Awakening

by solocitizen

7. Life and Death

A trail of black goo stained the ice and guided Lumina’s way to the relic. On her journey to the centipede pit, she put together a plan to confront the creature, subdue it, and talk and persuade and pry what she needed out of the machine. It involved a series of transmat beams and an elaborate light show provided by the Luna Dream’s laser. Her breath fogged her visor, but the heads up display cut through the condensation enough for her to program the ship’s systems. Her stake gun and transmat beacons clicked against her side with each step.

As she trekked across the ice under the afternoon sun, she realized that once she got down there her carefully laid scheme to force its cooperation was doomed to fail. The puddles of black blood only increased in frequency and size as she neared the pit. If she approached the wounded machine with hostility, after it had retreated into a corner to recover, it would fight her until one of them ended up dead.

Lumina reached the edge of the pit and stared down into darkness. She took a deep breath, sat down on the ice, and examined her options. Only one presented itself: the memory spell.

Before she left the Luna Dream, a series of words and symbols flashed into her mind’s eye, and compelled her to write. So she sat down with a datapad and a stylus, and let the words flow from her while in a trance. The entire time, Lumina fought doubt, disbelief, and the urge to control the words spewing onto the datapad. But she didn’t, and when she finished, she held in her hooves five pages outlining a spell she had never seen before. It was a memory restoration spell just as Twilight promised her.

“Okay, Twilight, you win.” Lumina shrugged off her stake gun and all her gear. “We’ll do this with magic.” She peeked over the edge of the pit and backed away. Underneath her spacesuit she was sweating and her heart was thumping.

With a shake of her head, she deleted her programs for the laser show barrage, and brought up her notes for the memory spell on her heads-up display. She sat on the ice and studied every detail of it until she had the casting process memorized. How exactly she was going to get close enough to the centipede to cast it, she didn’t know. Lumina would figure that part out as she went along.

Keeping a healthy distance away from the edge, she fastened herself into the rope line left behind during her first expedition and tested the cable. Deep breath in, deep breath out.

Lumina approached at the edge of the pit and counted to three.

“One. Two. Three.”

On three she dove into blackness.

Darkness surrounded her and the little atmosphere outside howled over the hole, and came screeching down the walls at Lumina. It was terrifying. She was terrified. But she resisted the urge to bottle up her emotions or succumb to them, instead she allowed herself to experience the fear and move on.

Once Lumina’s hooves hit bottom, she unfastened her suit from the rope and surveyed the alien corridor. Still dark, still twisted in design, and still just as creepy as she remembered. Lumina checked the readings on her heads up display for an atmosphere. It reported habitable conditions, just as before. She took a deep breath in, and pulled her helmet off.

Lumina inhaled through her nose, savoring the purest air she ever breathed, and exhaled through her mouth. She stared at the faint blue light reflecting off the corridor in front of her.

“Twilight, Celestia, I know you two are going to help with this next part,” Lumina said. Magic trickled in through her horn.

When she reached the entrance to the cathedral hall, she put her hoof down in more of that black goo, and the stuff stuck to the boot of her suit. She tried to scrape it off, but without success.

“Hello, I just want to talk, I’m not here to hurt you.” Lumina called out at the pillars and scanned them for any sign of movement. “If you can understand me, then please just hear me out for a second. I have a really good friend back on my ship and he’s dying. His name is Animus, he’s an AI like you, and he needs a new body. I know you have spares--”

Lumina stopped right there.

The tap, tap, tapping of needles on metal advanced on her right. When she spun to face the source, red light struck down not three centimeters from her nose. The heat singed Lumina’s face but she leapt to her left before it got any closer. She scrambled to her hooves and galloped into the forest of pillars.

A bolt of red light soared over Lumina’s head and collided into the pillar ahead of her with a shattering boom. Debris pelted her, and each stone fragment delivered pain. Lumina glanced over her shoulder for just long enough to catch the centipede charging up behind her and the blender in its maw whirling to life.

Lumina rounded the corner of the pillar to her right and continued on through the forest weaving and zigzaging. Where she was running to, she didn’t know, but if she slowed even for an instant it would get her.

She panted, her eyes struggled in the dim light, and at a gallop her hooves drummed up a cacophony. The centipede was at home in the darkness, did not tire, and moved in silence beneath Lumina’s hoof falls. Lumina pushed those thoughts out of her head and didn’t allow herself to feel the terror the place and the monster invoked. She just ran.

Metal pincers lashed out at Lumina and caught her hind leg. She collapsed in pain gasping. A beeper on her suit sounded; it already started patching the tear and applying first aid to the wet, burning spot on her leg. She spun her head around in time to watch the centipede close in on her.

Gritting her teeth together, Lumina put her good leg to use and kicked the machine square in its eye.

It shrieked and recoiled.

Adrenaline carried Lumina back to her hooves and around the next pillar. She continued through the pillars a short distance, then turned around, and stopped. If she didn’t end this right here and now, it would only be a matter of time before the centipede either impaled her, or gunned her down with that red beam.

The machine arced around the pillar and rushed at Lumina head on. Instead of running she called out to the magic pulsing through her, and she molded it around a single thought.

“Enough!” Lumina shouted back at the machine. “Stop it!” She stomped her front hooves and projected the spell out of her horn.

Golden light surged forward and wrapped itself around the metal centipede, and there it stopped. Lumina allowed herself to catch her breath; the golden aura held the machine captured mid motion. The golden light cut through the darkness and lit up the pillars surrounding them. Lumina’s eyes darted up to her horn, found the same golden aura, and then aimed right back at the centipede.

Her face lit up with glee, her heart fluttered in joy, and Lumina burst out laughing.

“I did it!” Lumina shouted. “It worked! It actually worked!”

In this state Lumina could rip that monster apart limb by limb and make it pay for what it did to her. For a moment she considered it, but she never did. Lumina let herself experience that anger, and let it go. As it vanished so did the thoughts of wrath.

Lumina approached the machine and touched her horn to its head. She performed Twilight’s spell exactly as the instructions stated. The magic flowed up her spine, out her horn, and into the centipede’s body. It tingled and reverberated between the machine and Lumina.

She pulled her head away, and when she did, the centipede clattered on the floor as limp as a ragdoll. The centipede remained motionless on the ground, even after she prodded it with a hoof. When her body realized the danger had passed, her heartbeat slowed, and the adrenaline coursing through her cooled.

Pain shot through Lumina’s leg, first as a twinge, and then as a stabbing pulse. Lumina staggered and fell to the floor. She flipped over on her side and examined the tear in her suit with a hoof mounted LED. Blood stained the edge of a long scar in the fabric, and she felt something hot and sticky dribbling down the inside of her legging. When Lumina tried to put weight on the leg, the pain shot through her tenfold.

A scream escaped Lumina’s lips. No way she was walking out of there.

Rolled over on her back, she stared up at the latticework and followed an individual strand of metal weave in and out. She flicked a pebble at the centipede but that didn’t even get it to twitch.

“Well, Twilight, what happens next?” Lumina asked the ceiling. “Or is this it? I get this far just to screw up the spell and kill the bucking guardian, and die of starvation or infection or any number of things down here?”

Lumina closed her eyes and meditated on the magic streaming into her. Something white flashed just behind her eyes, and then the answer came: No.

Shrieking bellowed out of the centipede and broke Lumina’s concentration. She rolled over and watched the centipede writhing and coiling, each twist echoing as it hammered into the floor. Then the machine half-retreated into darkness, just before it rushed forward. Lumina tried to scoot away from the enraged metal beast but it was on top of her in seconds. Its legs clamped down around her, caging her in; the machine sandwiched her between its carapace and the floor. Lumina pressed the side of her face into the floor in an attempt to escape the maw of steel lowering to her head. Its red eye fixed on her and drowned out Lumina’s sight.

“Please,” Lumina said. “I have a friend, and he needs your help. He will die without a replacement body. Please, you’ve got to help. I know you have a vault filled with blank machines and any of those will work.”

The red light waved back and forth, up and down.

“I’m sorry for hurting you and invading your building.” Lumina squinted her eyes but couldn’t penetrate the glare. “I know you don’t really like me, but I need your help, because without you, my friend dies.”

She didn’t know if it was something she said, or if the centipede’s memory returned and it remembered some repressed love for organic life, but the red light cut out and the centipede peeled away from Lumina. She sighed and pulled herself up as much as her leg allowed. The centipede crept along the floor towards some place deeper into hall. Using the centipede as support, Lumina picked herself up on her three good legs, and hobbled along beside it.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

The centipede didn’t even so much as twitch in response.

After about ten minutes of agony, the centipede stopped and directed its red light to the floor. Lumina watched the machine work from behind the cover of a nearby pillar. Air spurted out in a ring around a depression in the floor to reveal a staircase leading below the floor. The centipede slithered down the staircase and, having decided it would be better to face whatever awaited her than stay in the relic alone, Lumina hobbled along right behind.

There wasn’t any light down there. The LED lights on Lumina’s suit cut through just enough of the darkness to provide her with a view of some walls and the centipede’s rear end. And the stairs sucked. A lot. They were never built with a pony in mind; they were too close together, and forced Lumina to use her wounded leg. She hissed each step of the way.

“If you can understand me, please at least make some effort to talk.” Lumina put her hooves down on flat ground and continued on. “I mean, I know you’re intelligent, and I think you can understand me, so why not try to communicate?”

It didn’t even let out a peep.

“So, do you have a name?” Lumina shrugged and forced a smile. “You must have a name, or at least something I can call you other than ‘machine’ and ‘centipede.’” She tapped her chin. “If you don’t have a name, would you mind if I give you one, how about something like ‘Old Blender Face?’”

The centipede stopped and curled its front section over its back, and aimed that red light right at Lumina. It bellowed, shrieked, and clicked in her face before curling back over.

She decided to shut up after that.

Blue light flashed up and down a high ceiling, and when the lights finally stabilized, they cut through the obsidian walls to Lumina’s right and left. She jumped back and her heart pounded. Centipede models flanked Lumina on both sides, just beyond the clear obsidian.

Lumina waited for herself to calm down, and then started inspecting the machines. She spied tripods five times her height further down, and some machines that walked on six legs and hunkered close to the ground like a beetle, others were black and silver replicas of the winged bipeds that created them. None of them matched Animus.

“Do you got any more?” Lumina asked. “I don’t want to sound picky but I don’t think any of these are a good fit for my friend. They don’t match his personality, and I don’t want to put him in something he’s going to hate for the rest of his life.”

The centipede tapped down the hallway and Lumina tried her best to keep up, but after a minute, she spotted something that demanded her attention. Propped up like an action figure in a display case was a dragon, with metal armor for scales and myomer for muscles. Lumina had seen pictures of dragons in her storybook, but the eyes and wavy horns on the machine gave the impression of something far wiser. Erect on two feet, the dragon stood about one and a half meters tall. It had an entire head over Lumina. Its golden wings extended out twice that length.

“That one.” Lumina tapped on the obsidian wall. “It’s perfect.”

Air spurted out and the tubes and various bits of packaging sloughed off the dragon. The centipede fought its way back around itself and Lumina stepped out of its way. Without opening the case, it crawled up the side, and reached through the obsidian and retrieved it with its many legs.

In one fluid motion, the centipede curled over itself and accelerated down the hallway toward Lumina. She gasped, and hobbled away from it as fast as her legs allowed, but she lost her footing on her third step. She landed on her face with a smack. The centipede curled over her as Lumina stared up at a thousand needles writhing above her. Before Lumina could stand or protest, the centipede grappled onto her with all of those little legs and just slung her over its back.

Lumina guessed what would happen next, and tried to find a good hoofhold in the centipede’s carapace to grapple onto, but before she secured herself the machine rocketed through the hallway and up the stairs and around the rows of pillars all the way out of the cathedral forest. Lumina hugged the centipede’s back for dear life. But she never fell, in fact, the centipede propelled itself along without so much as jostling her.

The machine soared down the long and dark corridor, and in a matter of seconds they arrived at the hole leading to the outside world. Sunlight shone in and graced them with the golden hues of sunset. The machine only paused once, just long enough for Lumina to put on her helmet, and then it reached for the hole and shot out like a bullet from a rifle barrel. It did this all with Lumina on its back and Animus’s new body in its front legs.

In minutes they reached the Luna Dream’s exterior hull. Lumina climbed up to the centipede’s head and pointed in the direction of a nearby airlock. Using the console on her foreleg, Lumina queued up the door controls and guided the machine inside.

Once they reached the AI core the centipede could start pulling Animus out of the auxiliary computers and into his new body, assuming the centipede decided to help. Lumina couldn’t say with any degree of certainty why it followed her into the ship, or if it intended on helping.

On the other side of the airlock, Lumina removed her helmet and pressed onward to the AI core, and sure enough, the machine followed.

When Lumina looked down at her leg, little red droplets dribbled from the stain in her suit. She took a deep breath, ripped her eyes from the sight, and put one hoof in front of the other.

“Come on, the core is this way.” Lumina waved the centipede on, and together they pressed forward.

They rode the hyperlift as far as the damage to the Luna Dream allowed, from there they continued on hoof. Lumina made it on her own for about ten meters before the pain in her leg forced her to stop.

“Wait, I need a second.” Lumina leaned into the wall for support and hung her head. “Just give me a minute and I’ll be good to go.”

The centipede didn’t wait. Without warning, it picked her up and slung her over its back as it had before, and carried her the rest of the way.

Lumina yelled ‘stop’ once they reached the doors to the AI core. She started squeezing past the doors, but the centipede reached through with its many legs and pried the doors apart with a thud. She scrambled for the crowbar, picked it up in her mouth, and lifted up the plate leading to Animus’s auxiliary systems. For one brief moment, she placed all four of her hooves on the floor, and it hurt like hell to put any weight on that back leg.

Over her shoulder, Lumina spied the centipede scanning the remains of Animus’s quantum processor with its red light.

“He’s over here.” Lumina spat out the crowbar and let it clatter on the floor. “He’s down there in another computer, you’ll need everything tagged under Animus.”

The centipede didn’t wait for her to finish. It laid down the dragon and zipped down the hole in the floor. Lumina peered down but saw nothing but the centipede’s black, shining, metal carapace. A minute later it was out of the hole, with wires embedded in its head and a long probe extending from its maw. Without hesitating, it plunged the probe into the dragon’s eye. Smoke puffed; it smelled worse than a chemical fire. And that was it; the centipede retracted the probe and backed away.

Motionless, the dragon stared up at nothing. Lumina poked its side and tried calling Animus’s name, but no reaction -- no words, no movement, not even a flicker of light -- answered her calls.

“That wasn’t it, was it, please tell me there’s more you’re going to do?” Lumina barked at the centipede. “Why isn’t he awake yet? What’s wrong with him?”

She nudged the thing out of the way and dropped down on her belly. She slapped the dragon’s face and even poked it in the eye, but it didn’t move.

“Come, Animus, wake up.” She put her hooves on its shoulders and shook the dragon until its head rolled over to one side. “Wake up, you have to wake up. There is so much more ahead of us, you can’t die now.”

“Don’t just stand there, give me a hoof!” Lumina whirled around at the centipede and flung out her front hooves. “Do something! I’m not losing him now! Not like this. Not after all we’ve done.”

The centipede watched from across the room with its red eye. Lumina shook her head, and turned back to the body in her hooves. She tried everything from holding its claws to slapping the dragon in the face, but it remained still. She hung her head and whimpered.

“Please, Animus, wake up.” Lumina leaned in and wrapped her front legs around the robot. “You’re the only friend I have left, I just… I just don’t know if I can do this without you. I need you to wake up.”

Lumina hugged the machine closer and held it. For how long, she didn’t know, but at the end of a very long time the mouth on the dragon creaked open. She propped herself up on her front hooves and watched its unlit eyes fill with an aquamarine light. Her ears perked up and her eyes widened as the jaw twitched open and closed.

“As you command.” Her friend’s voice leaked out of the dragon’s mouth.

Tears rolled down Lumina’s cheeks, she sniffled and gave Animus another hug.

“I was so afraid I was going to lose you again,” she said. “I don’t know what I would have done if that happened.”

“I am aware that I am no longer installed in the Luna Dream,” said Animus. “This platform is much smaller and I am having difficulty adjusting to its architecture. This is not of pony construction.”

“You don’t want to know what I had to go through to get that body.”

Animus pivoted forward into a sitting position, he spotted the great metal centipede in the corner of the room and raised his eyebrows in astonishment. He looked back over at Lumina to put a question to her, but instead he paused, noticed the tears running down her face. His eyes found the blood leaking from the stain in her suit.

“Lumina you are crying,” he said. “You must be in a great deal of pain. I insist that we get you to sickbay immediately.”

Lumina rubbed the tears from her eyes, and more trickled out. “I’m not going to lie, it hurts a lot, but that’s not why I’m crying. I’m not crying because I’m sad, or because I’m in pain. I’m crying because I’m happy.” She chuckled through the tears. “I must need you much more than I think if I sound that cheesy after a week by myself.”

“I believe I owe you a debt that I can never repay. The events that you endured to acquire this body must have been physically and mentally demanding. Thank you.”

“Well, you didn’t just expect me to give up on you, did you?” Lumina let her face light up in a smile. “And you’re welcome.”

Animus flexed his hind legs, then leaned his body forward and attempted to stand. He didn’t get it the first time, nor the second, but on the third try he succeeded in finding his feet. Lumina and the centipede just watched.

“You got it?” Lumina asked.

“I have never had limbs before.” Animus put one foot forward, and then the other. His arms shot out to his sides to help him balance. “Using them is proving difficult. Your injuries require medical attention. I will accompany you to sick bay and provide whatever assistance I can.”

Lumina gathered her legs underneath her torso, and pushed up to stand. In the process, she put more weight on that back leg than she intended and hot fluid ran down her side. She hissed. The pain was excruciating.

“I think I can make it to sick bay.” Lumina hobbled over to the exit with the centipede following. “When you’ve figured out how to walk, meet me there. I’m going to go lock myself in the medi-pod now.”

Limping down to sickbay took her longer than she expected. The energy and adrenaline that fueled her during the fight and the trek to retrieve Animus’s new body just wasn’t in her anymore. She was almost done, and her body knew it. It fought her the entire way down. The centipede followed her every step of the way. Why? She didn’t know, and at that point she didn’t care.

In sickbay, Lumina yanked off her spacesuit, taking special care not to peel away any of her lacerated skin. As soon as she pulled her wounded leg free of the suit that had been applying first aid and pressure to the wound, blood flowed out.

It was a mess. Blood pooled up in her suit and left stains all over her white coat and gushed onto the metallic floor. She was beginning to feel extremely light-headed.

“I forgive you for this,” she told the centipede, “but this bucking stings.”

Lumina threw herself in the medi-pod, and just closed her eyes while the plexi-glass dome closed over her and the machine went to work. She gestured at holographic buttons with her horn as they popped up around her. Sweet tasting gasses filled the inside of the chamber and dulled the pain in her leg. A hub of mechanical arms lowered, and she turned her head away before it went to work. The centipede pulled itself away from the plexi-glass dome and started scanning a stray prescription bottle right as Lumina looked away.

Every now and again, Lumina glanced a squinted eye at her leg, and saw nothing but busy mechanical arms and medical tubing coursing with fluids of every color. She felt nothing more than a slight pressure on her leg. An IV full of blood was inserted into her forehoof, and in minutes the lightheaded feeling started to vanish.

Animus stumbled into the sickbay some time later. He bumbled up to the medi-pod and tapped a claw against the dome.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“The pain’s gone,” Lumina said. “The medi-pod is patching me up pretty well, I don’t think it will even leave a scar.”

A buzzer sounded, and the holograms in front of Lumina’s face flashed green. The hub of mechanical arms retracted into a panel at the end of the medi-pod’s bed. A fresh dermal regeneration bandage was wrapped around Lumina’s leg, and when she flexed it and tried to put weight on it, Lumina was met with only the mildest of pain. Lumina popped open the medi-pod dome and stepped out on all fours.

“Not exactly good as new, but nothing I can’t handle.” Lumina tested her leg a little more. “Now that I’m bandaged up, and you’re in a body, we need to talk about our next move. We need to leave this planet, but before we can, there is something we need to do first. There’s an alien ruin not too far from here, and in it there’s a device that will terraform this planet and let it support life again. We need to get the Luna Dream in shape to fly again, go back down to the ruin, and turn that device on.”

“I have detected a local network.” Animus put a claw to his head, and the lights in his eyes flashed. “Please standby while I search it for relevant data.”

The centipede scurried up to Animus and shone its light in his face. Animus’s eyes darted back and forth in his head. He broke from the trance and the centipede switched its light off.

“Well, what did you find?” Lumina climbed back into the medi-pod and lied down on her stomach. She was still really weak.

“I do not wish to alarm you but it appears that your associate has already activated the device.”

“When did you do that?” Lumina asked the centipede. “Never mind.” She shook her head. “Isn’t that good news?”

“Lumina, I may no longer be inside the ship but I am still connected to it,” he said. “The Luna Dream sustained heavy damage when it impacted the planet. Judging by the data streaming in from the local network, the entire terraforming process will occur rapidly. The ship barely survived landing. I do not believe that the Luna Dream will survive the rebirth of this planet.”

“It couldn’t have waited a little while?”

“The Guardian has waited millions upon millions of years to begin terraforming.” Animus tried to articulate with his claws but he couldn’t get the gestures quite right. “She will not wait another day.”

“How long do we have until the device, you know, starts up?” Lumina held back her panic.

Animus glanced over at the centipede, and then back at Lumina.

“I don’t believe we have any more than fourteen hours,” said Animus. “Assuming the data I am receiving is correct.”

A glass of water sat out on a countertop across the room. Magic returned to her in a fierce vibration through her horn. She focused in on the glass and started weaving magic over its sides.

“Then we’ll just have to move the ship before daybreak tomorrow,” she said.

“The ship’s engines are not designed to provide us with sufficient thrust to escape atmosphere even at full strength.” Animus tapped his foot. “What is your plan for moving a one point two kilometer long starship?”

Lumina reached out to the cup with her magic, and although it didn’t obey her as easily as it did during the fight in the ruin, with a great deal of focus, the cup lifted up off the counter and floated across the room to her. Animus ducked his head, and glanced to and fro at the golden aura surrounding both Lumina’s horn and the cup. She set the cup down beside her on the bed.

“I’m going to do it with magic,” said Lumina, “just as I did with the cup.”

“Will that work?”

“It’s got to.” Lumina looked Animus right in the eye. “If it doesn’t, the Luna Dream sinks into the ocean and us along with it.”