Sixteen years had passed.

Twilight was standing in the middle of her observatory, looking at the sky with an enormously large, several meters long telescope. That night she was particularly interested in a comet named 1337 Largeheap.

“Down to a minute! Both time and angle. This is incredible.” She then dropped a glance at the scientific appliance that allowed her to predict the comet’s trajectory with such a good accuracy. It was a modestly-sized box, hooked up to an electricity source. An upgraded version of the general-purpose computation device. For some time now the boxes like this significantly affected all the scientific endeavors in Equestria. They even started to find their way into other aspects of ponies’ lives. It was not yet clear how pervasive they will end up being, but the idea that the genie is out of the bottle had already filled the air above Ponyville.

Many ponies, who did not care at first, now spent a significant share of their free time next to boxes like this one. Rainbow Dash could not stop using a real-time interactive computational routine, created by Scootaloo. It involved some moving squares. After accessing it for the first time, Rainbow was all set. “I will not give up until I totally beat this game!”

Some ponies used the computational device to plan their bit spending. On the other hoof, a growing number of ponies spent so much time with the boxes that it started eroding their friendships — a frightening, quickly escalating trend that nopony knew how to reverse.

Apple Bloom stormed into the observatory, screaming. “We cracked it! Twilight, we broke the code!”

Alicorn gasped with amusement. She kind of expected the Cutie Mark Crusaders to solve the riddle eventually, but in the moment, she still could not contain her surprise. “I am so proud of you guys. What did it say?”

“Just as we thought, it leads to a large library of Ever-moving unicorns. At least we can’t imagine it being anything else. It also seems to congratulate us on cracking the code… Which is very odd. It’s like they wanted us to break it.”

Blue Monocle’s echo spoke to Twilight’s ear: ”The path will the bright ponies find, with the power of friendship”.

“And how did you break it?” wondered Twilight.

“They used a sort of a Fillystel cipher, but the first half of the secret key was set to zero. And also they used only six rounds of mixing. If they had used more rounds or a stronger secret, the chances of us breaking it in our lifetimes would have been negligible. But they didn’t do that, and that was such an obvious thing to do! It took our computation device a couple of days of brute-forcing different combinations, but we got the result.”

“I am glad you solved it,” said Twilight, patting Apple Bloom on the head. “I am so proud of you.” That second, the alicorn thought of many things, but one was clear to her: soon the Canterlot library will probably need to grow an extra wing. All thanks to her friends, her students, and an electronic device, resurrected from the pages of an arcane manual: the computer.

Author's Note

I am so happy that you read my nerd-fic! I would love if you'd write a comment about what you liked and didn't like about it.

I'd like to thank Martin04ka, Lyra, Anton S., Ян-Мартин, Алексей and Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct for their feedback.

Writing this fic was a fun experiment for me - I have never written any fiction before. Dear reader, try writing something yourself too! Before you do, we can only guess what wonders you are capable of!