[1114-12-01//11:59:59] -- [̴1115-̴0̷4̸-̵0̸9̵/̸/̷1̸8̴:̶2̸7̵:̴3̸2̸] (R̷E̵S̶E̶T̵,̷ ̶E̷N̶G̸A̶G̵E̴)
I̷
“Beep, beep, beep, boop. Beep, beep, beep, boop…”
“Y’know, Lotus, y’can let the EKG handle that for you if you want.”
A chuckle. “I know, but I’m just so bored!”
“You’re a dork, new-hire. Y’know that?”
“You wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Celestia’s eyes were opened wide, but the room around her took sometime to come into proper focus. A patient’s room, with soft, yellowish electrical light shining down upon her. Not daylight, but obviously intended to simulate it.
There was a window behind her, too, though a heavy blind had been pulled over it. Tugging it up a little bit revealed an inky night sky and a dozen gently twinkling stars. Much to her surprise, however, the world around her seemed to have no bottom to it, simply more stars beneath them as well as above.
Gently, Celestia clambered to her hooves to go meet the ponies who she had heard outside. Somehow, she’d already had two names bouncing around in her head since she had first heard them speaking upon waking. Without much of an idea how, or why, or who they even were--a distant part of her memory knew that Lotus Leaf and Codex Haze were waiting for her on the other side.
The door into the patient’s room had been left open, but when Celestia peered through it she could see that Lotus and Codex were both facing away from her and instead peering at a flickering CRT monitor together.
“Beep… beep, beep…” Lotus was saying. “Boop!” She extended a hoof to gently but firmly prod at Codex's snout, resulting in an indignant scrunch and growl from the stallion.
“Ouch! Watch it!”
“Oh come on. That hurt. Seriously? That buckin’ hurt? Damned pussy.”
Celestia cleared her throat gently.
“Oh! Oh, she’s up! You’re up!” Lotus wheeled around quickly, a wide smile on the bat pony’s face. “Good morning, Celestia! Remember me?”
“Lotus Leaf.”
“Righto! Remember this ugly fella?”
Celestia managed a little smile. “He’s not ugly, and his name is Codex Haze.”
“Good! Okay!” Lotus was grinning ear to ear, and she turned to rattle off something onto the keyboard in front of her. “Hungry, Princess? ‘Kin have Twiley nuke somethin’ for ya to eat if ya want.”
Celestia shook her head. “I’m… fine, for now.”
“Probably feelin’ a little fuzzy, though, right?” Codex asked, taking a step closer to Celestia. He had a glass of water in his left wing, and he gently passed it over to Celestia, who accepted it gratefully in her telekinesis. “How’s your memory doing? What’s the last thing you’ve got in there?”
“...I was here. The… the ship was… poorly lit. Very little power. I think I might have passed out.”
“Right. Well, er. First thing's first…” Codex began. “That… ‘very little power?’ And the relative weakness and amnesia you’re feeling? We’ve had some time to analyze it and… it looks like we were hit pretty badly by a meteorite storm. Knocked out a few of our solar panels, and basically swamped our power. Twiley panicking and waking us up was a good call on her part.”
That seemed vaguely familiar to her. Low power, and the sparking of something outside the ship—some misfiring electrical system lighting up the infinite void. But… something was distinctly off about what she was being told.
Suddenly, looking from the pegasus stallion to the thestral, she recalled a haunting visual of the latter’s mangled, decomposed corpse.
The glass of water fell from her telekinetic grip, but Lotus was quick to scrunch her snout and dive half-way across the room to catch it.
There was surprisingly little fanfare. Like they’d been expecting the reaction.
“What is it?” came Codex’s surprisingly calm, single-word question. “What else do you remember, Princess?”
“You two. You were…” Celestia winced as the visual refused to leave her mind. “Dead. You had both died. I was alone.”
Lotus and Codex shared a glance, as the bat pony gently returned the half-spilled glass of water onto the end-table beside Celestia. They held the look for several seconds, as though having a wordless conversation with each other.
“We… had been hoping for a lead-in to that, Princess…” Lotus eventually said, quietly.
“We imagine that was… frightening for you to see,” Codex added. “But we promise there’s a logical explanation.”
“Okay.” Celestia’s horn lit, and she once again attempted to levitate the glass, taking a shaky sip of the cool water without breaking eye contact with the two ponies. “Let me hear it, please. In no unclear terms. I can handle the truth.”
Codex gave a single nod. “If you say so. Y-you… remember where you awakened, right? The last time we were… well, here? I imagine it was alarming enough that you probably do.”
Celestia closed her eyes. The memories were a little faded, and distant, but they still seemed to be there to some extent. Terrifying, blaring alarms. The shimmering, wretched pupa she had awaken in, submerged entirely in the yellow-ish orange fluid that had spilled out all onto the metal grated floor as she had struck it, sputtering and weary and blinded and…
“Yes, I remember.”
“Okay. Did… did you see any of the other, uh… pods?” Codex continued. “I don’t imagine you did, but if you would’ve been afforded the opportunity to look more closely, you might have seen that they looked like they were growing… well, something. Like embryos.”
Celestia felt a lump forming in her throat, but shakily, she nodded her head. “Okay…”
“That was… us. The ‘us’ you’re seeing now,” Codex said. To Celestia, the words seemed… oddly calculated, despite their inherent absurdity. As though the stallion had had this conversation a hundred times before, over and over, always in slightly different contexts but always for the same end-goal.
“But I saw you.” Celestia looked to Lotus. “I’m… not trying to be rude, dear, but you were most certainly dead.”
“And decomposed, too, ye?” The bat pony tilted her head. Regarding the question with a level of curiosity that Celestia would have called ‘cute’. Hardly a fitting reaction to being informed of the discovery of one’s own decomposed corpse. “Like, real-real bad? Even though I shouldnt’a bin?”
“Yes.”
“That would make sense,” Codex said. “See, Twiley had to wake us up a full year into our embryonic recovery cycle. She didn’t have a choice--power was failing, she didn’t know if she’d get a chance to wake us up again, so she… well, I guess an AI can’t really ‘panic’, but she did the AI equivalent and woke us up while she still had power to do it. But we weren’t ready. Weak, falling apart. Bodies half-made.”
“But why? I don’t understand. How is that possible?”
“It’s…” Codex grit his teeth. He looked around the room for a moment, as though searching for some prop he might use as guidance. His eyes rested upon the glass of water on the end table, and Celestia could have sworn she had seen a little light-bulb illuminate in the stallion’s skull. “W-where do you think we’re getting our water from, way out here, Celestia? Considering how far we are from everything else? How would you do it?”
Celestia blinked. A rather strange aside, but she had to assume the stallion had some point in this. “I would assume it would be recycled. Body fluids, sweat, urine, et cetera. Filtered and recycled, essentially ensuring a near-infinite loop of available fluid for consumption.”
Codex looked impressed. “Exactly. Well, for us, it’s… kinda similar, I guess. We only pass the Tear for about two months, out of a trip that takes a few years each time. It’s… less resource intensive to just… break us apart, and put us back together again, when we’re needed, then it is to have to keep us alive forever.”
“‘Specially considerin’ we lil’ ponies aren’t really built to last like you are, Princess.” Lotus added. “Gotta find another way for us short-lives.”
“That’s… that’s horrible.” Celestia gawked. Not just upon considering such a horrific fate, but in the casual, comforted way that Lotus herself had referred to it. As though they were as disposable a resource as the water they were drinking. ‘Little ponies’. To Celestia, they seemed anything but.
Lotus shrugged. “It really ain’t. We wouldn’t be doin’ it if we didn’t know what we had to do. Equestria needs us, and that’s enough for us. It’s just efficient.”
“It’s only horrible if you give meaning to it.” Codex added. To Celestia, he seemed a little less… comfortable with the consideration, compared to his bat pony partner, but he attempted a small smile all the same. “There really isn’t one. It’s like Lotus said. It’s just what’s the most efficient. In a way, its granted us an immortality that most other ponies would only dream of. Dying again and again for the right thing. That’s… if you DO bother giving meaning to it, that is.”
Celestia exhaled. There was… another question, prickling upon the edges of her brain, but the expertly concealed, haunted-expression of the pegasus stallion bode her drive it down, for now. She wasn’t even entirely sure she could handle the answer quite yet, despite her own assertions to the contrary.
Instead, she settled on a different one.
“How long have we been doing this?”
“Uhhh…” Codex blinked. “Lotus? What loop are we on? Twenty two? Twenty four? Somewhere like that?”
Lotus frowned. “Gods, I ain’t even been checking, anymore.” Her hooves rattled against the keyboard for a moment. “Twenty-four is right. With the average length of a loop lastin’ ‘bout 1200 Equestrian days. Time distortion closer to the Tear is a lil’ funky, though, so it’s probably been longer back home.”
“Three and a half years.” Celestia breathed. “That’d be… that’d be almost eighty. Eighty years.”
Celestia hadn’t even a complete idea of what it was she had been doing, but to suddenly be informed she had been doing it for such a long time? To suddenly learn that she was approaching a century of repetition, when still Equestria and Twilight and the blue skies of home were still so fresh seeming in her mind?
Beside her, Lotus seemed to have read Celestia’s look of shock, for she gave a little chuckle in a vain but well intentioned effort to lighten the mood somewhat. “Hey, well. We prolly look better than most other hundred-n-ten year old’s ye know, though, eh?”
Celestia supposed that was true enough.
Over the next two days, Celestia’s recovery occurred both gradually and gracefully. It was time that seemed to exist in vivid contrast to the last time she had been awoken. The last ‘loop’, as she had grown accustomed to hearing Lotus and Codex refer to each traversal along the same orbital pattern surrounding the Chaos Magic Tear.
While confined largely to the patient’s room, it was time that Celestia was at the very least afforded to grow a bit more acquainted with the two ponies she was sharing the ship with.
Lotus Leaf was relatively young--barely twenty-eight--and despite the bat pony’s quirky, devil-may-care attitude, she had cheerfully boasted that she had graduated near the top of her class in a prestigious physician’s class with a minor on aeronautical engineering. She couldn’t fly a ship to save her life, she’d claimed, but she could sure as Tartarus steer one. Celestia did her best not to mention the paradox.
Codex, meanwhile, had been trained in the operation and engineering of aeronautical vessels for seemingly his entire life. He’d been a radio-operator and maintenance technician aboard the first airships that had ventured into Equestria’s mesophere, a part of the crew that had launched the first equine-helmed expeditions to Luna’s Moon, back in the Dawnclimber Missions of 1069.
But besides their commendations, the real reason for their presence soon became rather obvious to Celestia. She had suspected it strongly before, through her interactions with them, and the more she got to know them the more she convinced herself of the fact. They were, simply put, exactly the sort of pony that Celestia herself would have selected for such a dangerous and soul-crushingly lonely mission. Lotus’s bubbly optimism, Codex’s calm, collected demeanor in the face of such an existentially humbling fate…
It took a certain sort of pony to remain loyal in such a time and place.
That, of course, was assuming they were telling Celestia the truth at all.
While Celestia recovered, so too did the ship surrounding her. The critical power failures that had been plaguing them the last time seemed less intense, though it was a little difficult to tell without leaving the confines of the patient’s room. The corridors outside of them were still kept dark to conserve power, with Codex and Lotus both having to rely on their flashlights to get around when they left to go operate the various inner-workings of the ship or return with food for Celestia. They ate and drank together, in no small part because it was simply more resource-efficient to only have to keep one node of the ship heated and lit at a time.
“Is energy always such a pressing concern?” Celestia had asked, on the last day before she was slated to make the move into the rest of the ship proper.
“It’s… been getting worse, as of late.” Codex admitted. Lotus was elsewhere in the ship, off tending to some affair or another, leaving Celestia alone with the pegasus. “The solar panels are old… and they don’t seem to be getting the light they used to. And those are the ones I managed to salvage, before, well…” He shuddered a little. “Let’s just say it’s a good thing for the me now that the me then made it into an airlock before he, uh. Hit the wall.”
“It happened to me, too,” Celestia said softly. The memory was only partly there...of how she had lost consciousness on the bridge. Hit the wall. “I… thought it was a nightmare. But it wasn’t.”
Codex shook his head sadly. “Anyways, the equipment is dated, slow to respond. Keep in mind, while we’re gestating, it’s lying dormant for two to four years. Even the body-fluid filtration system is… in need of renewal.”
“We weren’t meant to be up here this long, were we?”
Codex went silent for a moment, a heavy sigh leaving the stallion. “I think the original assumption was that we’d be heading home in a few loops. We never put an end-point to this mission. ‘As long as it needs to last, until the Tear is closed.’ But… nothing is built to last this long.”
“Not even ponies.”
Codex gave a little laugh. “No. Not even ponies.”
Several hours after her conversation with Codex, Celestia was finally able to leave the infirmary, and venture back out into the darkened corridors of the station proper. It was a rather significant comfort, however, to be trudging her way through them feeling as though she had a proper degree of strength to do so, and shouldered on either side by Lotus and Codex.
Emergency lights had been activated throughout the corridor, dim but at the very least present. Something besides an endless sprawl of darkness was better than nothing at all, Celestia supposed.
“There’s a few more lil’ exercises we’re gunna have ya do first, Princess,” Lotus was saying as she trotted along, a few steps in front of Celestia and Codex, her flashlight’s beam dancing a little as the bat pony seemed to have a small skip to her step. As though seeing Celestia up and moving had given the young pony something to be particularly content about.
It was strange to see such a bundle of energy in such a grim setting, but Celestia supposed it wasn’t an unwelcome presence within the quieted and still and empty halls.
“We still have about… four weeks? To getcha back up to strength, ‘fore we reach firin’ range to the Tear. So there ain’t much of a rush, at least.”
“It all builds up to this, hrm?” Celestia asked. “One shot at the tear? A single attempt to close the thing, and then not another until our orbit aligns again?”
“No, no,” Codex said. “We’re usually in range for a couple of days. We fire the retros when we get there, slows us down a bit. But there’s only so much we can do without wasting fuel, y’know?”
Celestia paused, tilting her head. “We can’t stop completely?”
Codex shook his head. “Goodness, no. We stop close to it, and we’d risk putting ourselves into the gravity well of the Tear. We orbit at a safe distance away from it, where we can cast at it without risking getting pulled in and, y’know. Atomized.”
“Getting atomized seems most non-ideal, yes,” Celestia said, frowning ever-so-slightly. “Fuel is a finite resource, too, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. It is.”
“Meaning, one day… one loop, we will run out of fuel for the… ‘retro thrusters.’”
“Y-yeah.” Codex bit his lip, rustling his left wing. “But what’s the point in any of this if we don’t keep on hopin’ that the tear’ll close before that happens, huh?”
“What about fuel for a return?”
Codex exhaled. “Well. Priority of the mission is making sure there’s a home we can come back to.”
I̵I̷
Twiley was the name of the ship’s artificial intelligence.
Celestia had found such out without having to ask, partly because of context clues given to her by Codex and Lotus and partly because the AI itself came online on the third day of their waking. Codex had been working diligently to repair the panels that had been damaged during the meteorite strikes that had occurred (apparently three years ago), and little by little the lights and heating for the vessel came back to life in some capacity.
Never a lot, of course. They were running on what they could afford to run, even still. Only lighting rooms that needed to be lit, and heating rooms that contained things that would be ruined if they froze.
The management of the direction of the power itself was performed by the ship’s AI. She was gathered with Codex Haze when they booted her up—the AI itself requiring its very own node to contain its circuitry-based-brain. Up until now it had been on what Codex called a ‘Limited Safe’ mode, wherein the AI prioritized the crew above anything else and discarded concerns of greater ship-wide electricity, engine functions, and waste-water conversion. Keeping the pods gestating was, in the event of a total emergency, the only thing that mattered. Even if it was keeping them alive only to wake to an increasingly depleted ship.
Now, though, they had enough power to ease Twiley out of her ‘Limited Safe Mode’, and instead redirect her focus back towards ship management.
The room was directly in the middle of the rounded centrifuge, which meant that the artificial gravity generated by the centrifugal spinning was weaker, and their bodies thusly felt lighter. One had to be careful that a light skip did not send them careening against the hard metal walls of the node.
“Do you want the honours, Celly?” Codex had asked her, motioning with a little nod at the main breaker switch. She did. A dull hum flooded the room as she gripped it in her telekinesis and threw it, and the node began to glow with electrical lights slowly fading back into being.
“That should do it!” Codex said excitedly, shutting the panel for the breaker. “C’mon, we can chat with her at the console inside.”
She followed him back towards proper gravity, to a panel on the side of the entrance to the node. It looked not dissimilar to a telephone booth, something which Celestia found mildly amusing. She supposed convenience and simplicity went hoof-in-hoof. It was little more than two black telephone receivers, which were connected to a panel of dials and switches and a frequency indicator that was reading 9999 kHz.
There was a pause of several moments, as both Codex and Celestia simply stared at the communications panel. Then, to Celestia’s surprise, it rang. Like it really was a telephone! It even sounded like one. Codex’s expression lit up from tense anticipation to near-elation when it did, and he picked up the receiver only to hoof it over to Celestia.
She didn’t know what to do at first… how to go about communicating with an artificial intelligence. And so, she settled on the most basic thing she could think of.
“Hello?”
“Hiya, Princess!”
Twilight. The voice was unmistakably her, to such an extent that it just about took her breath away.
“…Twilight?”
“Is that what you want to call me?”
“It’s who you are! You sound just like her!”
A little giggle, which… sounded distinctly stilted and synthesized. Subtle enough that if one had not known Twilight they might not have noticed. But for all the decades they had spent together, Celestia felt confident not even a changeling could fool her on the sound of her faithful student’s voice.
“Heh, well. I’m BASED off of her, in voice and mannerisms, but I’ll make no claims to actually being her. Twiley, at your service.”
As ‘Twilight’ continued talking, it became clearer to Celestia that what she was hearing was… not quite her student after all. It was more like it was her voice, strung together from a thousand instances of her speaking, and reconstituted together based on the rhythm and cadence of her speech.
“Oh! Thanks for booting me up, by the way!” Twiley continued. “Running on safe mode is weird. Like you’re stuck only thinking a few thoughts. I can see here that I’ve been offline for nine hundred and ninety nine…”
She went silent for a moment, and then;
“Er. Well, that database is scuffed. Just showing me a buncha nines. Long time! Been offline for a long time!”
Codex—who had taken the second of the two receivers, piped up. “Our panels got hit bad by a meteorite storm. We’ve had to rely on auxillary power until about two days ago, Twiley.”
“Ah, so that’s what that was. I saw the readings spike up, and so I gave your pods a bit of a jolt. Early, though… I hope it wasn’t….”
“It was pretty bad, Twiley, but you made the right call. I got one of the panel’s working before I went out, so. You probably saved the mission by waking us up when you did.”
“Phew. Okay. I’ve been worrying about that for years. Hard not to, when it’s one of three thoughts I have in Safe Mode. Hey, nice last second repairwork, Codex. I, uh… is Lotus listening?”
“Lotus is, and I quote, ‘going to fly laps around this nightmare-in-space to try and forget this donkeyshit.’”
Twiley let out another synthesized chuckle, though her voice went grave before too long. “I, uh. Sapped a bit of...her, so that your bodily constitution would be a bit stronger. N-nothing personal, but, er. You are the mechanic. And I figured power was vital, and she only had to be alive long enough to stabilize you and the Princess, so…”
Celestia blinked. Codex did, too, and he looked to Celestia with an expression of blooming horror.
“Can…. Can you tell her that I’m sorry? It wasn’t an easy call at all, and it’s…. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I had to reconstitute her, and…”
“I’ll tell her,” Celestia spoke up. “I… have my doubts she’s going to hold it against you, Twiley.”
“Thanks, Celestia. How was… how was your last loop?”
“It felt more like my first,” Celestia admitted. “I don’t remember any of the others.”
“She has long term amnesia, and some brain damage,” Codex said sadly. “We had to use the Science Tape again.”
“O-oh…” Celestia could have seen Twiley wilt, if she was really there at all. “I… made a pretty tough loop for all three of you, didn’t I?”
“You made the best out of a horrid situation, dear,” Celestia said. “I don’t remember how I got back into the cryostasis pod after I blacked out, so I presume you did that. Thank you.”
“Oh… ah. You’re…welcome?” A strained chuckle. “I, uh… I really need to be focusing on rerouting the power coils in the Harmonic Node right now, you two… Its been nice catching up, though!”
“Sure thing, Twiley,” Codex said. “I’m gonna be back out there with the arc-welder in a bit. Got four weeks to get the rest of those panels up, so I’d best get moving. Later, Twiley.”
“Here if you two need me, just give me a ring.”
There didn’t come any further response, and so both ponies promptly hung up their respective receivers, and Codex let out a lengthy exhale.
“Buck, Twiley…” he shook his head sadly. “Gods, I need to give that bloody bat a hug or something. Can’t believe she did that…”
Celestia couldn’t really think of a reply that felt fitting to the revelation that their ship’s artificial intelligence had seen fit to butcher one of its passengers for the benefit of another. Celestia couldn’t even disagree with the suggestion. Simply wince at the inherent horror therein.
Four weeks was, as it turned out, an ample amount of time for Celestia to become a bit more acquainted with her current state of affairs. Life on the Station eventually approached something resembling a routine, as strange and foreign of one as it perhaps was at first. It was time spent in isolation of a rather perfect sort, with the three ponies eachother's only company for the apparent duration of their expedition.
Codex drew. He had sketchbook upon sketchbook filled with graphite drawings, and did so using pencils that had been whittled down to stubs. Another humbling reminder of the longevity of their eternal journey, as he slowly but surely trudged through blank-page after blank-page of his sketchbooks. Whether he would run out of paper or pencil first, Celestia supposed she would see at one point of her life, much as she dreaded the prospect.
Lotus had claimed to have read every single book they had packed for the expedition three times over, and Celestia believed her. She instead predominantly devoted her time to exercise, flying low through the halls of the station or doing wing-ups in a gym-area of shadowed, dusty, long-forgotten equipment that the ship no longer had the power to energize.
Celestia spent her own time watching videotapes.
There were, as she soon discovered, hundreds of them. All dated, stretching back for decades, until the labels on them were too scuffed and blurred to even be legible. The oldest of the tapes had become so distorted through constant rewatches that they would usually degrade into distortion and static after a few minutes.
It was as Codex had said. Nothing was built to last forever. Even the recorded memory of things had to fade eventually.
Every single tape was a recorded conversation with home. According to Codex, they were transmitted once each loop, as the orbits of Equestria and the satellite intersected at just the right moment to allow it. Then, they continued on, Celestia on one track, Equestria on the other.
Twilight on the other.
Most of the tapes were between the two of them, after all. Celestia could hear her own voice during their conversations, though she couldn’t dredge the memories from her mind. It seemed that the last loop, in which she had been awoken earlier than intended, had placed a firm reset on her own memory of her situation.
Regardless, the bulk of the tapes featured much of the same, though Celestia found herself watching them obsessively all the same.
The further back in time she went, the more the specter of digital distortion and degradation consumed the younger version of Twilight Sparkle. The more recent tapes instead featured a mare who looked the part of her Twilight, but much, much older than Celestia had been expecting. It wasn’t as though she was some weary old mare, yet the youthful spirit that had hung about Twilight for much of her early 100’s had matured into a taller mare standing with a prouder stature and a newfound patience in her muted smile. She was a different sort of beauty that Celestia had wanted more than anything else to have been able to watch Twilight grow into, together, over the many long years they would face together.
In most of the tapes, Twilight was standing in the throne room in Canterlot, but the old room typically looked far different from how Celestia had remembered it. Cables and long strands of electrical wiring snaked their way up towards the ceiling behind Twilight, and much of the back wall had been converted into what looked like a server-room, separated by a sturdy-looking glass wall. Whether the throne room always looked like this now, or it had simply been converted into such temporarily for each transmission, Celestia could only guess.
In the background of much of the recordings, though difficult to see in the grainy, poor-resolutiuon tapes, Celestia could watch a separate narrative of the ancient city of Canterlot proudly and hastily moving rapidly into the future. Skyscrapers rising into the sky, pulsating electrical light illuminating the city during the tapes that had been recorded at night-time. The growth of the city where Celestia had spent the most of her life relegated to a barely legible background detail visible over the withers of her dearest Twilight Sparkle.
In the tapes, they talked of everything and anything. The surviving fragments of the earliest tapes spoke of a Twilight still growing into the role of a ruler without Celestia by her side. But the more recent ones instead depicted a mare who had risen to the role with such a strong degree of confidence and competence that Celestia found herself pridefully tearing up listening to her speak of the various political affairs of an Equestria that history had already buried decades ago.
The more Celestia progressed through the tapes, the more she became aware of a terrifying reality--Twilight had been a ruler by herself for far, far longer, than she had ever been a ruler with Celestia.
“I wish I could understand why you keep watching these, Celestia.”
Celestia jerked her head around, at the sound of Twilight Sparkle’s voice sounding out from somewhere that was not the flickering CRT screen before her.
She was hovering behind Celestia, projected down from a spherical panel mounted atop the tiled ceiling of the station. Flickering in and out of her sarcophagus of scanlines, a dusty nest of decades of dead cells swirling like smokey vapour all about the holographic Twilight looming above her.
“That is to say, it, er.” The hologram let out a little digital chuckle. “Doesn’t compute. Beep boop, error message number seven.”
Celestia managed a smile herself. “It’s good to see you again, Twiley.”
“Aw, thanks! I’d give you a hug if I could, Celestia. You’re looking a lot better then the last time I saw you. S-sorry about that, by the way…”
“Hardly your fault. You did not have much of a choice.”
“I suppose not.” Twiley smiled, and then nodded her head at the flickering CRT, frozen in a torrent of static and distortion. “You always do this, and you never seem to feel good after. Why?”
Celestia took a moment to contemplate the question. “Because… I suppose I’d rather feel poorly while thinking of Twilight Sparkle than not think about her at all.”
“I see. But you do have your communication with her coming up, eventually. In approximately one hundred and two days, actually.”
“Yes, I suppose that is true. That is some comfort.” Celestia exhaled. “Twiley, may I ask something?”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“Lotus and Codex told me that they are… recycled beings. Grown, here, in the station, from their own flesh, again and again.”
“Which they are, yes.” Came Twiley’s calculated, largely impersonal response. “It’s more efficient than keeping a full crew alive for such a long time.”
“Am I the same as them?”
Twiley’s expression fell. To Celestia, she seemed to be gauging the benefits and the pitfalls of answering the question truthfully. “Yeah. You are.”
“I’m not Celestia, then. Not really.”
“That isn’t what I meant. Of course you’re her.”
Celestia shook her head. “No. I’m not. How many times have I crumbled apart, as I did before? The last time I awoke? How can I be the same pony if that has happened so many times?”
Twiley was silent for several moments. The hologram flickered, as the computer seemed to be calculating its response.
“I wouldn’t dream of telling Lotus or Codex that they are no longer themselves,” Twiley said eventually. “Would you?”
Celestia stared back at the hologram, opening her mouth with a response and closing it when none immediately came. Eventually, she exhaled a lengthy breath from her snout and shook her head. “No, I would not.”
“Then there’s your response,” Twiley replied. “Celestia, look at who you’re asking. You seriously think an artificial intelligence designed to mimic a real living pony has any right making nuanced claims about the specifics of identity?”
“I suppose I just wanted some confirmation, is all,” Celestia said. She stared into the flickering light of the paused tape. With a small sigh, she rose to her hooves, wearily ejected the tape, and returned it to its sleeve with the hundreds of other tapes.
I̸I̷I̶
Celestia was standing with Lotus Leaf, looking out through a wide-panel of reinforced glass at the looming sight of the Chaos Magic Tear. From up close, the Tear seemed even more terrifying than it had from their vantage deep in space. Celestia could see through into…
Well, it didn’t look like there was much of anything tangible besides uncompromising destruction, through the Chaos Magic Tear. It crackled and sparked with a never ending torrent of electricity, roiling over upon itself like a bubbling ocean.
“Ready, Princess?” Lotus asked. The bat pony, like Celestia, was already wearing a thick and heavy spacesuit that would (Celestia hoped) protect the two from the merciless force of space and the nearby Chaos Magic crackling through the air. Their wings protruded from the suit through separate openings, encased in a sort of rubber that allowed for mobility whilst keeping them shielded from the vacuum of space. The only thing left for them to apply was their helmets, which looked like giant glass fishbowls to Celestia, though she was assured that they were made of a far stronger type of reinforced plastic and not actual glass.
The two were both standing in the airlock leading out into space. It was the one hall that Celestia hadn’t investigated, during her first awakening, which truly was little more than the airlock and then a long metal conduit too narrow for a pony to travel through, that connected the two sections of the ship.
Furthermore, they were doing so without the benefit of artificial gravity. Indeed, they had stopped the centrifugal movement of the ship several days prior, in order to acquaint themselves with the feeling of moving about without it. It had taken Celestia some time to acquaint herself, but surprisingly not as long as she would have assumed of herself.
She supposed that somewhere in her brain, the training she would have received before embarking on this mission still remained.
With a single nod to Lotus’s inquiry, Celestia levitated the helmet over herself, having to duck her head a little so her horn did not strike it as she put it on. A faint hiss sounded out as pressurized clamps sealed it with the rest of the suit.
“Alright. I’ll get your oxygen hose on first, Princess. Then you do me.”
Celestia could hear the bat pony fiddling about with something behind her, Lotus’s hooves sounding out against the helmet a few times, before a sharp hiss rung out and a sudden rush of synthetic-tasting air flowed into Celestia’s helmet. Looking behind her, she could see the thick, reinforced piping spooled up against one side of the airlock, which then connected to two sets of oxygen tanks mounted side by side.
She attached Lotus’s hose, too, who responded with a smile and hoof held up in an affirming gesture.
“Hearin’ us okay, Codex?”
“10-4, new-hire,” came Codex’s reply, the stallion back in the ship’s bridge monitoring the two of them with what little equipment the ship still had working. “Ready when you two are.”
“Just a hop, skip, and a jump, Princess.” Lotus smiled, and turned to open the airlock. She grunted as she twisted the heavy mechanism open, and so Celestia lit her horn and gave the little pony a helping hoof. Together, they eased the airlock open, and Celestia found herself staring out into the reaches of space with nothing but the helmet over her head dividing them.
“We’ll take it slow, Celly,” Lotus’s voice came crackling into Celestia’s ear from the intercom. “You let me know if you wanna stop, okay?”
Celestia nodded. “Thank you, Lotus.”
Gently, Lotus clambered out of the airlock, hooking a hoof around a long metal railing that seemed to run the circumference and length of the vessel. Celestia soon followed her out, her eyes going wide as she felt her body continue on moving without her, momentum continuing to pull her along despite the relatively small step out of the airlock she had taken. She, too, gripped onto the railing, her horn instinctively lighting to cast a telekinetic field around herself and cease her movement.
“Good job, Celly. Now, our destination is across from us.” Lotus pointed a hoof along the metal conduit connecting the segments of the ship. “We’re travelin’ along there. Pay attention to your oxygen cable, make sure it ain’t gettin’ snagged on anythin’. If you have to disconnect it, you’re headin’ to the closest airlock. Don’t panic--you’ll have a few minutes of breathable oxygen still in your helmet, so just stay calm and get to safety while you still can.”
There was nothing more to be said, and no reason to say so with oxygen a commodity to manage. Celestia and Lotus both started out across the conduit towards the other section of the ship, which Celestia was able to see in its entirety for the first time since she had awoken. It was large—larger than the rest of the ship, it seemed, though most of the surface area seemed uninhabitable. The solar panels seemed to take up most of the area—there were six of them in total, and they all stretched out like mighty limbs away from the narrow row of three separate nodes. The panels themselves seemed to be greatly damaged—some were shorter than others and broken off in places, as though something had struck them at great speeds. Considering the earlier hull damage they had observed, such seemed unfortunately likely to Celestia. If an asteroid or a bit of space debris had the misfortune of getting caught in the same orbital well they were in, then Celestia imagined the two would collide at least on occasion, given the repetitious frequency of their respective journeys.
A large cannon-like device was mounted on the rear of the segment, and if Celestia squinted she could see that it was being gradually rotated to face the tear.
She knew without confirmation that such was Codex’s doing. She could practically hear the colt’s eager, frantic typing, from within the bridge of the ship, as he rushed to ensure it was ready for when they arrived.
Meanwhile, Celestia found herself nearly taken aback by the horrific beauty of the sprawling tapestry of space all around them. It was like swimming in the deepest depths of the ocean, the entire world one of motionlessness. Suspended in a void of pure, perfect silence, save for the uneasy rhythm of her breathing and—
“...Ack! Epona’s sopping mother-cuckin’ cunt!” The bat pony beside her chittered out, as she miscalculated her trajectory and collided with the conduit. “S-sorry! Ignore me!”
Celestia stopped, stifling a chuckle and lighting her horn to help reorient Lotus, who was frantically kicking about trying to right herself after her incident. She exhaled gratefully, a sheepish expression on her face.
The rest of the journey carried on without incident, until they were both at the far side of the conduit and looking at the airlock together. It had iced up rather significantly--a whole loop having gone by without anypony to clear it surely must have been the culprit.
“We’re at the airlock of the Elemental Node, Codex,” Lotus said as soon as they arrived, the bat pony detaching a cable from her suit and clipping it onto the railing.
“Despite your best intentions, it seems.” Came Codex’s reply from the bridge.
Lotus laughed. “Oh, git bucked, birdbrain.”
Celestia chuckled, too. She was starting to like these ponies more and more. “Move back aways, dear. I’ll melt the ice with magic.”
Lotus did just that, kicking off the side of the airlock and wrapping a hoof around the cable she had attached to the railing, which allowed her to watch from several meters away safely. Celestia’s heat magic made quick work of the iced-up airlock, and soon enough the two of them were carrying out an inverse-repeat of earlier.
Celestia was the first to enter the second part of the station. She did so with her horn ablaze with light, for the tiny corridors were almost completely black within, save for fragments of Lotus’s flashlight beam that were able to percolate through the icy windows. The oxygen cable connected to the back of her helmet was fed through a sealed valve at the top of the airlock.
“Should be oxygen inside of here,” Lotus said, as soon as the airlock was closed and depressurized. She verified such on the control panel, before lifting off her helmet and taking a long, relieved breath. “Mighty fine space-walkin’ there, Princess.”
Celestia smiled, and lifted off her own helmet. “Thank you, dear.”
The inside of the ‘Elemental Node’, as Lotus had called it, was rather claustrophobic. Most of the walls were dominated by electrical breaker panels for the outside solar panels, with a dozen different circuit breakers for seemingly every other function of the ship. Celestia imagined the conduit that had run between the two was populated mostly by electrical wires and other tubes for the oxygen.
“Harmony Cannon’s that way.” Lotus pointed down the corridor with a hoof. “I’m gonna go throw the breaker and git some lights on in ‘ere. Meet'cha over there.”
Several minutes later, both ponies were at the far end of the final node along the corridor. Celestia was looking down the barrel of the cannon, which was still in the process of being angled towards the Chaos Magic Tear. The panel in front of them flickered to life as electrical power flowed into it, technology and magic joining together and the cannon starting to glow ever-so-slightly.
She gawked in amazement when, mounted on the console itself, she could make out the tell-tale shapes of the Elements of Harmony themselves. They were embedded into the console in a star-shaped pattern, in their ancient, pearl-like forms instead of the necklaces the Bearers had worn.
“How am I looking, girls?” Codex asked, his voice coming from a radio panel on the console in front of them. Lotus snatched up a headset and hoofed one over to Celestia, too, letting it float across the distance in zero-gravity, only to be picked up by Celestia’s magic and lifted on to her own skull.
“Gimmie… er, six degrees towards ya.” Lotus replied. “‘Sides that, you’re basically spot on.”
“Good. You’re up, then, Celestia.”
Celestia operated on instinct. She’d only wielded the Elements twice in her life, though she supposed even that wasn’t entirely true given how many times she’d been through this same scenario. Just because she didn’t remember it did not mean she hadn’t done it, and it seemed as though muscle-memory had largely taken over her.
The Harmony Cannon flared to life. For a brief moment, the lonely little corner of space that Celestia, Lotus, and Codex had found themselves drifting was flooded in brilliant, wondrous light of every hue, as the magic of Harmony burst out from the barrel of the Harmony Cannon. It traveled, on and on, colliding with the Chaos Magic Tear…
…and sputtering out, fading away like the last traces of summer on a cool September night.
There was nothing more to do. Celestia and Lotus replaced their headsets, and without a word they began to make their way back to the airlock once again.
I̴͉̹͒V̸̮͘
Celestia and Lotus carried out three more firings over two days, sleeping only during the intervals spent waiting for the Harmony Cannon to charge. Four hours before their second firing. Nine before their third. And then, just as they were leaving the operational range of the cannon fifteen hours after first firing, they performed one last feeble attempt at closing the Tear.
Codex printed off the data and showed them the results of their efforts each time. Celestia somewhat wished that he didn’t… there was little consolation knowing that the result of three years of time back home had resulted in a net reduction of 1.2% of the Chaos Tear’s total diameter.
The fact that it was progress at all was… as encouraging to Lotus as it was discouraging. When she’d looked at the print-outs, she had scoffed. “Looks like we’re just good enough to justify havin’ to do this for another eighty years.”
At the end of the thirty-six or so hours of slowed spaceflight, they had all gathered in the bridge to fire the thrusters and begin the next leg of their orbital journey.
The bridge itself looked as though it had been intended to have been operated by a larger crew than the ship’s welder, physician and who was, in essence, a highly qualified specialist. Lotus was running two stations at once—monitoring the ship-wide structural integrity and ensuring their hardpoints were properly angled alongside an orbital graph projected onto an ancient flickering CRT. The display a corridor of rectangular indicators growing closer to them as the ship advanced along its orbit, the indicators themselves representing Twiley’s calculations on their orbital trajectory.
Codex was running the thrusters themselves. Celestia wanted to be useful, but she hardly comprehended the function of the bridge, let alone possesed enough knowledge of it to be more than an intrigued observer. As such, Codex had requested her assistance visually scanning their surroundings from a raised observation deck jutting out of the top of the bridge like a fishing trawler’s superstructure.
“Say goodbye to the Chaos Tear…” Codex murmured out, one hoof hovering over the thrust controls.
“Eat dirt and die, Chaos Tear,” Lotus chirped up from her stations, earning a little chuckle from Codex and Celestia both.
“Alright. Warming thrusters for burst number one,” Codex said. “Watch our fuel burn and lemme know if it dips outta nominal, new hire.”
“Y’got it, cap’.”
“Celly… when I say, you need to make sure we aren’t venting anything into space.We got beaten up pretty bad by that meteroite hit, so. If you see anything, let me know.”
“Understood.”
“Alright. Here goes nothing. Lotus, gimbal report?”
“Gimmie… er, four point five degrees starboard, Codex,” Lotus chirped. Codex tapped a few keys, and the hall of predicted directional indicators before her shifted. “Better. Orbit velocity approximately four thousand hooves per second. And falling. Not rapidly, but it is.”
“That’s the Tear trying to pull us in. I corrected...How’s our gimbal looking now, Lotus?”
“Lookin’ good to me.”
“Good. Then everypony hold on.”
Codex tapped a few keys on a pad next to him. The ship’s control were fairly simplistic for such an immense vessel, as its movement was more or less limited to forwards and minor pitch adjustments. A few directional keys for pitching and yawing, which Codex would program in sequence first before throwing a master switch to activate his selected sequence.
When he threw the master switch, the entire vessel began to shake and shudder and Celestia became aware of a sensation of movement that felt strangely subtle for how immense it must have surely been. A glance behind them, and she could see the blueish flames of the three thrusters firing in unison.
"Looking good, Codex!" Lotus chirped.
“How are we looking on your end, Celetia?”
“Peachy. No observable issues.”
“Alright. Velocity, Lotus?”
“Velocity now ten thousand hooves per second. Flying a little off center, ship’s yawing a little. One of the thrusters must be off.”
“Understood. Burn’s ending in three… two… done.” Codex glanced at Lotus again, wordlessly requesting his next course heading.
“One point five. Still starboard side.”
“Correcting. Second burn in three, two, one…”
For two more burns, Lotus and Codex continued their back and forth. Gone were the playful jabs and snide remarks the two were so fond of leveling at each-other. They were all business now, no room for ambiguity in their quickfire exchanges. Celestia wished she could have been more assistance, but she could not even think of where to begin contributing.
Maybe next loop.
On the final burn, they were moving well over 25,000 hooves per second. It didn’t feel like it to Celestia, she felt quite stationary, all things considered. It was strange to think that she was traveling something like three hundred times faster than she could ever recall traveling.
That had been the subject of discourse over the three’s celebratory meal of rice and beans. The fastest things they’d ever been in, back home in Equestria.
“Ever take the el train from Fillydelphia to Baltimare, Princess?” Codex had asked her. “Think that one cracks, like. Five hundred klicks per hour.”
“Hmm. Once.” Celestia nodded. “When they were hosting the Equestria Games. That would’ve been… 1002.”
“Wow. Old mare here,” Lotus said with a chuckle. “I was like, four, when those were going on.”
“Well, whippersnapper.” Celestia shot a playful glare at the bat pony across the table, lit by the dull burning of a single electrical light above them. The crew’s dining table was little more one lengthy table, intended for more ponies than were evidently still occupying it. “What’s the fastest your impudent flank has traveled?”
Lotus snort-laughed. “I, uh. Look, I don’t do well with speed.”
“As we saw on your space-walk.”
“Hey! Shut up, Codex!”
He stuck his tongue out. “Come and make me, new hire.”
“You’d buckin’ like that!” She rolled her eyes. “Uh… if I had to pick, and not counting the Dizzitron they used to prep us for this mission… one of them early ornithoper prototypes they were testing, in 1017.”
“Gods.” Celestia nearly facehoofed. “What a racket those things were.”
“Betcha they’ve come a long way since then,” Lotus replied. “You flew one of ‘em, right, Codex?”
“Yup. One of the high-altitude ‘glybrid’ models. With the switch-blade wings.”
“Daredevil. Hear that, Celly?” Lotus chirped. “This grouch used to be fun!”
Celestia chuckled. “You’ll have plenty of new craft to discover when we return, I suppose.”
A weary silence, mutually held. The three ponies resumed eating their dinner, and Celestia idly wondered why she had so much trouble keeping her bloody mouth shut. She’d thought it was optimism, but now she saw it would’ve been better if it’d been nothing at all.
“So…” Codex broke it softly after a few minutes. “Our next…point of interest, and something we’ll have to discuss… is the periapsis point between us and Equestria. The, er. Point of closest approach, between our orbit and theirs.”
“When we can communicate with them?” Celestia guessed.
Codex nodded. “That’s in, er. Usually it takes four months, from the Tear to that point.”
Celestia could sense the question in the air before Lotus actually said it.
“Do we have enough life support for four months?”
“A question for Twiley,” Codex replied, with a deep sigh. Rising from his seat, he trotted over to one of the communicator panels in the corner of the dining node, tapping a few buttons before lifting the receiver.
“I don’t know if we’re going to like the answer…” he murmured out, to Celestia and Lotus, before speaking into the receiver itself. “Twiley? Need you in the dining node. Holo array should be functional here.”
It shimmered for a moment, and Codex had to tune the old unit to get the image of Twilight Sparkle into focus, but soon enough the ship AI was projected as though in the room with the three of them.
“I’m… I’m sorry, you three…” she whispered out, the moment all three sets of eyes were on her. “I… was thinking how best to break it to you…”
“We’re not going to make it to periapsis, are we?” Codex sighed. “Wake up, survive long enough to close the Tear, and go under?”
“I... We’re already running into dangerous territory with what we’re running right now, and that’s… the bare essentials.”
Codex sighed deeply. Lotus gave a single, knowing nod. Both ponies… seemed annoyed, without being particularly offended or bothered. The cynical part of Celestia reminded her they had little reason to be. Anypony at home waiting for them would likely have been dead already. Celestia’s connection with another immortal was the only thing that made her different, now.
“What if… we go into stasis until peripalis?” Lotus offered, seeing the look of sheer hopelessness on Celestia’s face. “Wake up, have our chat, and go back under?”
“I… can’t risk that.” Twiley shook her digital head. “It’s not a priority of the mission.”
“It’s a priority to our sanity, Twiley,” Lotus interjected. “We’ve been up here for nearly a century. Give us a break.”
“I can…” Twiley sighed. “Okay. Loop hole. The reconstituter keeps a basic brain-scan from each loop as a backup. For considerably less power I can let that communicate with home for a brief period of time. It’d be... From Equestria’s end, it’d be like communicating without the video feed. They probably wouldn’t even notice. But I can only do one of you, and probably only a five minute conversation.”
Lotus and Codex shared a look with Celestia.
“Your call, Princess,” Codex said, bowing his head.
“Yeah. Literally.” Lotus confirmed. “What do you want to do, Celestia?
Celestia stared, for a long time. When she finally spoke, it was just to say one word.
“Why?”
Lotus blinked. She bit her lip, and glanced at Codex, as though begging her partner to ask for clarity she wanted more than he did, but hadn’t in her to ask herself.
“What do you mean, Princess?” Codex asked after several seconds of silence.
“I mean... Why? What’s the point?”
“Well... Don’t you... Don’t you miss home?” Lotus asked, tilting her head, seemingly genuinely at a loss. Across countless loops, she had seemingly never even encouraged the possibility that Celestia would deny the chance to talk with home.
“Yes. Which is why I would... Rather expedite the completion of our mission than bother wasting my time making myself miss it anymore.”
Lotus and Codex shared another glance. Both ponies looked like there was more that they wished to say, but neither could find it in them to offer anything.
They resumed eating their last suppers in silence. Somewhere, in the large, cavernous chamber, Twiley was already warming the reconstituters for the ship’s three passengers.
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This is definitely my favourite type of horror.
Wonderfully written, I hope you do well in the contest!
This is sad. I hope that the satellite is able to recoup more power and resources so that Twiley can afford to give Celly, Lotus, and Codex a little bit more life next life.
I can't decide if the slow decaying bleakness of the situation is the terror or if some horrific twist/revelation is going to pop up at any moment. I'll say Twiley is obviously unnerving, especially with her nonchalance for pony life, but what really strikes me as creepy is the overall crippled and seemingly forgotten state of what should be pony kind's most important mission. If they can build a station, they can build resupplies to said station. Heck, in the almost 100 years the mission has been going they should have been able to research wildly superior space technologies to upgrade said station instead of letting it decay into a barely shambling metallic corpse. It almost feels totally forgotten, but if the elements are there that seems hard to believe. The ship was also clearly built with a much larger crew in mind, all of which have been sacrificed, and now there's conveniently just 'no time' to let them communicate with home? Things decay, but the state of the ship feels much much older than ~80 years. Celestia's "pod" also feels too... organic? I can't help but wonder how long they've really been out in the black, how far they've strayed from their original mission, and if there's even anyone back home waiting for them to complete it. Hyped for more!
interesting!
definitely underscores Celestia’s earlier comments on the youth of these crewmembers. considering that this is a mission of utmost importance and weight, this really adds to the mystery of the whole thing!
love my Princess
ooh, cloning?
augh, love this, and solves the mystery above. also, given Celestia’s immortality and long reign, doesn’t this make Lotus and Codex’s attitudes a difference in degree, rather than kind, as the other mortal ponies that lived their lives and died and kept Equestria running?
much like she carefully selected the future bearers of the Elements of Harmony, perhaps? really makes you think
and oof, you could really feel this in every description in the story so far!
oof. truly giving their lives for Equestria!
oh Celestia, little do you know the power of AI!
and oof, this makes me wonder if that estimate of 80 years is itself accurate…
and augh. sometimes you can’t beat the cold equations
and augh! way to make me feel the inevitable weight of time, mare!
says everything without needing to say more. really makes you think about the continuity of identity and its meaning
about what i expected, given everything so far. really taking to its natural conclusion the transformation of the Elements from the civilization-defining artifacts the show centered around to the source of villain-zapping rainbow beams.
and oof. just enough progress to make it seem like continuing to do this and suffering through the growing decay is the right course, and just too little to make it seem anything other than hopeless and horrifying. an excellent balance to strike
should i love that this is what they use instead of “feet” or hate that they don’t use the Pony Metric System? i am so torn you have no idea
hell yeah, love the absolutely inexplicable pony version of the American mid-Atlantic
burn!
and, oof! looks like this is the first real break that Celestia has had with her past selves. and there’s still the reveal that awaits on the other side of the Science Tape that could very well recontextualize everything…
The earth spins around the sun at 97513 feet per second, assuming that hooves per second and feet per second are the same value then celestia is moving about about 4x slower than she would on earth/equis.