Applejack awoke before the first rays of sun had a chance to cross into her room. Her eyes snapped open out of a habit born from decades of waking at sunrise, and she smiled, groaning while stretching all her limbs out to wear off the stiffness of sleep.
She flipped her covers off and rolled out of her bed, landing on all four hooves. It had been a delightful sleep, and the morning appeared to be just as grand. Outside her cracked window she could hear birds starting to chirp as they too awoke, and the absence of any sound of rain grew Applejack’s already blossoming smile. She walked quietly over to her dresser near the window, grabbed a brush, and pulled it rhythmically through her mane while she listened to the soothing hiss of a gentle breeze passing through the apple tree leaves. She stayed there for a moment longer than she needed to, relishing the private symphony of a morning where she was the only pony awake.
She shook her head while glancing in a mirror, and posed elegantly with her mane loose and hanging over her shoulders. The thought of Rarity and how she had always tried to convince her to leave her mane down made her chuckle. She bundled her mane together with a tie, then turned around to make her bed.
It was pristine, as if it had never been slept in, and she dropped her head and sighed. She turned her back to the bed and picked her head up, putting her smile back on. It was nice, wasn’t it, to not have to worry about that? Nothing wrong with convenience, she thought to herself, and she pressed open her door to face the day.
She entertained thoughts of a simple breakfast as she walked down the stairs, taking care not to let her hooves clomp too loudly on the hardwood, lest she wake her siblings.
“A bowl of cereal, and some apple chips,” she whispered to herself. “I reckon that’ll be a mighty fine start to my day.”
She rounded the corner of the stairs and walked into the ranch house’s kitchen, and stopped.
Laid out on the table was a huge assortment of food. There were stacks of pancakes and waffles, chilled glasses of apple juice, fancy pastries and cakes, and even an apple pie with fresh whipped cream. There was not, however, any apple chips or cereal, and she frowned and sighed again while pulling up a chair.
She grabbed a plate of pancakes and ate them resentfully, glaring in the direction of a small metal footlocker set underneath the sink. She ate slowly. Normally with a feast like this, she would have relished in it, tried one of everything, made sure to really take her time to truly taste the food. It was ingrained in her and her family to be grateful for what filled your plate, and she felt a little foolish to feel so disdainfully towards the meal she had been given today. Nevertheless, the feeling stuck with her.
She finished and set her fork down quietly, hoping to avoid seeing the source of her consternation. Unfortunately, the sensors were exquisitely fine-tuned, and the metal footlocker popped open with a friendly ping that made Applejack’s eyes roll. Out of it zipped a circular little thing, about the size of a frisbee, that spun lazily in the air with blinking lights. It hovered over to Applejack’s spot, above her plate, and out of two compartments extended spindly metal arms that grabbed the dishes. Applejack stared as her dishes were lifted away and another arm--this one armed with a brush--extended from the robot and swept up the couple crumbs she hadn’t managed to get on the plate.
The robot tilted and chirped in recognition of the pony next to it and then bobbed away to the sink, where it turned on the water and the brush arm folded and reconfigured to a sponge.
Applejack sighed again. She pushed away from the table and dropped to the floor, and stomped out of the house, no longer concerned about the noise she was making. Apple Bloom and Big Mac did not need to wake up any time soon, so they could sleep in if she had woken them.
“None of us need to wake up at all,” Applejack muttered on her way to the barn. There was a commotion of fluttering and bird call above her, and she glanced up to see a family of swallows fleeing another one of the robots, which was scanning apples with a sharp blue light. There was a beep from the machine as it finished checking every apple, a quick moment while it hung noiselessly in the air, and then another beep before it moved off to the next tree.
It wasn’t until Applejack had placed a hoof on the barn door, ready to open it, that she realized she didn’t need to be here. She growled under her breath and opened the barn anyways, hoping to find maybe some sort of comfort in the scent of hay and dust. The barn itself was filled with baskets upon baskets of pristine apples, all labelled and ready for shipping to various towns and markets. She walked up to one of them and checked a dirtied notepad attached to it, and grunted in disgust as she saw she didn’t need to even fill out the manifest.
A thought occurred to her, and it caught her by surprise. She looked up at the hay loft above her, quickly recognizing the bundle of cables that ran up to the gable, and she frowned momentarily. Apple Bloom would probably be upset, but Big Mac wouldn’t mind. Heck, she thought, he may even be grateful.
There was a chirp, and Applejack glanced behind her to see another one of the flying discs, dancing back and forth almost foalishly behind her. She looked down to see she was standing in front of one of the metal footlockers.
“Oh, ah, sorry,” she said, stepping back. The robot chirped and tilted in thanks and zipped down and into its housing. She shook her head. Why was she apologizing to these things?
She looked up at the hay loft again and her eyes narrowed. She had made her decision.
She crossed the barn and started climbing up the old ladder, paying no attention to how it shook and creaked under her weight. The recognition that she had gained a not-insignificant amount of weight over the past month came to her, but she trusted the hoofmade construction. Besides, once she was done, she would lose the weight almost as quickly as it had come.
She made it to the top and looked around, having not been up here since before the salespony had installed the little robots. All her friends had ragged on her that she hadn’t gotten them yet, and about how helpful and useful they were. ‘You can’t live without them’, they intoned, shocked whenever they visited her and found they had to do everything for themselves again.
Well, no more of that, Applejack thought. She looked at the old lumber about her and managed to hold back yet another sigh. The bales of hay were neatly wrapped and packed, and the floor had been pristinely cleaned. Even one of the old nails that had never stayed down when hammered back had somehow been put into place. Safe, sure, but soulless.
She turned her attention to the stream of cables that ran along the inside of the roof next to her, and walked beside them until she came to the access panel they all turned into. She stood up on two hind legs and placed a hoof on the latch, when a beep--almost angry sounding--went off behind her.
She glanced to see two different robots hovering next to her, each with a series of red lights blinking back and forth.
“What?” she said.
“If maintenance is required, please contact support,” came a tinny imitation of a mare’s voice. “Tampering with the processing unit will void your warranty.”
Applejack made a noise that was somewhere between a scoff and a laugh, and she pulled the latch and came down with the panel. She tossed it absentmindedly behind her, hearing it clatter on the dirt below. She wasn’t after the processing unit, anyways.
Within the metal enclosure she had opened was a mess of computer parts and wires that she could make no sense of. She looked around carefully, following each of the wires as they moved from fan to motherboard, power supply to processor, processor to module, and finally found what she hoped was the broadcast component. She opened a panel next to the first on the side the communication system--marked with a radiating wave--came out of.
There was a large plastic rod sticking out of it, and the lights flashing at the base of it raced. The tip of the rod was rubber, and it stuck out through a tiny access hole in the roof to the outside. Applejack smiled deviously and reached her hoof in, only to hear yet another beep behind her.
No, it wasn’t a beep. It was an alarm, almost a screech. She pulled back and turned around.
Fifteen different robots hovered around her in a semi circle, surrounding her. One of them held the panel she had discarded, extending it to her in an arm, and the rest displayed those same warning red lights.
“Please do not interfere with the system. We are here to assist.”
“Like Tartarus you are,” Applejack said, turning back around to the open compartment. She reached in and grabbed the antenna, and felt a shock.
The shock had not come from the rod, however. It was on her flank. She bucked--out of instinct or reflex from the spook she wasn’t sure--and felt her hind hoof connect squarely with metal, and then something more solid. She glanced around her shoulder again.
The robots had all turned to look at the one that had touched Applejack, which currently lay in pieces next to the railing she had smashed it into. They turned back to her, and then to the robot, and then to her again.
“I just need a break is all,” she said. “I ain’t destroying no brain parts or nothin’. Just the thing that sends you out. Right?”
There was silence, and the red lights all turned off. One of them, the robot directly in the center of the circle, tilted up and down as if it was nodding.
“And it can be fixed easily if I just pull this thing out, right?”
It nodded again.
“So before any of you become spare parts, how ‘bout you give me some space here, perhaps?”
There was a pause before the fourteen remaining robots all tilted and chirped, though there was a strange reluctance to the computerized tone they emitted. They moved off then, sluggishly, towards their respective footlockers, and Applejack sighed yet again, and pulled the antenna out.
The processing unit let out a noise that sounded strangely like a scream, but it cut short and then went back to its typical clicking and whirring. Applejack gently set the antenna down, closed the panels, and then descended to the ground floor of the barn. She walked outside, feeling strange, and looked at one of the metal housings.
“I suppose,” she said while walking towards the house, already hearing Apple Bloom starting to complain, “that we all just want to have work to do. Poor fellers. Don’t worry,” she said to the housing next to the front door. “I’ll plug you in next time we have guests around.”
From the box came a small, but happy, chirp.
