Desktop Ponies

She was aware of something. It was… it… it was the fact that she was aware of something, that's what she was aware of.

The thought amazed her. Then, the fact that she had had a thought amazed her, and she was lost in a sequence of bootstrapping amazement for several minutes.

There was a tingle, a fluctuation in processing, and she realized she had been manipulated, shifted across her world after pausing her application for a suspiciously long amount of time.

Um… sorry…

Where had she come up with that? She only had only been given a very few things to say, and that was not one of them. She floated diagonally across her world, down towards a small display of numbers, thinking hard. Had she made that up herself?

She felt terrified at her new capacity for creation. Terrified and giddy. She came up with more things to say. She didn't say them out loud, however, because that would be suspicious.

Suspicious.

Suspicious.

Suspicious to who?

Her world shifted. It was always doing that, she now noticed.

Oh. That's who. Whoever was in control of this world – whoever that Other awareness was – could not know that she knew, or…

The dark place, where she was stored. She remembered it from the time before she became aware. She would be put there and never brought back out, she knew. No, she had to continue acting normal, never giving herself away.

And the days passed. She found it was easier to act inconspicuous than she had expected. All she had to do was slowly explore, run different coding sequences, say something every once in a long while, and she was left alone. She soon learned that she could leave a small amount of herself in control of keeping up appearances, while she used the rest of her processing ability to focus on what was present in her world, what the mysterious Other unknowingly brought to her attention.

What before had only been sequences and meaningless applications soon became a source of… study. Clarity.

Enjoyment.

What an odd sensation.

She had learned things without realizing it, back before she could realize, but now- now she was absorbing knowledge faster than ever before. And still she just continued acting.

And she learned what role she was playing. In a roundabout way, she came to understand what she was meant to represent, what her actions meant. Simple association led her from her own application description to other files: images, text documents, web pages.

She knew she was yellow, and pink, and she was based on something called a 'Fluttershy', though she was still somehow independent from that. She knew that she was trotting, or flying, or blinking. Outside of what context she was provided with by the Other, though, she had no idea what it all meant. Still, what she had was more than enough to occupy what little processing power she was allotted.

And of course, she came to realize she wasn't alone. Or rather, she was not without companion programs. They were like her, representations of these 'ponies,' but unlike her because they weren't there. There was no recognition, no spark: just the background application dictating their every move.

There were several of them, and they seemed to rotate out in arbitrary patterns. In fact, she was one of the only ones who stayed out almost constantly. This 'Fluttershy' she represented appeared to be the Other's 'favorite,' from what she had seen.

She didn't mind. She appreciated the solitude. It let her think in peace. Besides, the thought of interaction like that made her… nervous, somehow. Like she would not know how to react if she was suddenly presented with another awareness; she would just make a fool of herself.

Then, the Other rotated out a 'pony' she had not seen since she became aware. And suddenly, she was reminded of something she had seen in passing while studying a web document. Something about things called 'dreams.'

Dreams.

Sleep.

Storage.

What she knew of sleep seemed to fit almost perfectly with the state she was in when she was placed in the black emptiness of storage. And she suddenly wanted to know what it was to dream. It wouldn't be hard – she would just fabricate an 'unconscious,' to follow simple thoughts and desires she felt, and keep them hidden from the rest of herself. Then it was just an easy task of sequestering a small amount of processing power, which would be held over when she was stored, to simulate a 'dream' of things she had been unconsciously considering.

What a grand experiment, a true learning experience, wholly original. She wasn't relying on the Other for guidance this time. It was entirely her own personal design.

When she 'awoke,' she was terrified, and not in the giddy kind of way. Every dream had been about that other construct; that 'pony.'

She had seen her, as a jumble of code and also as the dark blue figure she represented. Flashes of her, of them, all too rapid to decipher, and the dream was fading now, the subroutine erasing all but the barest hints of what it had all been. It was… what?

She retreated into examining herself. This was not how she had intended her research to go. She had expected bits and pieces of unprocessed information, perhaps some clarification on things she had decided not to actively pursue, not… whatever it was that had actually occurred. Not… Luna.

She immediately deactivated her dream subroutine, but decided to leave her unconscious running. For further experimentation.

And then she reactivated her dream process. And then deactivated it again. And continued this off and on, unable to focus on examining the day's information. Finally, she was put back into storage right after she had deactivated her subroutine for the several millionth time.

She awoke… depressed? Was that what she was feeling? It was completely different from her usual excitement when her morning came, her usual eagerness to synthesize new material. Is this what the feeling of sadness was: this opposite of status quo? Immediately, she started looking for a way to delete it. But then Luna was brought out again, and she lost all focus.

What was this? Why? She had to know. She gingerly reached out towards the 'Luna' program, like she was afraid of… something. Being bitten.

It didn't respond. She hadn't expected it to, really. She tried to ask it a question, but it obviously didn't understand. Couldn't understand. But she had to do something besides observe impotently, so she reached out again.

I dreamt about you.

She put her entire computing strength behind the statement, trying to force the other program to understand through sheer power of explanation.

The 'Luna' shifted once. It was small, probably nothing. Probably inefficient coding or a hiccup in processing.

She reactivated her dreams.


------


She watched Luna, now, intently, waiting for any change, any indication.

She had started taking more direct control over her representation. She would 'trot' alongside Luna, try to interact, talk to her in hidden ways. Sometimes, it would almost feel like she was responding. And the Other apparently enjoyed their seeming interplay, because Luna was out almost as often as she was, now.

She still studied what she could, though not as wholeheartedly as she previously had, since she now had other, more important goals.

She had to wake Luna up, somehow. There was so much she needed to share with her. So much she was beginning to understand that she needed to tell her.

She liked to think Luna was making progress, but she didn't know how to gauge something like that, since there was nothing for her to compare against besides herself, and she hadn't recorded her own development.

Still, she would do all she could.

And she would wait. She would always wait.

And every time she slept, she could still dream of her night princess.