*** Mission Log: Sol 5172 ***
*** AOS – BSN ***
*** Message Received (Source: Starlight): Oppy, please. Everything’s alright. Please come out. ***
The rover backed up further into the closet, bumping into a set of brooms with its rear. Its camera shot around behind it, then back to the closed closet door where a comforting light was shining around the edges and a soothing voice was trying to coax it out.
“Twilight scary,” Opportunity replied meekly.
“I know, sweetie. Don’t worry. I’m not gonna let anything bad happen to you. I’ll protect you from the mad Twientist, so won’t you please come out?”
“Hey!” the voice of the alicorn in question protested in the background. “I’m right here, you know.”
“You be quiet,” Starlight hissed over her shoulder. “What in the hoof did you do to scare him so much?”
“I don’t know! I just spotted him at the door to my lab, said ‘hello’ and waved at him. Next thing I know, he backs up into the wall and begins racing down the corridor. Then he barricaded himself in the supply closet, and here we are.”
A small piece of crystal fell from the ceiling and bounced off the rover with a metallic clink.
“What was that?” Starlight asked.
“Just me,” Spike replied calmly as he hopped from the top of the shelf to the floor. “Hey, Opi.” Spike held out his fist for a bump.
Opportunity looked at the door it had accidentally jammed shut by knocking over a broom, then down at his own chassis that was noticeably missing his robotic arm. Starlight had removed it earlier this morning.
“Oh, right. Sorry,” Spike said, lowering his fist.
“Spike! How did you get in there?” Starlight asked from outside.
“What do you think? You said Opi was locked in. So I went into the closet on the upper floor and ate my way through,” he replied, munching on the last bits of crystal still between his teeth.
Opportunity moved its PanCam to survey the dragon-sized hole in the ceiling.
“What?” Twilight called. “Spike, we talked about you eating the house!”
“Shush,” Starlight cut in. “Count yourself lucky. If it hadn’t been Spike, it would have been me. And trust me, I would have made a much bigger hole with my magic.”
“When this is over, we’re going to have an unscheduled roommate meeting about eating and blasting load-bearing walls,” Twilight grumbled. “Drilling into them for scientific experiments, too,” she added after a moment’s thought, mentally counting all the small, circular holes from the Rock Abrasion Tool that had become commonplace around her walls and floors.
“Alright,” Spike said, ignoring the girls and sitting down next to Opportunity in order to project calm. “What’s wrong, buddy? You wanna tell me what happened?”
Opportunity turned its mast to indicate the laptop it had taken to carrying around most of the time. After a moment, a picture began to appear on the screen, a picture the rover had taken earlier. “Twilight scary,” Opportunity repeated when the image had finished loading.
Spike squinted his eyes. “Huh. Oh! Yeah, I can see why that would freak you out.”
“What is it?” Starlight asked, her voice sounding agitated through the door.
“Well,” Spike began, trying to think of a way to best describe the image while scratching his head. “It looks like Opi drove by Twilight’s lab and, well, she’s standing amidst a bunch of robotic arms. She’s also holding one in the air with her magic and waving it at him. Oh, and she’s sporting her best mad scientist grin.”
Starlight’s voice became angry. “Twilight!”
“What?” The alicorn seemed taken aback. “I was just demonstrating how well the joints turned out on the final model. I thought he’d be happy to see it after all the failed prototypes.”
“Do you honestly not see anything wrong with this picture, Dr. Frankenlight!? Imagine walking into somepony’s basement and seeing it filled with severed pony limbs. And then they spot you and start waving a hoof around they’d just cut off somepony.”
“… Huh, I guess that would be a little disturbing,” Twilight admitted, though her voice carried a hint of clinical detachment. “I suppose I’ve just kind of gotten used to the idea of losing and gaining extra limbs over the years. I lost my horn twice, once when we fought Discord and when I first went through the portal. Three times if I count the poison joke incident. I grew my own wings, and then there was the time those three cultists stole Rainbow Dash’s wings. I still know the limb reattachment spell I researched at the time. Oh! And, not to put too fine a point on it, but when you were still evil and ripped the cutie marks from me and my friends, that was kind of like losing a limb. Or maybe an organ would be a better analogy for that?”
Spike couldn’t see it. But he could have sworn he heard Starlight rapidly blinking through the closed door. “What?” the unicorn asked after several seconds of stunned silence. “No, seriously. WHAT!?”
“Anyway,” Spike carried on, tuning out the conversation that ensued between the alicorn and the unicorn, “you know that Twilight was working on this for you, right? We’ve talked about replacing your arm for ages now, since it keeps getting stuck when you try to move it.”
Opportunity remained silent.
“Please, help me understand,” Spike said calmly, his hours of helping Starlight perfect her counselor voice paying off. “You didn’t even bat an eye when we replaced your wheels.”
“… Opportunity no have eye to bat.”
Spike frowned. “You know what I mean.”
The rover regarded its new wheels, then the housing where the joint for its robotic arm was supposed to be. “Different,” it finally said.
Spike considered that. “Hm, well. I suppose this and that are two different things.” He thought for a moment. “Is it that the wheels were more like having horseshoes replaced, but the arm is more important?”
“Yes. No. Instrument Deployment Device more important. Experiments. Fulfill mission. But not what Opportunity mean different.”
“Then what else is different?”
The rover once again was quiet, and Spike allowed it the space to gather its thoughts. “Opportunity … different. Different from before,” Opportunity finally said.
“How are you different?”
“Before Opportunity listen to creators. Creators say ‘bad path’ or ‘big rock, no go there.’ Now Opportunity alone, scary. Afraid end up like Spirit.”
“Spirit?” Spike asked.
“MER-A, Spirit. Spirit and Opportunity same. Assembled together, same creators.”
“Assembled? Do you mean born? Like, a brother?”
Opportunity nodded. “Yes, like brother,” it confirmed. “Older brother, not by much. Twins. Like Opportunity, Spirit explore. Stuck. Battery low and in the dark. Silent now.”
“And did your creators help him?”
“Try. Try Free Spirit. Fail.” Even though Opportunity’s voice was artificially created by Trixie’s enchanted bow, Spike felt like there was a twinge of sadness in it. “Opportunity lose brother. Opportunity lose creators. Now must make own decisions. Afraid. Afraid lose more. Afraid lose friends. That why Opportunity different.”
“Hey, listen,” Spike said, calling upon his own memories of being a dragon in a pony world. “Change is always scary.” He extended his wings. “When I got these, I was terrified that I had to leave. But change doesn’t have to be bad. You’re not going to lose your friends. Twilight, Starlight and I, we’re not going to leave you behind, even if you get stuck” he said, patting the rover’s front wheel comfortingly.
“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU SOMETIMES, TWILIGHT SPARKLE!”
Spike and Opportunity looked at each other when they heard Starlight’s outburst through the closed door and continued to listen on.
“I thought I handled the situation well,” Twilight mumbled in her defense.
The duo could practically feel the gargantuan effort Starlight mustered in order not to scream again. “Twilight, I’m literally the last pony on Equus who can criticize you for your reformation-over-retribution approach, but seriously? Those cultists broke into your friend’s house and stole her wings while she slept! Don’t you think that calls for a little more than one of your lectures?”
“Well, I did disable their magic, too. To reinforce the lesson.”
“Temporarily,” Starlight pointed out. “Did they give you any indication that they realized the error of their ways? And remind me, what was the result of the first time you tried to give me one of your lessons?”
“You … eventually came around?” the princess ventured.
“After?” Starlight prodded.
“After embarking on a year-long revenge plot that nearly destroyed the universe as we know it,” Twilight conceded with a sigh.
“So what makes you think they didn’t go out and immediately foalnapped some other innocent pegasus as soon as they got their magic back, one that didn’t have the benefit of being best buddies with a princess?”
“… I should probably go and follow up on any missing pegasus cases with the Royal Guard as soon as I get the chance, huh?”
“Ya think?” If a sarcastic undertone could be used as a battering ram, that closet door would have stood no chance against Starlight. “But first you get in there and apologize to Oppy.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Twilight replied sullenly.
“I think what we can take away from this,” Spike noted dubiously, “is that you can’t be afraid to make a mistake. You just have to move forward and try the best you can at any given time. And if you make an honest mistake, you can always count on your friends to set you straight.”
“Opportunity take different lesson from that,” the rover replied.
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“Starlight way scarier than Twilight.”
*** IDD: Extending Instrument Deployment Device ***
*** MI: Beginning Microscopic Imaging ***
*** MI: Imaging underway ***
*** Spectrographic Analysis Queued ***
*** APXS – WARNING: Radioisotope source decaying, additional processing time required ***
*** MB – ERROR: Instrument unresponsive ***
*** MTES: Status nominal ***
“How does it feel? Everything alright?” Starlight asked as she packed away her tools.
After emerging from the closet, Opportunity had sheepishly accepted Twilight’s apology and allowed the ponies to bring it back to Starlight’s workshop.
Twilight’s new design for the arm, which allowed for a much wider range of motion, had been fitted first. The old instrument arm with its broken wiring and malfunctioning heater element had been declared a lost cause and instead been used as the blueprint for the improved version.
After receiving the new arm, Starlight had remounted the housing for the actual scientific instruments, its innards cleaned and restored to working condition to the best of her ability. Rebuilding them from scratch had been a non-option, since even a visit through the mirror portal had left the resident Twilight Sparkle there at a loss for explaining how some of them worked.
“Is fine,” Opportunity replied. “Status nominal.”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t restore them all,” Starlight said, picking up a small, round disk in her magic and frowning at it, as if staring at it hard enough could unlock its mysteries. “It has to be this part. As far as I can tell, it’s just Cobalt. But I’ve tried every piece of Cobalt Maud could dig up and some similar metals. None of them worked. There must have been something special about it.”
“Opportunity not know. Only know not work.” The rover rotated its instrument arm and once again tried out the new addition. In place of the malfunctioning instrument, there was now a three-fingered claw that could pick up and manipulate small objects, Sunset Shimmer’s contribution who continued to show a knack for combining Equestrian magic with technology from her second home.
In this case, the salvaged claw from a crane game machine found in a junkyard was being controlled by Oppy sending commands through the Binary Sparkle Network to a harmonic crystal that in turn made the claw move.
Opportunity picked up the small sapphire it had just examined as a final test and deposited it in Spike’s outstretched claw. The dragon gobbled up the treat, made a fist and bumped it against Oppy’s new appendage. “Opportunity like this better anyway,” the rover decided. “Is more useful.”
Starlight chuckled, but her eyes were drawn back to the disk. It had a nice, metallic sheen with a slightly blueish tinge to it and seemed perfectly intact. “It’s a shame we don’t know what’s wrong with it. It is rather pretty,” she mused.
Opportunity watched Starlight regard the unassuming piece of metal, its beauty enhanced within the unicorn’s azure glow of magic, twinkling as she turned it this way and that. The rover noticed its resemblance to Starlight’s own cutie mark as it was held in this manner. “Starlight keep,” it said.
“What?” The unicorn turned to look at the rover.
Opportunity drove towards her and plucked the little disk out of the air with its new fingers, holding it out to her. “Starlight give Opportunity so much. New wheels. New voice. New arm. Opportunity want give back.”
“I didn’t do it for a reward,” Starlight pointed out.
“Opportunity know. Starlight friend. Is gift.” Opportunity brought it closer to her, indicating for her to take it.
Starlight opened her mouth to say something, then simply smiled. Rather than using her magic, she received the gift with her hoof and brought it close to her chest. “Thank you, Oppy. I’ll treasure it always.”
That pretty much made my morning
This whole chapter was great.
9681053
That and Mad Twientist.
radioactive cobalt gift,OOF
9681131
What is that cobalt used for and why does it need to be radioactive?
9681131 Yeah, pretty sure that stuff is deadly. I know it keeps saying about being depleted but surely it's half-life is longer than that. I'm fairly sure it just means depleted too much to work right, not enough to stop it being deadly. Of course I haven't looked up the specs on radioactive cobalt for quite some time.
That is the Cobalt-57 source for the spectrometer, right? I know it’s radioactive, but not how bad it is for cartoon ponies to handle.
Yeah, you might not want to keep that too close to you, Starlight. If she makes it into a necklace or something, I'm gonna have to figure out how to travel into fanfiction in order to yell at her for keeping chunks of a material that has unknown properties in constant contact with herself.
A perfect summary of how bizarre her life has become. And yeah, Twilight could've handled the pseudocorns better.
In any case, heartwarming stuff... once they got past Twilight's vivisecting grin.
I have to remember that one!
Took her long enough,
And thus we get our first (hopefully not last) Spirit reference of the story...
Also, have fun being Radioactive Starlight, because you have woke up to ash and dust before
Unless its a different isotope, that looks like Cobalt 60, which either Brazilian or Mexican scrap dealers kept a pellet of when breaking up abandoned medical imaging equipment.
Look pretty, glowing Blue, but thats Cherenkov light from the radioactive particles exceeding local speed of light. Should definitely have a nice RainBoom colour effect as well as its Vastly faster than Dash?
Im waiting till smartphones have diode radiation detection aps as standard, for system error correction ajustments, so when you walk into a resteraunt with hot steel, you get an idea of how long you have before you get your yearly dose..
The big problem with current robotics, is that everything is designed using 1950s dumb terminal methods. Every single pulse to ever single motor is calculated in real time by the central computer, instead of it taking the two endpoints of motion, calculating the transfer polynomial, then sending the parameters for each sub polynomial to the processor attached to each joint motor, or some variation?. But thats distributed cooperative philosophy which seems to be so very obnoxious to buisiness?
I like the idea that the Crystal Castle is still alive and so reforms damage, so that hole Spikes eaten can fill rapidly using transfer from below to seal the floor, followed by slower thickening and restoration. Like wound healing mechanism in Crystal Ponies?
Could do with forming up a whole bunch of bearings etc out of local materials. When you have dragons and similar, better material replacements are a lot easier, given they have access all times instead of a 8 month trip?
RoboOp.
The source of alpha particles used by Opportunity's Alpha Particle X-ray spectrometer is curium-244 with a source strength of approximately 30 millicuries (1.1 GBq)
Curium, being an artificial element, means that there is no way Maud could just find any on Equus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curium
Luckily for Starlight, touching an alpha source is typically not harmful, as alpha particles are effectively shielded by a few centimeters of air, a piece of paper, or the thin layer of dead skin cells that make up the epidermis
9681178
The half-life for Cobalt-57 is only about 272 days, actually. And it's been 15 years. If this was mission day 1, the amount Oppy had on board could actually kill you in an hour. How deadly is it now? We'll see.
9681185
I know that now. Got a page of calculations to prove it, plus I'm probably on a couple of watchlists now for typing the words "how much radiation would it take to kill a tiny unicorn" into a search engine.
9681318
Oppy has two spectrometers. The Alpha X-Ray you mentioned is one. The other one is a Mössbauer Spectrometer, and that one uses Cobalt-57 as a gamma ray source.
Story is going well
9681175
It was used in one of the instruments on Oppi's arm. One of the two spectrometers. It needed to be radioactive in order for said spectrometer to work.
9681336
Well, if it has a half-life of that long, and Oppi's been on mars for 15 years, then it will have decayed over 20 times by now, meaning that only about 9.5 one-billionths of the original amount of Cobalt-57 is left. I wouldn't make a necklace out of it, but keeping it on a shelf in your room should be perfectly safe.
Here's the math, for all of us nerds:
(365*15)/272 ≈ 20.13
1*0.5*0.5*0.5... twenty times.
9681336
Ah. Could not find the info on the cobalt one. But, if Maud gets a look at the Curium, she will be shocked, since it is a rock that she has never seen before. I just hope Oppy will be able to tell her it is a made rock, not a natural one, so she doesn't spend the rest of her life on a fool's errand.
Also, according to chart on wikipedia, Cobalt-57 becomes Iron-57, a stable isotope of iron.
Without knowledge of atomic theory, a rock that becomes another rock with no external stimuli is 'magic'.
Well, technically it's always decaying.
Some platinum group metal?
Radioisotope are supposed to decay.
But it might be decaying faster than it should. I mean it shouldn't be getting warnings until like way later on. Because.....oooohhhhh.
... Umm...
Uhh...
You okay there, Twilight? What even is 'okay'?
While it depends on the circumstances...
Yeah, former season villain generally has more capacity for scariness.
Wait, so it actually happened?
Gotta read that when I get the chance. How do you even steal wings anyway?
Another great chapter. Thank you very much for explaining where the whole missing wing thing came from and providing a link. :)
Kek
So much Meme material in one chapter.
I might steal that one from you. ;]
“It has to be this part. As far as I can tell, it’s just Cobalt. But I’ve tried every piece of Cobalt Maud could dig up and some similar metals. None of them worked. There must have been something special about it.”
9681808
... so wait, the ponies are waving around a gamma-ray nuclear source like its nothing? No wonder Maud couldn't dig anything like it up - cobalt isn't naturally radioactive.
No - what they have there is 60Co, probably sprayed onto an aluminum foil base, used as the radioactivity source in the Mossbauer Spectroscope (the MB mentioned). So, kinda freaky. I wouldn't want to be in the same goddamn room as that, as long as it's uncovered.
What the hay, author?! You intend to have Starlight get fucking cancer from that shit or something? Drama, sure, but the hell?
And yes, it's probably fairly dead for its intended purpose at this point. 60Co has a half-life of roughly 5.27y, so after the 15 years Opportunity has been up there, there's something like 12% of it remaining. Considering it usually took some 12 hours to get a good, reliable reading from the MB on the rover when it was new... I'd say it's pretty useless now.
For the record, most reads took a few hours - the rovers were there for an in-depth study. You'd often have the rovers pour over a sample for days on end, I suppose. This was never intended to be a quick mission... ;]
9694102
Thanks for all the comments.
I suppose you can make that argument. But in science, you should probably use neither. Kelvin is really the best choice there, as it doesn't depend on any arbitrary measure to define 0 on its scale. 0 Kelvin is Absolute Zero, and it doesn't get colder than that. And Celsius is easier to convert into Kelvin because they scale the same, all you have to do is add or subtract 273.15 to get from one to the other.
What Oppy has is actually Cobalt-57 with only 272 days of half-life. So while what it had at the mission start could have killed you in an hour when handled directly, it's so degraded at this point that it's more or less safe to handle without protection, at least for a time.
And yes, the readings on both spectrometers tended to take several hours, even when they were functioning at peak efficiency during the original 90-day mission. I tend to gloss over that fact, having him move on after only a couple of minutes from a sample, to move the story along.
9694726
You. I like you. ;]
Since Oppy is a natural physicist and mathematician, and programmed to be insanely curious, is he going to pick up on the "almost destroyed the universe" bit and start pestering Glimmy for details? It's going good interesting to see his reaction to finding out time travel is a real thing, and if can be used to swiss-cheese Creation..
I wonder if at some point Oppy's body will completely break, so Twilight builds him a pony body to use. That would be ver interesting for Humanity to learn.
Still bothers me that Spirit and Opportunity keep being referred to as male. They were made by a a bunch of professional nerds, they're clearly women.
9701115
Nah, they're passengers on a ship, they would be traditionally male.
The Delta II that carried them, on the other hand, and its various stages, would be traditionally female.
Yeah...that issue had me scratching my head that Twilight didn't do anything more drastic or at least report the incident, this wasn't the CMC not thinking things through or anything so benign, it was a deliberate attack on RD with no compulsion for her safety or wellbeing, and they get off with what equates to a slap on the hoof. Seeing as I am commenting here I may as well put in my other big thought regarding this story, that being it reminds me of the movie 'Short Circuit'
vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/marvelcinematicuniverse/images/b/b6/Dum-E_3.png/revision/latest?cb=20140921200543
sounds like those two bots from the Iron Man films. I find that adorable, by the way.
9681281
If you are refering to 1986 Goiania Nuclear Incident, it was Cesium-137, and not Cobalt 60.
.....did opportunity just give starlight a hunk of URANIUM???
9694726
Of course there's always the Rankine scale as well.
The MER rovers used curium-244 as the alpha particle emitter for the APXS.
9919357
Casually gifts starlight cancer
So, I assume that was a radioactive isotope of Cobalt?
9807631
Many years later. But I work in Radiotherapy and immediately recognised the Ciudad Juarez incident.
The lump of Radioactive Cobalt from an illegally sold then improperly disassembled Radiotherapy unit was smelted down in to Rebar. The resultant construction materials were used in 30,000 table based and 6000 tones of rebar. Which was then used in construction all around the country, irradiating people as it did so. Fortunatly, very few received more than a minor dose, but some did receive a much heavier dose.
The incident is notable not so much for the size of the radiation but the sheer scale of the effected area.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident