Beautiful weather, extravagant houses, and private omnicarriages—I must be in Silipone Valley. As an information specialist myself, being in the heart of the information capital of Equestria is awe-inspiring—and makes me more than a little nervous for my job. I hear talk of relays, algorithms, and data. Lots and lots of data. Where it comes from, what to do with it, and how to make more from less. Does a picture tell a story? Not today maybe, but I’ve been told that’s just a matter of finding the right algorithm and feeding it the right data. One day a reporter’s job might be done with a camera and a pocket horn.

You read that right: a pocket horn. Whether they’re working at a giant corporation like Billion Jillion Gazillion or just a couple of ponies experimenting with their horns in a dusty garage, the innovators and inventors here are pushing magitechnology to limits hitherto undreamed of. I asked one pony at the Microhorn research institute if she had any concerns about the moral implications, and she told me, “It’s all right, we have an algorithm for ethics.”

Should everypony have access to a Unicorn’s magic at their whim? As an Earth Pony myself, I’d love to be freed of the trouble of having to pick something up rather than levitate it, or being stuck pounding helplessly on a locked door when I’ve forgotten my keys rather than teleporting through it. Yet I also worry that one-third of the population having forehead lasers is more than enough. Ponies who can’t afford the latest and greatest pocket horns will not be able to keep up. Unicorns will be born with inherent advantages, able to practice their magical craft at a much younger age. I was told by one such Unicorn that the march of time is always forward. He also told me that if his hunch is right, he might be able to change that. Then he asked me for a grant for 50 million.

Maybe it was just my stuck-in-the-mud ways, but the inhabitants of Silipone Valley struck me as…not smug, but self-assured without quite being proud. They knew they were right, they knew their doubters were wrong, and they knew the gulf between them was like that between the Southeastern Jut and the lower lands to the south beyond our national borders. Asking about the Great Crash punctured a few inflated egos, and maybe I was too anxious to do so as a result. But one pony puffed up when I mentioned it to her, proud, even eager. Rightly so, for she was Gamma Glisten, and she saved the world.

Gamma Glisten is chartreuse, not light green, and envious of information she doesn’t have. She shares gossip as generously as she does slices of the exquisite key lime pie to be had at the bakery on the ground floor of the Daughter Bank of San Franciscolt. Yet she has the most incredible way of niggling any details from even a reporter as taciturn as myself. Then from tidbits and rumors she constructs a grand picture that surpasses my own more informed speculations in every respect. Forget pocket horns and algorithms—if this Unicorn wants my job, I can’t stop her!

After pie and chatter, she takes me on a tour of the daughter bank. It isn’t gaudy and enormous like the Manehattan Daughter or small and unassuming like the Ponyville Daughter. This bank is sleek, efficient; all sharp angles and open offices to encourage “synergy,” a word as common to Silipone Valley as rain isn’t. It is mostly Unicorns, some Pegasi. A pair of gray Earth Pony sisters run the Mascarpony Bakery on the first floor.

Her office alone has an opaque wall, an incredible mass of colored dots on a canvas meters long. She tells me she likes to look for patterns. She also tells me there aren’t any.

I was eager to ask her about the Great Crash. I also wanted to know about the pocket horns, and the private omnibuses, and the ponies, mostly Earth, who suddenly found the price of living unaffordable due to the influx of high-earning Unicorn researchers and Pegasus capitalists. I also wanted to keep her from stealing the hat off my head, and to make a stand for old-fashioned ways.

Then she shows me the list of questions I am about to ask her. She says she fed an algorithm data from my past interviews. It’s accurate. Scarily accurate.

I’m flustered and annoyed. Maybe that’s why I asked her what I did.

Isn’t your drive to break down the universe and understand everything just playing God?

I think they stopped playing when they got an Earth Pony to teleport without any Unicorn interference. She split herself into, oh, quite a few pieces.

But she’s all right now?

Mm-hm.

What is the future of magic? And what does an economy where magic is readily available to everypony look like?

I don’t research magical technology, I just tell them that if their horns mess with the money supply, I’ll break their horns in two, and not the ones in their pockets.

You don’t see yourself as one of the innovators here pushing ponykind relentlessly forward?

(Shudders) Celestia no. I want to keep things working. They want to break things and go, “Ohh, that’s why!” And lately I think they add, “Better not tell Gamma!”

Tell me about the Great Crash. What happened, and what was your role in saving the world?

I, I think Princess Celestia must have sent me here for a reason. Her mane is different every time, did you know that? The wave of colors, the little sparkles and curves, it’s galactic, slow, tiny changes, but I notice. I came here, and I saw that there was too much…too many ponies willing to argue economics not with me, but with the economy itself. Who thought that they could see how the world ought to be, and if the world disagreed….

Yes?

I’ve given up on psychoanalysis. My psychologist says it causes me stress.

Does the job wear you out?

You know the legend that a Unicorn can only be tamed by a virgin? I’m surrounded by them. I feel phantom iron bars around me, like a prison amputee.

About the Great Crash….

Yes, yes, look, at some point you have to make some money or admit you’re destroying value. Without anything to sell, mere patter about technology and the future, today! are so many empty promises. It was simple fraud that brought it all crashing down. Strange, don’t you think? It’s as if a single pinch was enough to wake everypony from their collective dream. A cautious wind, er, critter spirits, you might say, I don’t wish to be offensive. And so every fleck of foam on the wave of the future crashed on the shore and faded on the sand.

What steps did you take to prevent the destruction of the world?

Put out pamphlets that explained about P/E ratios, what a dividend is, that sort of thing. Smiled from under a wide-brim hat while frantic ponies made pathetic pleas in my office. Lent at high interest on all good securities! (Laughs) It’s banking, you know, only banking.

You’re from Louisireana, correct? San Franciscolt must be quite the contrast. Do you have any thoughts or concerns about the visible inequality on the rise here?

I say let them eat cake. The bakery downstairs is quite good. We are making an effort to hire Earth Ponies. Not a successful effort, aha, but an effort. They just can’t, hmmm, do anything.

We can talk, chat, if you will, about inequality in Coasean terms, and then we would say—

(A cloud of multicolored butterflies slam into the window, making a very delicate racket. “Come in, sweeties!” Gamma says, her horn glowing. The window opens, and they flood in, filling the room. I hold my mouth closed, afraid I might swallow one. On closer inspection, they’re not butterflies at all. They’re ponies, tiny ponies with large, fragile wings. Gamma engages in a dozen conversations all at once, exchanging information with the high-pitched, chattering perversions of nature. I can’t follow a word of it.)

What are these?

Meet the Breezies! They helped me during the Crash, you know, they distributed pamphlets everyone and flapped annoying ponies out of my office. I can’t wait to try a real helicopter drop with them, Princess Celestia will be so delighted. They’re magical creatures, the wings look fragile but they’re immensely powerful. That whole stretch of country they called Tornado Boulevard was just Breezie territory before ponies, ah, helped them relocate.

What lessons do you take from the Great Crash moving forward?

If you’re convinced the world does or is about to work by entirely new and different rules, you had better know what those rules are and be able to test them before you start investing bits.

(The Breezies, who have been chattering in their high-pitched little voices the whole time, earn a sharp reaction from their chartreuse master. She jabbers at them, starting one sentence directed at one Breezy and finishing another aimed at two on the opposite side. It’s incomprehensible gibberish. I catch something about a countess, some kind of coruscant letter, and an order of figs that seems to have been waylaid.)

Any closing comment?

You must find those figs, Seabreeze!

Author's Notes:

Curiously, when Gamma was quite young, she swore she heard a voice speaking to her from a copy of Prices and Production in her mother's library. She ended up reading it.