Do I even have to preface this by saying it happened in 2020?
It all started when Turner went to pee.
I knew this because in every video conference I’ve had with him, he turns off his camera every thirty minutes like clockwork. He turns it back on again exactly two minutes later, often brushing still-damp hands on the front of his shirt. He never explained nor even acknowledged the brief substitution of his live video image for his (very static) avatar: a picture of him taken at an IETF meeting almost 15 years ago.
By the way, I wasn’t the only one to notice Turner’s frequent body breaks.
On screen, Lauren’s eyes widened briefly as she obviously noticed his momentary escape from her report on the sales forecast of smartNICs in the Taiwanese market. Like the pro she was, she effortlessly chose that moment to relate an interesting incident that happened the last time she visited that island, when she was brought to a night market to drink wine mixed with the blood of a freshly decapitated snake. Not coincidentally, the anecdote took precisely two minutes to tell, ending just as Turner’s little square on screen switched back to showing him seated his office chair, the room behind him blurred for privacy, movement drawing the eye to his chest where he was rubbing his glistening hands together.
No one ever called Turner out on his brief ‘disappearances’, nor enquired about his frequently damp digits. After all, he was the boss. And obviously had a sensitive bladder. It was just another COVID-19 discovery about the man, including his fondness for Crimean war memorabilia. This was revealed in early video conferences before he learned about the “blur background” option. We all got an eyeful of the pictures and framed dioramas on the wall behind him, his shelf full of business and leadership self-help books, and a thermos bottle next to a coffee cup sporting the words “IBM OS2”.
So, imagine the reaction when a cheery voice suddenly piped up and asked “Hey, Turneroony, where’dya go?”
A bright pink avatar appeared in the speaker’s block in the conference window. It showed a cartoon character with pink skin, huge blue eyes, a wild mane of curly pink hair from which peeked what looked like horse ears. Long lashes gave an impression of cheeky femininity.
Great, I thought. We’re being Zoom-bombed by Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony! Yes, that Pinkie Pie.
I took a closer look at the image. It smiled and raised one eyebrow in expectation. Color me impressed! It was a full-motion avatar, maybe a really impressive Animoji. And since I had called this meeting, I was the moderator and I had both the responsibility of inviting attendees and controlling access, the latter task in which I had obviously failed.
Heat rushed to my face and I flailed to grab my mouse as my five on-screen colleagues reacted to the interloper in a surprising variety of ways. I directed my cursor to the Participants panel to eject the offending pony. No luck. There was no extra party listed, just the usual members of the weekly sales call. And I had set a password for the call, anyway.
I may have been alarmed, but I was not yet confounded. “Uh, this is a private conference call,” I said, letting some of my anger show through.
Pink eyebrows rose. “A private function you say. So that’s where Turneroony went!” She winked theatrically. “Ya can’t keep it in forever, you know. It’s bad for the kidneys if you do!” said Pinkie Pie. A pink hoof touched the side of her muzzle. “But you should also consider cutting down those third and fourth cups of coffee so early in the mornings,” she opined.
At this point in the story I must admit I was I well on my way to being at least technically confounded. I could have noticed the reactions of the other attendees of the call, to see if one of them was in cahoots with the Zoom-bomber. I could have seen Turner turning almost as pink as the cartoon character claiming the big center block on the screen. I could have ended the conference and e-mailed everyone a new and secure (this time, I swear) call invite. I could have done all these things, but I didn’t. Instead, what caught my attention was how impeccable an imitation of Andrea Libman’s voice was coming from the Zoom-bomber. In my defense, please keep in mind this was before LLM-based AIs came out that let anyone deepfake any image or voice, living, dead or animated.
Then Turner broke the mood. “Can someone tell me what’s going on?“ he asked angrily.
I shook my head. “Uh...” I started off brilliantly, “I think someone’s trying to pull a prank on us.“ I could have kicked myself. Good going, Captain Obvious! I licked my lips and thought furiously.
On-screen, Pinkie laughed out loud. “Don’t be silly! If I was trying to pull a prank on you, you wouldn’t know about it until I did the gotcha. No gotcha, no prank! It’s pretty simple, really!“
Sudden (desperate) realization washed over me. Not a prank. A phishing attack! This was all a social engineering trick to get us to reveal our passwords or otherwise compromise security. I decided I needed to take control of this situation, before anyone let critical info slip, like our upcoming webinar with Intel, or our super-secret planned website refresh in the new year.
I hit the End Conference button. Oh, and of course, then I hit the Confirm button. When the browser window closed the last thing I spied was Pinkie Pie’s baby blue eyes.
I took a deep breath. Then I generated a new meeting invite, this time with an extra-long password. I sent the e-mail. I took another deep breath. I opened the new conference bridge in Chrome instead of Safari. Just to be sure.
Unsurprisingly, the first one back on was Larry, our veep of R&D. Years of last-minute-before-the-release bug fixes and calm response to frantic customer emergencies had burned all the drama out of him long ago. He didn’t even bother to acknowledge the interruption. He just sat in his chair as he always did, the corners of his lips turned slightly down as if this was just another of life’s trifling challenges to his unassailable engineer’s stoicism.
Next was Lauren. She, on the other hand, was grinning like the cat that had caught the canary and swallowed it whole. A perfectly stenciled eyebrow rose and immaculate white incisors briefly bit a ruby red lower lip.
“Well that was unexpected,“ she said. “A friend of yours?”
Did she know? I swallowed. I hadn’t told any of my work acquaintances about my love for this cartoon for little girls. I certainly hadn’t told them about the hundreds of thousands of words of fanfics I had written over the last 13 years. I was a serious professional. They didn’t need to know anything else.
“The news feeds have been full of stories about business meetings being Zoom-bombed. I guess it was just our turn.“ I smiled embarrassedly. “Just glad it wasn’t some exhibitionist freak looking for a new audience.”
Lauren shrugged as the images of the head of product management and the CFO appeared onscreen.
Two things then happened in quick succession: Pinkie Pie’s image appeared upside-down, and then Turner showed up in his, also reversed.
“Beat ya!” declared Pinkie. “Turner, you’re it!”
“I’m what?” he blurted out with equal parts confusion and anger. “Who are you, and how do you know my name?”
“It’s written there at the bottom of your box thingy, silly! And you can read my name at the bottom of mine!” Pinkie’s hoof actually extended past the bottom of the frame (technically the top as she was upside down) to gesture at her displayed handle. She drew the hoof back up (technically down), placed it next to her mouth and whispered sotto voce: “Not the brightest candle on the birthday cake, is he?”
By the way, the text below her image showed her name in full: “Pinkamina Diane Pie”. Who knew who it really was, mind you, but by that point I wasn’t in the mood for mysteries. I had had enough, and I shut down the call for the second time.
I thought for a few seconds, running the possibilities in my mind. The e-mail mailing list! Somehow Zoom-bomber Pinkie had gotten the password, which means she had received the e-mail invite. I set up I a new conference call, copied the link and password, and emailed Turner, Bill, Jane, Lauren and Larry one-by-one, in reverse order of how much time it usually took them to get online for an impromptu meeting.
Turner’s was still the last face to appear. His eyes were narrow and his lips almost invisible. Individually, each of these facial tics was a sign of trouble, together meant someone was going to have a bad day. Even before he spoke I knew his first words would be for the person obviously to blame for screwing up this call, me.
“Are the shenanigans over?" he asked.
Pinkie’s image appeared, her box right below Turner’s. She gazed upwards, as if this was Hollywood Squares, the Covid-19 Edition. She smiled. “Hey Turnerooney! I see England, I see France –“
“ – And I see you, Pink… er Pony.” I cut her off as my career flashed before my eyes. I desperately searched for any excuse to redirect her attention away from further embarrassing our boss. “How in the world did you manage to join this teleconference?”
Pinkie’s avatar appeared next to mine, now sporting a deerstalker hat and holding a huge Meershaum pipe at the tip of a hoof. “Elementary, my dear Watson,” she said, and blew a huge soap bubble from the bowl of the pipe. “I had Twilight set it up. She’s like you, good with the technical stuff, but a whole lot more purple.” The soap bubble burst with a wet pop. “Kinda like the color of Turneroonie’s face is turning.”
Pinkie had a point, Turner’s face was getting more livid by the second. “This is unacceptable! Close this conference down and reschedule the call for tomorrow. And this had better not happen again, or your job is on the line!”
His avatar disappeared from the screen, followed by everyone else’s except Pinkie Pie’s.
Then another avatar popped open showing a bright-eyed purple unicorn sporting a navy blue mane striped with dark purple and magenta.
“I’m so sorry about this,” said Princess Twilight Sparkle with a wince. “I obviously didn’t think through informing Pinkie Pie of my first contact plans.”
I raised my hand and waved.
“Er, hi,” was all I managed to produce. Then my brain finally kicked into gear. “Wadaya mean, first contact?”
I was amazed to see Princess Twilight Sparkle’s ear droop in on each side of her sharp unicorn horn, which was longer and thinner than I remember from the show.
“Yeah, about that… “ She coughed into a hoof, raised her chin and her ears, and then intoned in a deeper, more formal voice: “Greetings from the kingdom of Equestria and the sapient inhabitants of planet Earth.” A broad toothy smile punctuated her pronouncement, with only a slight droop and tremor at its corners.
I stared at the screen. “But that’s what we call our planet!” I remarked.
The corners of Twilight’s smile drooped down even further, and her ears dipped even lower than before.
I realized belatedly that I had just monumentally flubbed first contact! Me, a proud science-fiction nerd who had endlessly fantasized about this moment for over five decades. I could have done better. I could do better. So I tried.
“I mean, greetings from the people of our planet… coincidentally, uhhh… also called Earth.”
“Wow!” said Pinkie Pie, nibbling on her right fore-hoof pensively. “That was a tad more awkward than I had imagined it.”
A loud sigh issued from the laptop’s speakers. “Same here,” said Twilight, sounding miserable.
Embarrassment warmed my face, and I admit not for the first time that day.
I decided to try to lighten the mood. “Well, any alien first contact where no-one gets eaten, or attacked by a face hugger, is at the very least a qualified success.” I raised both hands in the universal sign of approval, bright colored graphical fireworks exploding behind my screen avatar.
Pinkie looked down at her forehooves and frowned. “Hey, no fair! We un-gu-lates can’t do that!” Her frown turn upside down as quickly as it had appeared. “See, Twi, I can learn some of those ten-bit words you keep using!”
Her sudden good cheer didn’t seem to have made Twilight feel any better. I decided to take the unicorn by the horn, so to speak. (Yes, I know, witty in retrospect, if not in heat of the moment.)
“So Princess Twilight, how is it that you’re able to connect to the internet and raid my conference calls?”
“Well” – her gaze turned inwards – “it was mostly by accident. I was doing some cosmology research using certain spells mapping the space-time continua based on Calabi–Yau manifolds. I figured that somewhere in the Multiverse there might conceivably be a universe that was a superset of our own – as postulated by Starswirl the Bearded in his magical simulation hypothesis – and figured there could conceivably be a few quantum-level entanglements I could tap into to get a communications channel going. Little did I know that this would be electro-magnetic in nature instead of thaumic, but you work with what you can get, right?”
Her earnest magenta eyes had grown bigger and bigger as she spoke, her avatar coming to dominate the screen.
“Er, yeah. Sure. And how did you work out the Internet Protocol and video conferencing APIs?” I felt like a heel for asking. But I just felt that I had to. Once an egghead…
“Oh…” – Twilight waved a hoof dismissively – “after the spell casting, that was the easy part! Keep in mind, this is science, not fantasy!”
A pink hoof reached out of Pinkie’s vid window and pushed at the corner of Twilight’s, forcing it to shrink back to only a quarter of the screen’s available surface. “Hey, Twi! Tell’m about the fanfics!”
Her head shrunk back on her withers. “I’m sure he doesn’t need to know about those!”
“What fanfics?” He pulled at his collar, which unaccountably felt tighter.
Pinkie’s grin displayed an impressive number of teeth. “The ones with a lot of horsing…”
“…words.” Interrupted Twilight, eyes wide and waving both forehooves in the air.
In her window Pinkie winked hard, confirming several of my headcanon theories about the party mare. “He knows what I mean, I’m sure!”
“Ahem. I don’t write or even read those types of fanfics.”
With an effort, Twilight took a breath, closing both eyes. A composure-regaining moment later, they opened slowly to a serious expression. “I know. That’s part of why I chose to contact you.”
Pinkie plopped her muzzle over crossed cannons. “Yeah. She wants you to write something for us.”
“What?” My brain caught up with my ears. “Uh… may I ask why?”
Twilight took a moment to gather her thoughts.
“It’s just that, some of the fanfics I read online were reasonably accurate descriptions of real events in Equestria. Mind you, we don’t know if this is because your universe influences our, or that ours influences yours.”
“Ipso fatso,” added Pinkie, “does the author write the fanfic, or does the fanfic write the author?”
“Sometimes I wonder that myself.” I crossed my arms and sat back in my office chair. “And why me?”
Twilight’s eyes widened slightly. “Because in your fanfics you tend to treat your characters with respect. I like that.”
Pinkie Pie shrugged. “That, and you don’t do clop!”
“Well,” I responded, “sounds like you’ve got me pegged.”
Pinkie’s eyes opened so wide her face filled the vid window as she took a preparatory breath… and a purple hoof reached over from Twilight’s vid window to cover Pinkie’s mouth, muffling the words she attempted to speak.
I was reminded of why Twilight had always been my best pony. “So you want to do a controlled experiment on universe building?”
“Yes,” Twilight replied. “Nothing extravagant nor earth-shattering, just a simple slice-of-life story to tie up a loose end and do something nice to help a pony out.”
I was beyond flattered. “Sure, I guess. I’m pretty used to writing stories from prompts for contests and such. What did you have in mind?”
Twilight beamed. “I’ll send you an e-mail with a brief outline. It ought to result in a testable effect in our universe.”
“I’m honored you’d ask me.” A thought occurred to me. Thankfully I came to my senses before writing anypony a blank check. “But, please remember that I also don’t do…”
“Shipping.” Pinkie Pie stuck out her tongue. “Yeah, booooorrrring.” She tilted her head. “You know I really liked the one you wrote where I end up hatching Discord from an egg.”
I was surprised. “You did?”
“Yeah, but that one didn’t happen in real life, so I still just have to dream of what’s it’s like to be a mom.”
The incoming e-mail chime rang out.
“That’s me,” said Twilight.
We all looked at each across the digital divide.
“So when will I find out if it worked?”
Twilight’s gaze dropped down. “You probably won’t. I can’t seem to keep a two-way connection open to a universe for more than a few hours. And I’m never sure when I reconnect it’s to the same universe. It’s kind of a quantum indeterminacy thing.”
“Yeah,” said Pinkie archly. “So you better get cracking with that story!”
Twilight waved a hoof. “Thanks for giving this a try. We really appreciate it.”
Easy come, easy go, I thought. I waved a hand in response. “And I appreciate…”
The screen went blank.
Sigh.
Well at least I don’t have to worry about tomorrow’s conference call. Feeling melancholy, I clicked on my e-mail inbox, opened the latest entry and read Twilight’s foolproof scheme to test her hypothesis.
Rats!
I really should have told them I don’t do self-inserts, either.
