Awakening

by solocitizen

2. Never Been Here Before

“Animus, where...” Lumina tried opening her eyes, but she was too tired, and within seconds she nodded off.

A bump roused Lumina from her stupor. Her head rolled over to the side, the chair was comfy, and the hologram in front of her pretty, but she couldn’t drift off again. Stay awake, she shouted inside her own mind. A green triangle sped toward a blue ball.

Another bump, that one more of a jolt, and her mind drifted out of the haze a little more. FTL jump, that’s right, they made an FTL jump, that’s why she was so disoriented. Best just to sleep through those things whenever possible. She looked at the hologram again and jumped into full alertness with an explosion of shock and terror.

“Animus!” she shouted. “We popped out of FTL next to a planet the size of Equus, and our orbit is rapidly decaying, fire up the reactor and throw all engines into reverse!”

No response. Her heart sank into a pit just beneath her stomach.

“Animus! I need you!”

“Alert, collision detected.” The voice wasn’t his; it sounded like him, but it lacked all the intelligence that backed up his words. Why in the name of Celestia that thing spoke in her friend’s place, she didn’t know. “Autonomous control unavailable. Manual helm control engaged. Alert, collision detected.”

Flashing lights sprang up around Lumina, along with a joystick from beneath the command chair, and a throttle from the hoofrest to her left. She took the throttle in her left hoof and the joystick in her right. Lumina had a class F license and more than qualified to fly a starship exceeding two million metric tons, but she was always assisted by a computer. An AI always backed her up. She didn’t drive so much as command. She didn’t know what to do, her AI companion wasn’t helping, and the haze from FTL space still filled her head.

She panicked.

The Luna Dream bucked and reeled at the slightest touch of the joystick or throttle. Animus’s cool logic wasn’t there to intermediate between her and the ship, to smooth out her commands and adjust her maneuvers. Over the next twenty minutes, she lost the battle to stay afloat. Warning lights announced her defeat, and the planet below filled the windows ahead of her.

Massive sheets of ice blanketed the majority of the surface, broken up by jagged shards of land. It shined like the sun, reflecting the light, and glowing without taking any of the warmth in for itself. A silver ring haloed the ice world and a single moon shined from high above. Lumina’s mother said that long ago, the three pony tribes struggled against each other without end, and their anger drew windigos, spirits of hate that choked the land with snow and ice. If there was any merit to the story at all, then that planet must have been rage and sorrow incarnate.

Short minutes passed, and the big white ball filled the windows. The Luna Dream shuddered as red flames lapped at the window. She was entering the atmosphere. Great, the starship was never designed to enter an atmosphere.

The best Lumina could do was open all the hatches, docking ports, and cargo holds, and throw the engines in reverse. It didn’t help much. Two of the remaining ram jets broke off their spokes and disintegrated high above the ice. Each time, the ship bucked and kicked in agony. The engines pushed back against the planet and put Lumina in a brutal tug of war between the two competing forces. Her insides threatened to burst. The holograms around her reported bits of the ship peeling off and burning up in atmosphere.

Flames cleared from the window enough to show ice flowing by beneath the ship. The Luna Dream sped into a valley bordered on all sides by imposing mountains as hospitable as a dragon’s mouth. Lumina gripped the hoof rests, tightened her harness, and grit her teeth together.

Then the hull touched ice.

Lumina was catapulted into her harness with enough force to knock the air out of her lung in a single bleat. Metal convulsed and moaned, and the lights and holograms around her flashed red and died. A grinding feeling flowed up from the bowels of the ship and filled Lumina with a harsh vibration. Ice splashed across the window and obscured her view. She felt the ship turn. Sparks rained down on her. She never screamed, she never even let out more than a whimper. Lumina stared straight ahead in silence and waited for the ship to topple over and her life to end.

But the Luna Dream never rolled over, instead the ship found its center, and Lumina lived. Over the course of countless minutes, the ship ground to a halt.

When it was over, and Lumina’s frantic breathing was the only sound on the bridge, she curled her shaking body together in a ball. She survived. Somehow, through it all, she survived.

Damage reports and red system failure messages flooded in from all over the ship. She didn’t want to look, she didn’t want to hear about how she survived the crash just to freeze to death or run out of oxygen.

After a few minutes her shaking died down and she rounded up enough courage to look at the damage report.

It was bad. It was real bad.

The engines were mostly trashed, the bottom two decks were nonexistent, and the central AI core wasn’t talking. The FTL drive and dark matter core reported fine, but once a ship the size of Luna Dream touched down on a planet, there wasn’t anything anypony could do to get it back in space; it was hopelessly massive.

Well, at least she wouldn’t freeze to death. The reactor kept pumping out power to heat the hallways and power the food synthesizers, and emergency bulkheads locked down the tears in the hull. The two lowest decks were smeared against the ice behind her, but nothing critical to her survival was lost.

Lumina unfastened herself from the crash couch and fought her way past the fallen control panels and wires cluttering the bridge. Red emergency LEDs lit her path. The stairway leading out of the bridge lay strewn across the hallway below, nothing more than a four meter drop, but she didn’t want to risk landing on broken metal, so she used some broken cables to fashion a make-shift rope to lower her self down. Progress was slow.

Before she even began tackling a reactor inspection, a distress beacon, or the obligatory venture outside, her first priority was checking on the AI core and trying to restore Animus. Something very wrong happened down there.

The hyperlift stopped halfway to the AI core, so Lumina popped open the emergency hatch and hiked to the core on hoof. The way was unlit save for sparse running lights. The insides of the Luna Dream creaked with each step of her hooves. The stench of super-heated plastic plagued her nose, but she pressed on through the fumes and darkness.

Prying the open doors to the AI core almost took more strength than a unicorn like her could muster. Lumina didn’t have the strength of an earth pony, after all. However she managed to get the doors open enough to wedge her body through. Her heart sank at the sight inside.

Animus was dead. No better way to put it. A big black scorch mark spat out from what she assumed was his quantum processor, while a crater the size of a pony was all that remained of his hard drive.

Lumina plopped down on her hind legs and wept into the grated floor beneath her. Her friend was gone. He was one of the few she ever had, and now he was gone.

In that dark place she found a light, it was nothing more than a faint yellow LED beneath the grated floor, but a light nonetheless. Lumina dug up a crowbar out from under a pile of scrap metal, picked it up with her mouth, and lifted the grating from the floor. She climbed down into the pit and checked the label next to the LED:

“Animus!” Lumina ran a hoof over the LED and smiled. “I was so worried, I thought I lost you! Please, tell me what happened and how I can fix you?”

“Please restate your command.” The same vacant voice from earlier echoed throughout the chamber.

Lumina followed the light to a collection of hard drives anchored into the floor. The computer wasn’t connected to a quantum processor, and the hard drives themselves only stored about half as much memory as he needed to run properly.

The only explanation she thought of was that Animus transferred himself into another system, and was trying to run himself without the proper hardware. Only the most basic bits and pieces of Animus still functioned. Maybe if she had spent her life studying computer engineering, then she might know a way to fix him, but she didn’t.

“I’m so sorry.” Lumina put her head against the computer, and tears rolled down side of her cheek. “I don’t know what to do.”

At least, maybe, some part of her friend was still alive. That was enough.

Lumina brushed the tears from her eyes and bottled up her feelings beneath her heart. She still had work to do.

“Animus, is that you I’m talking to right now?” She crawled out of the hole and slid the floor grate back into place.

“Please restate your command.”

“I’m going to have to be real specific with you, aren’t I?”

“Please restate your command.”

“That wasn’t it. Uh, what is the status of the Animus intelligence?”

“Please restate your command.”

Lumina covered her face with her hoof, sighed, then trotted over to the burnt out quantum processor.

“Run diagnosis on the--” Lumina read the label on the processor before continuing “--Autonomous Networked Intelligence Master Unit System.”

“Alert! Total system failure following non-standard FTL jump. All memory files and applications compressed and downloaded to Auxiliary systems.”

“Any way to fix you?” Lumina asked.

“Please restate your command.”

“You’re not going to be much help, are you?"

“Affirmative.”

Lumina sighed, again, then forced her way into the hyperlift tube and started her hike back to whatever was left of her room. She needed a good night’s sleep. The rest she’d deal with tomorrow.

Sleep didn’t come to her easily that night, and neither did it last when she reached it. Nightmares of falling, monsters in the sky, and sightless horrors barraged her. She woke from her dreams covered in cold sweat and with a racing heart.

Lumina was desperate for some rest. She knew about a tranquilizer in sickbay that would knock her out, but she didn’t know if it would provide any reprieve from the nightmares. Lumina threw herself out of bed and kicked the wall with her hind legs. The anger in her subsided into sorrow, and she collapsed on the floor crying in the moonlight.

“I’m never going home!” Lumina wiped her running nose with her hoof and rolled over on her back. “What’s the point if I get up at all tomorrow! Nopony is ever going to find me!”

Rolling over onto her stomach to hide her face, she caught sight of her book sprawled open and out of its box. It slid under her bed during the crash, and its faded cover now bored dozens of nicks and scars, but it was otherwise intact. She pulled it close to her and curled her body around it.

“What would a brave pony like Applejack do?” she whispered to the night.

From some deep place in her mind, an answer whispered back.

She wouldn’t let this get the best of her and neither should you. No matter how bad things get you have the strength to pull through.

Lumina sniffled and picked herself up.

Most of the furniture in her room slid to the far wall during the crash, since she wasn’t going to get much sleep anyway, she set to work picking everything up and pushing them back into place.

When she was very little, and very scared, Lumina’s mother taught her a little trick for finding a peaceful place away from her fears. She sat in the middle of the room on her hindquarters and with her back legs crossed together. She pushed her tail off to one side and rested her front hooves on her hind legs. There was a name for this position, but she didn’t remember. After a moment she closed her eyes and imagined light.

In her mind’s eye, a single beam of light shot down from way above her and hit her horn, from there it expanded, and poured down her spine into every place in her body. She imagined it warm and clean. She held the image for a while, and pulled the light outward through the entire room.

Lumina opened her eyes.

A slight pressure on her horn broke her concentration. She didn’t know where that sensation came from. Oh, no, could she have broken something in the crash? She tapped it with her hoof but didn’t feel any sharp pains or loose parts.

Something to deal with in the morning, Lumina was tired now, and decided to try sleeping again. She yawned and wormed her way under the covers of her bed.

There she was met with dreams of Twilight Sparkle and her five friends. They were trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t hear them over the noise of her own dreams.