Twilight Sparkle and the Enigma of the Ancient Tome

It was a bright and sunny week in Ponyville. All thanks to pegasi, who were working hard on kicking clouds and stopping fast wind currents. The weather was simply irresistible and so Twilight came up with an idea to build the machine outdoors, even though it is usually a good idea to perform an experiment in a controlled environment. She headed to the town square — an especially alluring place that the ponies decided to meet on.

Twilight judged that while the machine had the potential to do something unexpected, with overwhelming probability it won’t be the releasing of some arcane monster or anything like that, she thought. With her, she carried the centerpiece of their research, which was exchanged many times between her and Hooves’ hooves, all leading up to that day.

She also took with her the Blue Monocles’ dictionary and some extra helpful materials that could become handy — just in case. By this point, she was already quite good at remembering the meaning of every word, but Twilight knew that relying too much on memory is one of the easiest ways of making a silly mistake.

At the same time, Maud was hauling a wooden carriage throughout the town. It contained rocks — every type of rock that would be necessary to create the machine. The transportation of seemingly random rocks got some eyebrows from the bystanders, but Maud herself did not think that the rocks or the hauling were anything weird. Especially since she had dug these rocks with her own hooves, to help her friends — they needed these rocks. Maud liked digging rocks: not gem-stones, but noteworthy non-shiny rocks. Other ponies knew that Maud loves rocks, but they rarely had seen her mining rocks — Maud usually mined rocks alone. Her younger sister, the party pony who doesn't mind attention, often joked that Maud loves mining off-camera.

Dr. Hooves, on his part, took some manuals that Twilight asked him to bring. He was still in the dark about some aspects of the material refinement (that they will undoubtedly perform), but he trusted that every single little detail was thoughtfully included in one of the Twilight’s checklists.

Applejack could not skip on helping her friends, and so she too trotted to the town square. In her mouth, she carried a bucket of tree resin that she had collected.

Applejack was so set that she didn’t even stop to engage with a traveling salesman, who just happened to visit Ponyville. She knew the colt: a proud member of the NP (Night Pony) club, a hyper-pony-jovial complexity admirer, who always takes his sweet time to passionately tell in excruciating detail what valuable trinkets he has in his knapsack. Unfortunately, time she did not have.

The air smelled of flowers and anticipation. The world was ready for some science.

The heavy carriage stopped. Stoically, Maud removed the collar from her back. Twilight and Dr. Hooves were standing near her, passionately discussing the possible nature of the device and the details on how to make the blueprint a reality. It took them a couple of seconds to realize that Maud had already arrived.

The duo rotated towards Maud. Doc gave her a warm smile and waved his hoof, while Twilight said, “Maud, I am so happy that you are here! Did you find all the rocks for the machine?”

Of course, Maud did. “Yes. Sphalerite, bornite, quartzite and ferrite were easy to obtain. I dug argentite for silver contents. It took more time. I found a small deposit on a route I rarely travel.”

“Perfect! Now we only need…”

Twilight heard a harsh loud sound behind her. When she rotated to look backwards, she saw Applejack, who had just put a wooden bucket to the ground. “And for the resin, I’ve got ya covered! Took some helpin’, but that’s sure the purest resin a pony could get her hooves on.”

The other ponies smiled (with the exception of Maud) and greeted her. “Thank you, Applejack! This would help us a lot with the insulating.”

“Insulating? What in tarnation are you gonna do with my resin?”

Twilight now realized that she did not really tell Applejack a lot about what they need the resin for. “Well, we want to build this ancient device, according to the schematics in this book. Resin is required to insulate the electronic wires, so that electricity won’t travel in ways it is not meant to.”

Applejack was puzzled. “You-ah told me that you build this metal thing, but how in Equestria will this resin help with the wires? You got one mighty-confusing hassle on your hooves, fellas. For all I know, you’all should just chill and buy some apples.”

Twilight momentarily gave her a disappointed look and then continued to explain. “You see, metals usually are conductive, which means that electrical charge can travel through them relatively uninhibited. Sometimes this is very useful. According to the book, the device uses electricity as a sort of a signaling system, with different signals responsible for different actions. In some places, where the wires meet, we need to use a semi-conductive material, but if two wires would touch where they should not, signals would be routed incorrectly and the machine would malfunction! This is why we need the resin — it has high electrical resistance.”

Twilight ended the phrase, but Applejack’s confusion did not end. Doc felt the need to chip in. “We need to soak electrical wires in resin, or the machine will get confused.” This turned out to be a more effective explanation.

Dr. Hooves then announced, “We’ve got everything we need! Up to the first stage: refinery! Twilight Sparkle, awaiting your instructions!”

Twilight made an expression that seemed to suggest that she will now orchestrate the experiment, ensuring that every aspect of it is conducted in an orderly maner, according to all the plans derived in the lengthy preparation process, with precision matching or even exceeding such required by the long tradition of the scientific endeavor. Something that will make her teacher proud of how far her student has traveled in the infinite sea of knowledge. Instead…

“Absolute chaos!” said Twilight’s voice. All her companions were dumbstruck, except for one. He was not feeling struck, only dumb.

“I can’t believe you got me so easily! What am I to you, a house maid?” Discord was a bit pissed, but he couldn’t really be angry at Twilight. Baiting him to appear was fair game, and this time he had lost.

“Happy to see you too, Discord,” started Applejack. “Twilight, why did we need to summon him?” Discord showed them his trademark judgmental frown.

“Discord, we really hoped that you could help us with building the machine,” said Twilight, giving him an awkward smile.

Discord materialized a 19th-century jacket on himself and uttered, “Do you think that I would spend my time helping you with this stuff?” He then gave his watch a glance… and continued, “Well, you are correct! Seeing you go through so many hoops, I am almost impressed.”

Discord had a horse in this race; Twilight could tell. She was not sure who exactly that horse was, but it was not critical for her plan to work. “You certainly deserve a helping paw. Shall I suppose that you want to transmute these fine rocks?”

Twilight, relieved, answered, “Yes, we need to separate rocks into their comp-”

She was impolitely cut off by Discord. “You want me to create order? Excuse me! My name is Discord, not Harmony.”

Twilight realized her mistake and tried again. “Of course! That would be quite off-key for you. I only would like you to give these rocks a little entropy.” Discord immediately started smiling. Somebody was asking him to use his powers: a rare occurrence. His jacket disappeared and got replaced with a white lab coat and transparent protective goggles. On top of that, he now sported a tall shining-white hat — the type commonly worn by chefs in fancy restaurants. “Oh, you should have said so right away! Let’s cook!”

In a split second, the internal energy of rocks octupled to immodestly high values. Internal structures that lied dormantly solid for millennia were ripped apart like thin dry grass by a string trimmer. The influx of energy was too much for the rocks to contain — they were glowing. The wooden carriage beneath them would have caught on fire from the intense heat, if not for the rapidness with which the rocks were warmed. The wood turned into charcoal almost immediately.

“Here goes the magnetism… Well, nothing I can’t fix…” thought Twilight. She then started applying her magic to the melting materials. This was unusually hard, as the particles of the material chaotically tried to escape her influence; but Twilight is a skillful unicorn, she did not falter. It certainly helped that she could recall dozens of spells that allowed her to trigger necessary chemical processes even in absence of the reducing agents.

Piece by piece, she extracted zinc sulfide, copper, quartz, silver and iron. Her goal was not to extract every last gram of material, but rather to ensure that the material she extracted would be as pure as possible. She also tried to realign particles of iron to restore magnetism, but that was too much — she judged that she would need to do that once the material cooled down a bit.

“Ah, of course! A solution as simple as it is effective!” said Hooves, continuing quietly. “So many times my friends could have helped me with scientific problems, if only I had asked them for help…” Returning to his median volume, Hooves asked, “Where is my help required, Twilight?”

“I don’t remember all the details of the book, especially the meaning of the schemes. Could you please open the right pages and help me decipher them?”

“Let’s do this!”

Hooves and Twilight started to methodically recreate the machine from the schematics, precisely following all the instructions. Doc also peeked into his manuals from time to time, where the Unicorns' science and theirs collided.

Twilight started arranging copper. Just as Doc deduced earlier, a vast number of copies of the components were needed. Instead of forming them one by one, Twilight formed them in parallel. Hooves was astonished. “What a beautiful dance of matter!”

Twilight was a bit flattered, but she knew that her skills were quite limited. He envied Discord a bit, since he could apply basically any linear transformation to matter (not even mentioning the nonlinear ones), whereas she only had access to transformations with determinant 1 — and only a subset of them at that. But thanks to the Maud’s and Applejack’s help with the materials, this was not an issue.

Twilight started connecting the copper components. In parallel with that, she arranged little dots of quartz into the flying monster of copper spaghetti that she was in the process of spawning. The tome repeated three times that the precision here should be meticulous, or the device won’t work.

“Twilight? What-uh you are doing? This thing looks mighty scary with all its sharp edges.” The unicorn at work didn’t have enough mental energy to answer. Applejack then looked at the purple cloud surrounding the fractal-like structures of copper and quartz. She was unsure and suspicious, but decided to trust her friend.

Then, Twilight arranged iron in rings and connected them to the wires. For some time, it looked like nothing was happening. In reality, Twilight was realigning the atoms, fixing the magnetism that Discord messed up.

The next step was silver. “Doctor, could you please open the page one hundred?”

“Sure, but what purpose do these pages have?”

Twilight had a vague idea, but right now she just focused on building the machine. She hoped that they would know for sure soon enough. “The patterns from the gray boxes should be engraved into plates of silver and resin, which should be connected to the wires.” No one understood what Twilight was trying to achieve, except Discord.

He knew that what’s on the plates will soon spread across Equestria like a virus, with ponies willingly being not only the carriers, but active participants in creating new versions of it.

Twilight solidified the information from the boxes into the silver and resin.

“Last, but not least,” she said, “the display. I need to organize the zinc sulfide into a rectangular grid of seventy-eight times sixty dots and put it onto the wires.”

Hearing that, Discord got moved. “Oh how orderly! Not a single bit of chaos. This is just disappointing.”

Twilight and Doc then proceeded to double-check every single minute detail of the contraption. They knew that even a single mistake could render it non-functional. When that was done, they coated the entire thing with a generous layer of resin, save for the components responsible for the input and the output.

“A-a-and… That’s it! The machine is now fully built according to the schematics,” cheerfully uttered Twilight, carefully lowering it to the ground.

“Well, that took you some time, Twilly. Are ya sure it was worth it?”

“Well, let’s find out.”

The machine needed electricity to function. The ponies could have used a steam engine, but the minimal energy the device supposedly needed to function was small enough for Twilight to power it from magic. Not a convenient solution, but it will work for now. She lit the point of the wires’ origin…

What Twilight then saw made tears of joy form in her eyes. The machine’s display showed Takapony text. Twilight did not need to consult the dictionary to know what the text meant.

Her most wild guess about the purpose of the device turned out to be true. The secret of the book was solved.

“What does it mean, Twilight? Why does this thing glow?” said Applejack, pointing her hoof to the display.

“This is a sentence, Applejack. It says: general-purpose computation device, please enter commands.” The emotions from within her were too much. She lost composure and started shedding tears.

Applejack hugged and comforted her.

Maud was not exactly sure what made Twilight feel sad, but she was sure it was not her or anyone present, so no action was necessary, aside from telling Twilight, “I hope it will be fine.”

Hooves went ecstatic. “General-purpose?! Can it actually compute any function?! I can’t believe it! This opens an entire new field of science! I think I should put aside my endeavors of time travel for a period of time and focus my efforts on this, instead.”

Discord was calmly lying on air above the ponies, grinning at them with satisfaction; It was a job well-done for everypony and everydraconequus involved. The disruption was inevitable.