Sol 412
AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 419
ARES III SOL 412
“You know,” Mark said as he pulled a bundle of wiring out of its recess, “you have it lucky. The capsule we took to the moon had fourteen miles of wiring. With your magic comms and life support, your ship has a lot less.”
“That doesn’t make this any more fun,” Dragonfly grumbled. She was of no mind to be buoyed by Mark’s it-could-be-worse comments, not when she was engaged in one of the most hated tasks ever to confront a repairpony: wiring harness inspection.
Lots of subsystems and control panels had been yanked and dumped in the search for weight savings. The entire launch staging system, with all its reprogrammable switches- gone. The subsystem for controlling maneuvering thrusters- junk, once NASA had looked at the thruster block specifications and assured her that the MAV’s control system could be adapted to use them instead of its own heavier thrusters. Engine throttle- what engine? Buh-bye.
But in many cases the wiring for these systems remained, because it was too much trouble to unearth the wiring harness involved and then remove only the superfluous wires. Technically it still was, because even with wire coding it was impossible to be certain that one out of a dozen little wires in a bundle was the one you wanted to strip out. But they had to pull all of them anyway, and inspect them all, and make sure there were no bare spots where insulation had failed, allowing the metal wire to touch or spark against the metal of the ship interior.
Mark had told them all about what had happened once in a human ship, one with a pure oxygen atmosphere, when a wire sparked. The ship life support provided normal atmosphere and not pure oxygen, but the image stuck in Dragonfly’s mind of a fire that burned so fast that the bodies of the astronauts it killed didn’t have time to cook. That image almost- almost- made going through every single wire remaining in the ship tolerable.
But it didn’t make it even slightly fun.
Yesterday had been the easy part. Yesterday they’d found every cut end, yanked the wire completely if it was conveniently short (not many), and taped off every loose end too troublesome to remove. (This was a lot- Dragonfly was down to a sliver of electrical tape on the spool, although admittedly the outer quarter or so had been made useless by the same Martian cold immediately after the crash that had turned the ship manuals into confetti). That had proceeded quickly- the loose ends were all in known, easy-to-find, generally easy-to-access places, generally because they were where something had been cut or removed.
But wiring inspection was worse than watching paint dry. You could let your mind wander with paint, but you had to pay full and absolute attention to every bloody inch of what was still several miles of itty bitty wires.
Thankfully, just before Dragonfly was going to ask for a break, Mark did. “I need to rest my eyes,” he said after checking off Wiring Harness #7 (port thruster control, port SRB ignition and decoupling control lines, habitat deck and engineering deck lighting). “I haven’t told NASA yet, but I’ve been getting a little bit farsighted the last couple of months.”
“Farsighted?” Dragonfly asked. “Does that mean you can see the future?”
“What? No,” Mark said, confused. “It means I’m going to need reading glasses when I get back to Earth.”
“Oh. You don’t have any problem with computer screens.”
“Computer screens aren’t up close to my face, and the letters are pretty big. But I can’t read the characters on your wiring harnesses without squinting really hard.” Mark sighed. “It’s a common symptom of long term zero-gravity- weakened vision, I mean- but I’d hoped Mars gravity would be enough to avoid it.”
“Huh.” As Mark flopped over to lean his back against the habitat deck bulkhead, Dragonfly joined him in a similar pose. “That’s kind of strange. You have the smallest eyes of any of us, but they’re also the most fragile.”
“Yeah, I’ve wondered how the ponies get on with those huge eyes of theirs. Probably spend a fortune on eye drops.” Mark chuckled. “Allergy season must be a bitch.”
Dragonfly blinked again. “Um, no,” she said quietly. “I mean, a few ponies have allergies, but it’s not like it’s crippling or something.”
“Oh. Huh.”
The conversation lapsed, and Mark shut his eyes, reaching up to rub his temples with one hand.
“Hey, there’s a thing you can do that we can’t,” Dragonfly chirped. “We can’t rub both temples at the same time.”
“Mmm.”
More silence.
“I was wondering,” Dragonfly asked, “why don’t we move to the cave for the last few sols?” She’d thought about proposing this for weeks now, but this seemed like the time to bring it up.
“Mmm?” Mark didn’t open his eyes. “Hadn’t thought about it much. First thing I think of, I don’t want to move Pathfinder. After what we saw when we opened up Sojourner, I think we were lucky as shit that Pathfinder worked pretty much first time. For all we know, any little bump could kill it. The Hab still has work space, the equipment we’re not taking with us, six hydrogen cells for extra power storage, and more safety backups than the cave or the rover. It’s still the safest place.”
“Yeah, but… well,” Dragonfly muttered, a little uncomfortable with her thought, “you’re a botanist- a farmer, basically. Doesn’t the farm feel more like home?”
Mark snorted, but his eyes stayed shut. “The cave is the most alien place on Mars to me,” he said. “Yeah, it has plants. But it’s underground, in a giant geode that dwarfs almost anything ever found on Earth, and it runs ninety percent on a force of nature my entire species had relegated to myth.” He chuckled and added, “Well, most of us. I hear there are some who think that there are evil magicians among us who cast curses and steal away men’s penises.”
Dragonfly couldn’t hold back her laugh. “What??”
“I could barely say it the first time,” Mark said. “Apparently there’s this really weird mental disease, a kind of paranoia, that can make a man think his genitals are gone. And then they have to blame somebody, because obviously…” The human began to chuckle uncontrollably, then managed to finish, “… they don’t just get up and walk away…”
Dragonfly laughed too, but not as much. “You humans are weird,” she said.
“Yeah, probably,” Mark said once he calmed down. “But my point is, the Hab feels more like home than anything else here. I trained in a simulation of the Hab for years. And I’ve spent over a year living in it. The cave is nice, but…”
“The cave is alive,” Dragonfly said. “The Hab is dying.”
Mark’s eyes finally opened. They looked a little sad, staring off at the opposite wall of the compartment. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “We’re killing it one piece at a time. The life support is down to about eighty percent capacity, give or take, despite my maintenance. We’re lucky it has that. It was never meant to last this long with full occupation, much less with full occupation plus a farm.”
“Mmm.” Humans got a lot of mileage out of grunts as conversational tools, and Dragonfly could see why.
“There’s a children’s book back home,” Mark said. “It’s called The Giving Tree. The tree gives the young boy an apple. It gives the older boy a place to hang a swing. When the boy becomes a man, he takes the wood to build a house. And when he’s an old man, there’s nothing left to take. All the tree has left is its stump, and so the old man sits and rests on that. That’s what the Hab feels like to me- a giving tree.”
“That… that’s so stupid!” Dragonfly snapped. “I want a copy of that book to put in the hive nursery! It’s a perfect changeling story! Only instead of ‘The Giving Tree’ we’d call it ‘The Taking Boy!’ That tree gave the same way ponies ‘give’ to changelings!”
“Yeah, you’re not the first to notice the story’s a little one-sided,” Mark said. “But there’s another side to it. The stuff the boy took didn’t make him happy in the end. In fact, at the end he had nothing except the stump of the tree, because he’d taken and never really gave back. And when he’s old, he goes back to where he was young and happy, trying to find that again.”
Mark shook his head. “I haven’t read the book in so many years, I’m probably messing it up. But I feel bad about how we’ve looted the Hab. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to help keep the cave going. I can’t save the Hab, but maybe I can save that.”
“Huh.” Dragonfly shifted position. “How are your eyes?”
“They still hurt a bit,” Mark said. “Gimme a few more minutes.”
“Okay.” Dragonfly got up, stretched her legs, and trotted over to her discarded spacesuit. “I’m going back into the Hab for a minute. Want anything?”
“Pill bottle in the medicine chest marked ‘aspirin’,” Mark said. “If you could bring that. Rather not touch the Vicodin unless I have to.”
“Okay. Back in a while.”
It took time to cycle out the ship’s airlock and in via Airlock 2 of the Hab. Once inside, she checked the clock. In about two hours Mark would have to take Rover 2 to the cave to pick up the others- well, Starlight and Fireball, anyway; Cherry and Spitfire would walk back. But for the moment she was alone in the Hab.
The Hab floor was dirty, but no longer dirt. The plants had been carefully transferred to the cave, followed by as much of the cultivated soil as they could shovel up. The cabinets and tables, so shiny and brilliant when the five of them had first entered it the night of Sol 6, now looked dingy, scratched, beaten. The canvas scar left by the blown-out Airlock 1 grabbed and held the eye, reminding Dragonfly of that pony who had worked for the Storm King, what’s-her-name. One of the air circulation fans rattled, and another had that high-pitched whine only Dragonfly could hear, warning that its bearing was beginning to fail.
Without the farm- without the castaways- the Hab felt sadder, more tired, than before. If Dragonfly put the sensation into words, it had moved away from I still stand and had edged closer to I once stood. She still didn’t know if what she felt was real or some magic-deprivation hallucination, but to her it didn’t just feel like the Hab was dying; it felt like the Hab knew it was dying.
“Excuse me,” she said, alone in the ninety-two square meter space under the canvas dome. “I, um, just want to say something. We didn’t build you. The five of us, I mean, not Mark. We just showed up. You protected us. You warned us when you had trouble. You stood up to frightful things and kept us safe. And now we’re taking parts of you so we can go a long way away, and probably never come back.”
There was a vague hint that the bug had something’s attention. More hallucinations, probably. She felt silly, but she carried on.
“Well, I just want to say that we’re grateful for all you’ve done. And we’re sorry, really sorry, for how badly we abused you. You deserved better. You deserved a happier mission, with your proper crew. Instead you got us, and you took care of us. And now you’re giving us a chance to live long enough to maybe make it home again.”
Dragonfly walked up to the console of the Hab’s main computer, the one that monitored all the other equipment, the one too big and inconvenient to take with them to Schiaparelli. She placed a hoof on the side of the console and said, quietly, “Thank you.”
And the Hab was happy.
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Why do you hit us with feels outta nowhere? Plz, keep up the good work!
I really love this spirit angle, imagined or real. Though the last sentence makes it sound real. Heh
Yeah, that's really good.
It still makes me think of Spren in the Stormlight Archive. Or animist religion of course.
I love how even the inanimate objects in this story have character. Mars, the pony ship, the cave farm, the hab... it’s things like this that I love about written stories. And having Dragonfly there to give them a voice? Even better. Well done, sir.
Frazzleplop Hairyfist.
That was nice.
9103176
Maybe, but that's also how the book ends, so that might the main reason for the last line.
9103202
Oh God! Hairyfist?
images.zaazu.com/img/Gene-Simmons-rockstar-kiss-gene-simmons-smiley-emoticon-000231-medium.gif
9103202
Snazzytop lemongrist?
Popsicle BerMalBerIst?
I love these chapters where Dragonfly is communicating with inanimate objects. I can never tell if they really are "aware" or if it's just Dragonfly suffering from magic deprivation, but it always gets the feels going.
In the anime one piece the going merry had a spirit that lived in it the help the crew whenever it could also there been several other works of fiction where when somebody build something and they put their heart and soul into and it comes alive innocent similar to how the hab and Rover
9103270
My god, you people, is Benedict Cumberbatch really that difficult to remember?
9102662
i found someone making fan art of this fic!
derpicdn.net/img/2018/4/26/1717227/large.jpeg
I feel sorry for the Hab, especially if Dragonfly is not just hallucinating. I am very seriously wondering what is going on with Dragonfly. I am sure Chrysalis can probably tell her. Then again, maybe not? I don't think there's ever been a changeling as isolated as Dragonfly before.
9103202
Templeton Shitshow?
9103343
No but it's immensely amusing to be able to say Condlecrunch Bendyswatch and have people know exactly who you're talking about despite possibly never having heard that exact name before.
#HugAHab
I really liked this chapter.
😭 the Hab is so stalwart. RIP.
9103352
That's freaking awesome!
Thanks for bringing the buffer back into positive digits.
I cried happy tears.
Very nice. :)
9103164
But does SU even exist in this universe? We have no confirmation that it does...
Seriously, though. The part of my comment about 4chan was literally a commentary on how /mlp/ came into being, so... yeah. If boards get flooded with too much of something, quarantine boards pop up in response. Doesn't seem that far-fetched to me
My eyes genuinely watered up a little at Dragonfly's talk with the Hab.
The scar where the airlock was torn free. Tempests Shadow.
Depends on what the Habs primary controller is using and running. Laptops and PCs a badly crippled with timing delays and code bloat and eye candy etc, but if the Hab itself is running NASA class core architecture and code, the stuff used for the Rovers, Satelites, probes and such, then its not so much Speed, but Response. Keyboards are mostly Wifi and USB, data packets every millisecond or so, but the old machines used essentially hard wired terminal keyboards. they would start to respond to keys pressed even while the screen was updating. Depending on how you measured timings, the fastest could put the text on screen before the feeling of pressing the key had made it back to your brain. Any form of event based store and response would follow the behaviour of the user and have the subtle variations that are teh basis of fast response chaos based living organisms.
In space, you almost never get the chance to stop, pull over and rest to wait for things to settle down before even starting to work out whats wrong so it can be sorted out. In space, the best thing you can hope for is to Reset and hope you dont die in the 4 seconds it takes to get going again, or even Hard Reboot, and hope you survive the next 12 agonising terrifying seconds as the system comes back to life during the middle of reentry.
Theres no ARF in Space.
Now I want to see a heavy duty enclosure built over teh Hab to protect it as First Contact site, so that it can sit in a protected enviroment, so its sensors can return recoded low stress values so that its errors and warnings dont have to be continously triggering. Let it retire gracefully.
Human Spirit on Mars.
We'll Be Back.
9103377
"THE SPIRIT BOMB!"
"shuddup!"
"THE SPIRIT BOMB IS THE ONLY THING THAT CAN KILL FRIEZA!"
"DAMMIT KRILLIN!"
Yeah,i think animism is an actual magic thing. Maybe zebras know about this? Shamans have this thing where they isolate themselves from society to go on a spiritual journey. At least in earth mysticism.
9103605
this confirms it for me Dragonfly is best pony of story.
i have had the same talk a few times around the farm hear.
9103062
Well, looking at the available definitions, I don't see one that fits. And googling "overcoming inertia" gets me self-help books.
How would you define overcoming in this context.
Dammit quit putting dust in my eyes.
Right now someone at the real NASA is now using Pirate Ninja as a unit.
9103352
That’s cool, I like it.
9103519
I find it hard to justify Steve Universe not existing. MLP is inspirational, obviously, but we cannot assume all well plotted, quazi female hero stories are a result of MLP's success.
As for /b/ yeah I can see Quarantine boards for this event, and didn't mean to come off as denying what you said. I was more discussing what other possible outcomes it would have.
((Although I left /pol/ alone because while I am sure their would be a reaction from that board for this situation, I am also sure it would be fairly toxic. Most other 4chan boards would probably have little to do with these events, except MAYBE some games or stories inspired by these events /lit/ /f/ /co/ /v/ and /tg/. Not to many though I suspect, as their are better boards to post such things.))
9103352
.... Okay, if this Fireball is accurate, my mental image of him was WAAAAAAAAAAAAY off. I thought he looked kinda like an all-red Gronckle.
9103352 That artwork was commissioned by me specifically for the story.
I hope Firefly keeps her Mechapathy when she gets back to equestria, or at least to earth. It could do wonders for a technician.
9103841
huh cool but where i found it didn't refeafe that
9103862 Every time this happens I wish a little harder that I hadn't decided to include Dragonfly, Spitfire, and Fireball in the same mission.
I should have sent Gordon the Griffon. Yeah. Nobody's going to get their name mixed up with Gordo...
Goddamit, Kris. You made me cry.
9103800
I find it quite easy to justify. We don't know that it exists, nor do we know that it doesn't exist. Schrodinger's Cat.
9104055 And for me, at least for the past seven and a half months, it's been an unimportant detail that readers can fill in as they wish.
9104055
WARNING: The following post contains my own opinion on part of why MLP blew up so big and thus why inevitably some other show turned up in its place and thus an /mlp/ replacement is guaranteed to exist. As this is speculation into the nature of people's media consumption without statistics to back it up, please take my theory with the pinch its salt its worth.
To quote Loading Ready Run, "I can't drink possible Beer."
We can assume Steven Universe Exists, or we can assume Steven Universe does not exist. In the end the outcome largely remains the same if you think about it, and doesn't lead to the situation you picture where 4chan 'need an equivalent to /mlp/ in this universe.'
MLP got as popular as it did because it was a positive, slice of life TV show, made in the west, that wasn't overly focused on either romantic comedy elements (Friends of How I met your Mother) or familiar comedy elements (The Nanny or Everybody Loves Raymond), and actually tried to be somewhat serious in nature a lot of the time, with well developed female characters.
These factors combined are what make it so special....but even a TV show with half these elements would have filled the market demand for this kind of slice of life show....if not as well.
If MLP did not exist, something else would have caught the eye of the internet and the love/hate of millions. It likely would have been from Japan (mainly because they make far more Slice of Life shows then the west now), but the idea that absolutely nothing, no Steven Universe, no other children's TV show, no other Slice of Life Anime, nothing of that nature at all fills the void....
Seems unlikely to me. Would it have been as good as MLP....no, almost certainly not. Would it have had quite the impact MLP did....unlikely, as it would have arrived a little latter. But part of MLPs success among adults is we wanted something like this show, we wanted a positive slice of life TV show. The fact the show is excellent helps, but an excellent show that people don't subcouniously want to see takes a while to find its niche. (See the average ratings on the first season of Breaking Bad).
MLP didn't have that. It blew up really fast. And thus, we would have found a replacement....one way or another.
I used Steven Universe as its the biggest show I know of that fits the bill. Given it only came out 2013, its almost certainly not the show that filled the 'positive slice of life' niche we as a community were craving for in 2010, but I don't know much else that fits that niche in 2010/2011 calendar year.
9103605
After everything, the Hab deserves it.
Darn Mars dust in my eyes!
9104020
GORDONS ALIVE?
9103270
Well, as far as the series is concerned, she's still called Tempest. It's like they decided that her real name is too hard to remember for the series.
9103841
Are red stripes on Fireball his natural marking? Looks almost like racer suit
9104806 Yep. His design is inspired by the main character (main puppet) in Fireball XL-5. His suit is colored to match his hide.
Sorry for being quiet for quite a bit. Had stuff to attend to and didn't read at all.
But now I just read a bunch of the sols at once and you know what, Kris?
You're doing great.
You're doing wonderful.
And scenes like the last one, with DF thanking the HUB, show your brilliance in making the little stuff mean so much more for the reader.
Good job.
Stop making me feel for inanimate objects it hurts and makes everything blurry!
I'm a little disappointed that she didn't offer a little hope back to the hab, something like "We'll be back, someday we'll come back and make you good as new, and you'll get to share our story with visitors from everywhere. You did more than anyone asked of you, and you'll never be forgotten."