Ladies And Gentlecolts, We Are Floating In Space

by PeaceColt112

Act 1, Chapter 1: Brave New World

Liquid. It surrounded her, cradled her, nurtured her.

It kept her alive.

Boom, boom, boom

The journey was almost complete and reality started fading in again.

Her eyes opened slowly, as if she had just woken up for the first time. Light, blinding light. A flash. It burnt her eyes.

Boom, boom, boom

It was her. That was the sound of her. The pounding seemed to slow down and speed up randomly, filling her ears with a deep echo. Covered faces appeared above the surface, looking from side to side.

Boom, boom, boom

Like a vein, throbbing, alive, breathing as one within the mass of the void. Far away the liquid faces moved, looking around. Something was approaching her, something white and vaguely plastic.

With a splash the calm broke. Bubbles floated up all around her, moving her forward. She braced for her first breath of air in…

Odd.

She could not recall how much time had passed.

Her mind was wiped clean by the sudden surge of blinding whiteness, turning her vision red for a few seconds. She held onto her eyes with her hoof, her head spinning. In front of her stood a small robot, his ever vigilant electronic eye looking up and down her wet body. It seemed confused, troubled even. She just glared back at him, rubbing her head gently. The cryogenic fluid began evaporating rapidly, leaving a few white patches here and there.

The room she had woken up in was long, not unlike a shopping mall aisle, cryogenic tubes lining the walls and the ceilings, all of them containing grey and motionless shapes chained in the eternal synthetic ice. Overhead a million lamps poured their merciless derision upon the hallway, keeping it lit for a hundred years now.

One hundred years. Now she remembered. Her throat tightened, her muscles contracted and she began hyperventilating. They prepared her for this in basic training, this realization of how long she had actually spent…

Dead.

There was no better way to put it.

She had been clinically dead for one hundred years, the ice keeping her motionless body from decomposing. When the time came, an electric impulse was sent trough the crystal, turning it into gel that repaired the broken and damaged cells. Almost instantly a corpse would walk once again, as if nothing happened.
Slowly, her stiff body rolled off the capsule’s edge, her face abruptly colliding with the cold metal of reality, pulling her out of the throes of shock.

She was awake. Alive. Her eyes closed slowly, her mind flickering back to life. Like a snowed-in television set suddenly that suddenly started receiving a faint signal, she jumped. Her eyes were glowing with life once again, her mouth turned into a faint smile. After one hundred years she could walk, she could see, she could feel! The resulting euphoria took her by surprise.

For some reason she started laughing uncontrollably, rolling around the floor, her eyes full of tears. The feeling of blood surging trough her cold and stiff body was indescribable, every single iota of her mind singing with a forgotten sort of joy, the simple joy of being alive.

Then she remembered something.

Name. Name. She needed a name.

She sat up, leaning onto the side of her pod. Her face contorted with thought as she tried to reach her memories, those that were not erased by the stasis. For a while she just sat there, listening to what remained of her past. Images flew past in her head, unconnected events and blurred faces coupled with a flurry of incomprehensible words. It all became faster and more confusing as her concentration deepened. Some of the memories disappeared into a set of abstract mathematical equations and formulas. With a flash, her eyes opened wide and she mouthed something.
Aeris.

Her name was Aeris Skye.

She was a scientist, aged 22

Theoretical physicist department of New Rome University of Science.

According to her newly awakened memory they were en route to an ELP, just about one hundred and five light years away from The Solar System. The ship she was on was called the N.L.R.S.S. Eternity; her mission was to populate said planet and establish a colony under the flag of the Alliance. Onboard, twenty thousand ponies, all of them cryogenically frozen for the one hundred year journey, all kept alive by the onboard nuclear reactor and it’s assortment of sub-systems. As a matter of fact, they were already supposed to be awake for the descent onto the alien world in question.

They were not. None of them. She was entirely alone; her only company the silent humming of the ship’s electrical systems and the occasional robot drone that whizzed past her pod. Usually, entire wings of the craft are woken at once to avoid having to deal with the separate confused groups. That was strange, very strange.

“There’s the understatement of the year” Aeris said to herself. She just couldn’t shake the feeling that something had happened during the journey. Nobody was awake. Nobody except her that is. She needed answers and there was one place that could give her what she sought.

The bridge. Aeris needed to reach the bridge, and quickly too. Inside were the computers that controlled all of the on-board systems, including life support and oxygen recycling. She gave her pod one last look, nonchalantly waved it goodbye and walked off towards the brain of the ship.

A lone blue dot moved through the empty hallways, its hooves echoing off the massive walls that separated 20000 beings from certain death. She walked past row upon row of identical pods, all containing her friends, her colleagues and her superiors. The whole craft had been a monumental effort, the life support alone took about five years to install. These halls were not foreign to Aeris. She had been through a large part of the ship already, particularly during its construction phase. Her father was an electrician and sometimes she would accompany him on board for the sole purpose of watching him work.

Initially, she just used to hold things for him and hand him his tools. As she grew older, her interest in numbers and mathematical equations became more prominent. Soon, she handled most of the wire checking and number crunching, under her father’s supervision, of course. With chart in hand she became a mandatory companion to him during weekends, always keeping a calculator close to hoof and her mind sharp.

That all ended when she went to college. There, she studied for three years, working hard and eventually earning her degree in theoretical physics a year early. In the meantime the spacecraft was completed and ready to set out on its journey. She signed up and got accepted relatively quickly, mostly on account of her intelligence and her credentials.

Aeris could still remember launch day. All of her friends were there. Her parents waved her goodbye as she climbed the stairs to the airlock. After that, everything disappeared into a void of sorts. She was put inside a pod, she had a few needles put in and soon she fell asleep. Or at least that’s what she knew of the standard cryo procedure. The last hour before she was put into stasis was missing from her mind.

Finally, she reached the elevator that led to the top of the vessel. It took a while for it to get there and she spent that time thinking about her past a little more. Her cutie mark was a simple white x squared with nothing else around. She always thought it was boring. It also reflected her personality very well. Her mind was flexible and practical
and her ability to solve an assortment of already memorized mathematical equations in an instant was legendary.

She was pulled out of her thoughts by the beep on the metallic console to her left as the floor number turned to B3WA

The silver doors slid open without a sound. Inside laid a corpse.

Aeris screamed.

Comments

[RavensDagger]

Hmm, image of ship over... Horse head nebula? Oddly fitting.

EDIT:

Not bad, not bad at all. One quick tip though, you might want to italicize the sound effects to make them stand out, I read them as text and it's a little jarring; but that's up to you. Keep it up.

[Sgt. Pony Brony]

Great story, dude

[The Redbeard]

This is... actually quite good.

I have the feeling that any questions that I may have at this point will be answered soonish in future chapters.

Please continue. You have my attention.

[Blue Nova]

I foresee....a lot more dead corpses.....

Don't ask where I got that impression, just write whatever you wish.

It's only one possibility.

[Bronyhood of steel]

interesting