Speedwriting Anthology

by AuroraDawn


Solace (Nov 8 2020 - "Into The Breach")

Solstice did not fear loneliness.

She had been warned of it, extensively trained against it, prepared and armoured against it by a team of psychologists and psychiatrists, and had mastered dealing with it.

But, even before all that, Solstice did not fear loneliness. 

It was why she had volunteered for this mission; why she had undergone the intensive and invasive training regimen for it, why she had studied for weeks at a time with no outside contact for it. If anything, she feared being the center of attention, having all eyes on her, the topic of all the gossip.

The irony of her having become the most well-known pony in Equestria specifically for going on the mission was not lost on her. But it was okay. There, all might be speaking of her, discussing how she feels and what she’s doing, critiquing and analyzing every movement and moment of the mare’s trip. But here, she could not hear them, and could not feel their stares.

Solstice was alone, but she was not lonely. 

She wondered often what it actually meant to be lonely. Perhaps that was the real reason she had volunteered, she had thought. To learn what it meant to feel disconnected, isolated, out of the reach of any help or love. She pressed a few buttons on a panel and the opposite wall in the tubular room she was in sputtered static before changing as if to glass. She pushed off from where she was and gently floated to the screen, staring out at space in awe, just as she used to do when her father took her outside on full moons and told her Princess Luna’s tale.

Solstice thought back on the lesson her father had tried to teach her; that we must appreciate others lest they, or ourselves, become as lonely as the Nightmare on the distant lunar surface. Her muzzle turned to a small smile, and she glanced back at her supernova cutie mark. She probably would have enjoyed a thousand years by herself. 

She would have been alone, but not lonely.

Her thoughts turned outwards as she looked to the galactic arm, framed by her aluminum and plastic home, considering just how truly far she was from anything and everything.

And every one. 

Each speck of light a star, each star with its family of gaseous or rocky planets, each planet holding a chance to have a creature, much like her so many years ago, looking up at the solar-freckled sky with a dream of their own.

In public, and in interviews, while she tried her best not to shy away from the cameras and microphones, she had said she volunteered because she wanted to help Equinity reach out and colonize the heavens--a sperm cell, of sorts, on its way to fertilize an egg and birth a new member of the Equestrian family. She said it was about all of them, and for the future of the next thousand generations. She said it was to give the world an opportunity to try again, without the anchors of history and society, to form a world where friendship and happiness were the foundation and status quo, and not an unstable state subject to the whims of ponies and monsters.

But really, she had volunteered for herself. She wanted to be away from everyone. It was not so much that she didn’t like anyone, or society, or anything like that. Solstice just preferred solitude. It was tough to get that, even in a small town like where she grew up, back in Equestria. She could go a day or two without bother but eventually some well-intentioned neighbour would show up with a pie, making sure she was okay.

And so, when the united space agencies of her world put the call out for a pony to die in space, she had volunteered.

She had volunteered to spend the rest of her life in this capsule, waiting a decade before she would even begin the artificial gestation process of one of the hundreds of embryos that had been selected to colonize her ship’s final destination. That embryo would grow into a foal, which she would raise, and teach, and train, and then pass the same responsibility on to. And once that foal became a yearling, ready to run the mission themselves, she would slip into the airlock, let out her last breath, and jettison herself.

Solstice was not afraid of loneliness. 

She was wary of the years to be spent with her protégé, but she figured she had done pretty well for herself when surrounded by ponies for most of her life, and that she would fare well with a single guest. It was only five or so years before the education phase would be complete, and then she could pass the rest of eternity in the comfortable emptiness of space.

She turned off the view screen, and the billion lights recorded on the interstellar hard drive were hidden from view by a cold and unloving wall. She pushed off from the wall and floated gently down the length of her capsule towards the cockpit, twirling gracefully in place, laughing as her mane wrapped around her head like spaghetti around a fork. Solstice had never been jealous of pegasi, but as an earth pony now able to fly, she admitted it was definitely a trait her race was missing out on.

She made it to her cockpit and strapped herself into the chair. She did a routine check of all the instruments and lights and, satisfied nothing had changed, just like nothing had over the last year, picked up her comm-unit and gave a report. She listed direction, velocity, readings, oxygen levels, fuel levels, and her vitals, and then switched the speaker off. Her message would take several minutes to reach the control, and several minutes more for the reply, but she didn’t want to hear it. She would read the print out when it came.

For now, she rested her eyes and tapped some keys on a console next to her. She executed her favorite command, and meditated as the computer translated radio signals from the nearest planet and stars into an audio output, breathing deeply to the hum of a gas giant some two lightyears away beneath her.

Solstice was not afraid of loneliness, and she didn’t need to be.