage of questions, inspections, and showings of documents, before finally entering the portal. Ponies said the portal was weird for humans, but she didn’t see why. It was a fairly ordinary magical portal, and yeah it made her fur stand on end when it activated, and there was the usual bit of discombobulation as she popped out the other side—this time in a different world—but it didn’t feel that much weirder than her biannual aura checkup.
She spent a few more hours in an Earth-side fake-stone building, reprising the question barrage, inspections, and presenting of documents, and then got shuffled into her first real car, which was actually called a bus.
It smelled bad, was as creaky as an old farm wagon, and almost as slow. It was still exciting, because there was indeed a grumbling locomotive inside it somewhere, and it didn’t need rails to run on, although it would have been more comfortable if it had.
The bus delivered her, her travelling companions, and their luggage to an airplane station. At first it was more paperwork and inspections and she had to stand in a weird thumpy tube that made her fur stand on end but didn’t send her anywhere, and then she got out into the nicer part of the airplane station, where there were restaurants and stores and fountains and big windows so she could look out at the airplanes nosing up to the gangways. It even had a train that ran inside, floors that moved, and a newsstand which had a limited selection of pony potboilers printed in Equestrian and comic books in Neighponese.
She didn’t like the airplane much; it was like a bus but faster and with wings. The air was stale, most of the passengers were unruly, and it flew so high that she could barely make out anything on the ground, not until it descended for landing. It had to have a moving map in the seat in front of her so she’d know where it was, since it was nearly impossible to pick out landmarks on the ground below.
❤❤
Birria didn’t have to be inspected or present documents on her way out of the airplane. She followed the signs to the baggage claim and snagged her saddlebags off the conveyor as they went by, strapped them on, and headed out to the street.
There were lots of stands for various forms of transport. She could take a sky-train that ran along a concrete causeway, busses of all sizes, or a taxi. She could even rent a car and drive it herself, if she knew how. She’d read a book about it, but didn’t feel confident enough to try it on her own, not yet.
Besides the ordinary transportation options, there were special places to wait for personal transportation—a friend with a car or carriage, or in her case, a college-owned minivan. The one that was waiting for her was sleek and silver and had side doors that slid open automatically and a back hatch that opened itself, too.
When she got in, she discovered besides all the buttons and picture screens it had on the dashboard and doors, there was also a skylight that could be opened.
Not all the buttons could be worked with her hoof, but Matt, her driver, ran the controls for her.
He also had a pocket telephone, or a smart phone as humans called them, and when he’d poked at it a few times, it showed a moving map like the airplane had. It stuck on a little disc on the dashboard and it called out his turns on the road before he needed to make them.
❤Ʊ❤
Human College was a lot like Pony College except that the buildings had more glass and less gold. She got a suite with five other girls—each of them had their own bedroom, and they had a common kitchen and living area, and a shared bathroom.
She spent a few days getting acclimatized to her new roommates and their strange names: Madison, Ashley, Taylor, Hailey, and Mackenzie. She also got acquainted with the strange technology she’d read about and seen documentaries about but never actually used, from the humming science oven to the Kureg and its fiddly plastic pods.
At first, she didn’t really register how often her new roommates were using their cell phones. That was just another human behavior like wearing clothes everywhere and not wanting to shower together and her classes having numbers and letters along with their name; that blended in to her vague understanding of Madison complaining that she hadn’t gotten into Kappa Alpha Theta and her sheer bewilderment at buying groceries from IGA—how was she to know what was good to eat if there wasn’t a pony telling her all about the food on offer? It looked attractive, piled up as it was, and it felt wrong to just take it and pay a fixed price for it.
Not that she would have to do much shopping; her shiny new multipass not only let her into buildings but also let her into the campus restaurants which had seemed like all she’d ever need, but it turned out that their food mostly sucked.
It wasn’t until the second week that she really got interested in cell phones. Birria was a studious pony, but there was only so much macroeconomics she could take in at any one time, class assignments notwithstanding.
A familiar chirp caught her ear, and she glanced over at Madison, who was stretched out on the couch with her portable telephone in hand.
Madison snickered, poked at the glowing screen a few times, then set it back down.
“What was that?” Anything to take her mind off macroeconomics, as long as it wasn’t an explanation of what the box of cotton sticks in the bathroom were for.
“Oh, one of my friends sent me a meme.”
“What’s a meme?”
“Uh, a funny picture. Here, I’ll show you.” She picked her portable telephone back up and pushed a few buttons, then turned the screen towards Birria.
She didn’t understand what was on the screen; several men in suits were dancing while balancing an ornate box on their shoulders, but it was a diversion from studying. And all on a little slab of glass and plastic that fit in a pocket, something which could be watched from the comfort of the couch, rather than having to go to a movie theater.
❤Ʊ❤
Sometimes she’d hear her roommates talking to other people who weren’t really there. It was easy enough to figure it out when they were holding their telephones against their faces, but it took a while before she got used to hearing conversation from one of the other rooms and when the door opened, there was only one of her roommates there. The first time had been a disappointment; she was classmates with Ashley’s boyfriend Hunter, and had knocked on her door assuming he was there and could clarify how aggregate demand was graphed on a cost-push diagram.
He wasn’t actually there, but Ashley was kind enough to briefly curtail her conversation and let Hunter explain through the telephone.
❤ ❤
Three weeks in, they had a girl’s night with wine, reheated frozen pizzas, and science oven popcorn. They watched Wonder Woman. Everybody wore pajamas except Birria who argued that au naturel counted as pajamas since that was what she wore to bed. And everywhere else.
Partway through the movie, Ashley and Hailey got in an argument about the leading actor: Ashley said that he’d played Captain Kirk in Star Trek and Hailey disagreed, so Ashley paused the movie, got her cell phone, and looked it up.
Birria hadn’t seen Star Trek, but she couldn’t help but see an encyclopedia entry plain as day on Ashley’s iPhone, summoned by nothing but Ashley asking Siri to tell her about Chris Pine.
She didn’t have a stallionfriend on campus—or anywhere else—to talk to on a cell phone, and she didn’t really understand memes, but a portable encyclopedia she could summon on demand would be useful. Especially if it knew about cost-push diagrams.
❤Ʊ
Mackenzie’s phone had a calculator which was more readable than her own TI-85, and every day it also gave her an aurascope. Humans had different names for them; and rather than aura color they were based on Zodiac signs but the principle was largely the same. A vague, broad prediction which was certain to at least partially come true. In that system, she was a Pisces, and her aurascope said that issues in her life needed to be torn to pieces to be seen clearly, whatever that meant.
Mackenzie had told her that Pices were romantically compatible with Virgos and Tauruses; Birria had countered saying she hoped that wasn’t the case, since most ponies had a March birthday. She certainly didn’t know a single stallion who’d been born in late August or early September.
Mackenzie didn’t believe that the latest birthday in her village was July, but it was true. A few towns away, there was a filly who’d been born in October, and the celebration of her birthday was a town-wide event.
❤ƱƱƱƱ❤
Earth weather wasn’t like Equestria weather at all. Birria, like most ponies, had been in the habit of checking the weekly schedule and planning accordingly.
When the weather wasn’t what she’d expected it would be, she’d at first assumed that she just hadn’t read the schedule closely enough. There were other more important things to focus on, especially since her classes were all inside, and so was the IGA. It wasn’t until she’d planned a picnic—on a day which the USA Today had promised would be sunny—that she started to suspect that a newspaper which she’d found on top of a trash can in the dining hall might not be the most reliable source for up-to-the-minute weather reporting.
Taylor had an app for that, which showed her hour-by-hour what the daily weather was going to be, could notify her about severe weather and lightning, and it even had a moving map which showed where it was precipitating and where it wasn’t.
❤❤❤
“I’m feeling like Taco Bell tonight.”
Birria couldn’t help herself; the mere mention of Taco Bell set her tail wagging. A mythological destination back when she was a filly, watching wide-eyed as the documentary explained how humans could drive their automobiles up to a building and have whatever hot, fresh food they desired in mere minutes. Taco Bell had tightly-wrapped burritos, crunchy tacos, and mixed bowls, all with plenty of salt and other nutrition to keep a pony healthy. They even had little packets of sauce with inspirational messages which were hot, hotter, and hottest: the latter was ideal if she felt like regretting her life choices twice instead of only once.
Unless she went solo, Taco Bell usually meant a car ride, which was also fun. Madison had a car called a Fusion which was flat in the front but otherwise sleek, and had funny-smelling seats but offset that with a really bumping stereo.
“Sounds good. Are we driving or walking?”
“Neither.”
“Neither?” Birria tilted her head in confusion.
“I got an app,” Madison explained as she pulled out her phone. “And can get it delivered right to the dorm. What do you want?”
❤ƱƱ❤
Their dorm room came with a wall-mounted telephone, and Birria had thought that was good enough for her, but as she munched on her Veggie Power Menu Bowl she thought about all the things cell phones could do that the wall-phone couldn’t. Summoning encyclopedia articles, calculating, weather forecasting, memeing, navigating, contacting friends, and most importantly, ordering Taco Bell for delivery.
She went to Best Buy, because unlike the IGA, there were people who would tell her what was good and what wasn’t.
Mackenzie had strongly argued for the Apple store, but Mackenzie didn’t have a car. Madison did.
Madison was also a strong believer in Samsung and passionately argued how her phone was better and didn’t have dumb cameras nobody would ever actually use, and the two girls wound up showing off lots of pictures that were on their telephones. That was another feature they possessed, an extra bonus on top of all the other things that a cell phone could do. Birria couldn’t really tell the difference between the Apple pictures and the Samsung pictures; both were as good as a pony camera could take, and didn’t have to be developed or put in a photo album.
The phone was expensive, and not only did she have to purchase it, she had to sign a contract agreeing to pay even more in order to be able to use it. The terms and conditions were confusing, but both Madison and Mackenzie understood them and explained them to her.
She couldn’t put a hoofprint on the little screen to agree to the terms and conditions, so she held the fake pen in her mouth and scrawled her name on the screen instead. That wouldn’t have been a binding contract in Equestria, but on Earth it was, apparently.
And that wasn’t all she needed; the phone was too delicate on its own, so she had to buy a separate screen protector and an armored plastic box to clamp around it. The plastic boxes came in several styles— she eventually selected an Otter Box, even though it didn’t look anything like an otter. Maybe otters made them; they had clever human-like hands.
Safely back at the dorm, munching on Taco Bell they’d gotten at the drive-through, Madison and Mackenzie helped her set it up. It turned out that the little screen didn’t recognize hooves at all, and there had been a furious debate about if a Moto G Stylus would have been a better choice for her. Whatever that was. Outside their boxes and covers, all cell phones looked pretty much the same.
❤❤❤❤
Ashley had a special kind of clicky pen that had a faux finger on the end which Birria could use to navigate for now. She also warned the pony to be very careful about downloading apps; they’d ask for all sorts of permissions to track her and give her advertisements and sell her things and steal her personal data.
There was a lot to set up on her new telephone. It didn’t have a clever background like Mackenzie’s phone; that was something she had to find on the internet and save and crop in order to make it work, or she could use a picture from her picture folder, except she didn’t have any pictures in her picture folder.
Birria had some skills at looking for things on the internet; the campus had labs full of computers that she could use after showing her multipass. There were even special computers she could talk to and they’d do the typing for her. They weren’t very accurate, but they tried hard, and she had to admit that it was still faster than trying to hunt and peck on a buttonboard. The English alphabet was confusing enough with all its letters, and they couldn’t be bothered to put them in order.
Unfortunately, the virtual buttonboard on her telephone mirrored that layout, and none of the girls knew how to change it.
They did manage to find an app that gave her the option of an Equestrian typewriter, and she downloaded it and then showed the girls how to type on one of those. It was really clever; it translated lefts and rights into complete words every time she hit the spacebar, and could show the output both in standard Ponish or Unicorn.
And that discovery delayed any further progress she might have made with her cell phone, since the majority of the girls were fascinated by the idea that ponies used three different writing language, and most ponies could understand at least two of them.
Birria knew all three, since her mother worked for the railroad.
Without having planned to, Birria explained the reasoning behind the initial two scripts, the benefits of Unicorn for spellwork and Ponish for everything else, as well as the development of the telegraph, telegraph key, telegraph typewriter, and the adaptation of telegraph typewriters by newspapers and secretaries and then a large portion of the populace throughout Equestria.
She also explained how mad traditional ponies got when you called shorts and longs left shoes and right shoes but that was how they were teaching foals these days, because it was easier to remember.
Madison said that she totally understood; Boomers got mad when Millennials didn’t know cursive because it was honestly useless.
As the night waned on, Madison taught Birria, Ashley, and Hailey the alphabet in cursive; Birria taught them the Ponish alphabet in shorts and longs. Mackenzie, who always dotted the i in her name with a heart, was the only one who appreciated that shorts should be hearts when written out. The rest settled on the technically correct but boring circles or dots for shorts, and the traditional horseshoe-shape for the longs.
ƱƱƱ
They stayed up later than they should have, but it was the weekend.
Birria had left her cell phone sitting on its magic charging dock. It could either have a wire put in it, which it came with, or be set on a special platform which was far more convenient to use with hooves.
She was the first one awake—she usually was; humans liked to sleep late.
After a trip to the bathroom sans phone, she walked back to her room and picked it up. She was going to use it to its full potential, and said potential was having a breakfast delivered to her.
She needed to push a button on the side before the phone would activate. That hadn’t been a problem last night; the girls had helped her with it, and as long as they kept using it, the phone stayed active.
Pushing against the button did nothing but slide her phone off its dock. It needed resistance, so she grabbed it in her mouth and set it on her desk. She’d need both forehooves, which meant it had to rest where she could work it while sitting.
The first part was easy enough. Brace with one hoof, and push the button with the other, but there were buttons on both sides and she accidentally opened Bixby which wanted to help her but needed to be set up first.
She could cancel, which required the special pen. She picked it up with her mouth, accidentally drew a line on the screen, unclicked the pen’s inkwell with her tongue, and tried again.
This time, it worked, and went to her home screen.
Apps were up, then swipe left and left again to get to the one she wanted—her phone came with lots of apps she didn’t want but couldn’t get rid of.
She had to choose from another menu, because Mackenzie didn’t believe that she’d only want one option for food and Birria was too friendly to reject her roommate adding things she might not want. After all, maybe someday she would.
Setting up the GrubHub app had involved clicking circles to enable restaurants; now that she was using it for real, she had to figure out how to work a dropdown menu.
The pen liked clicking on things she didn’t mean to choose; the girls made it look easy when they used their phones, but without fingers it wasn’t easy at all.
She accidentally figured out that she could make selections by booping the phone with her nose, and that helped. She had to close her left eye to get a good sense of where her nose was pointed; once she figured that out, ordering breakfast went faster. There were even little pictures, so she’d know she was getting what she wanted.
A vegetarian breakfast Crunchwrap, a mini skillet bowl, and a hash brown toasted breakfast burrito. The app helpfully asked her if she wanted anything else, and after a moment’s consideration, she added a dozen Cinnabon Delights—that was too much sugar for the morning in her opinion, but the rest of the girls liked them and she was willing to share.
Ashley had advised against putting her multipass numbers in the phone, which meant she had to put them into the tiny little boxes before her food would be made. Sixteen numbers were a lot, but she diligently booped the screen until she’d entered all of them, then another four, another three, and another five.
When she’d accomplished all that, her phone had the audacity to ask her if she was sure she actually wanted to order breakfast. As if entering twenty-eight numbers correctly wasn’t enough confirmation that she wanted food.
Ʊ❤
Her phone helpfully gave her the status of her order, which honestly just caused anxiety. Back in Equestria, when she’d ordered something by mail, it arrived when it arrived, and there was no way for her to know what part of the process it was currently in.
Her phone informed her that her order had been received.
A few minutes later, it said that it had been made.
Then it had been picked up.
Then it was enroute.
She knew that cell phones could show maps, and she knew more or less the way from the dorm to Taco Bell and back again; as smart as it was the phone couldn’t tell her where the delivery driver was. Back in Equestria, she wouldn’t have wondered; back in Equestria, she knew about when the mailmare would arrive and that was good enough; here on Earth, there was a car with a sack of breakfast food and would it still be warm when it arrived?
Would the app tell her when the driver pulled into the parking lot? Would it give her enough notice to go down and meet him, or would he have to call her so she could come and meet him? If she didn’t, would he leave the sack of food on the doorstep, and if he did, would the squirrels get it before she did?
As a filly, she’d derided those ponies who stood by their front doors or mailboxes waiting for the post, and yet, here she was standing by the front door, cell phone held in her mouth because unlike her roommates, she didn’t have a purse or pocket to carry it in. It was supposed to beep when it got a message, but it was silent as a car pulled into the parking lot and went past the front door and found a space and that was only Jacob who lived one floor up and down at the other end of the dorm and usually smelled of skunkweed.
❤
Her phone pinged and she hadn’t known that her tongue could make it work, too. She looked at her phone which was in Facebook and wasn’t sure why; she tried to scroll through in case it was an important new notification, accidentally commented asedrfgIPTZ:JKM on Kyle’s photo, and then managed to get back to the GrubHub app.
Her breakfast was still enroute.
At the dining hall, she got to pick what she wanted and scoop it onto a plate or dump it in a bowl; that was practically instant gratification. Her phone was taunting her. It couldn’t take this long to bring a sack of breakfast to her dorm.
And then a car pulled up right by the front steps and a man got out and he was holding a bag of Taco Bell breakfast and all was right with the world.
Birria couldn’t carry both her cell phone and her breakfast in her mouth, so she settled for dropping the phone in the bag. It beeped at her once on her way back to her room and she thought about seeing what it wanted but decided it could wait for later. She had breakfast, and it was still mostly warm.
