The Black Between the Stars

by Rambling Writer

4 - A Dark Disquiet

It only took Applejack a few seconds to return to the locked door. Just to be sure, she looked over the walls for a plaque and found nothing. Figured. Down here, everypony probably already knew everypony and they didn’t need plaques. After a bit of fumbling, Applejack pulled out the dead pony’s card and, holding her breath, swiped it through the reader.

Bee-beep. A small green light winked on and the door slid open. The space beyond was as dark as could be, but it felt like a room. “Thanks,” Applejack whispered to the dead pony as she pocketed the card again.

She found the lightswitch after a moment’s blind flailing. It must’ve been a janitor’s office; it was drab, utilitarian, and stuffed with all sorts of neatly-arranged cleaning supplies and toolboxes, even a reployer. Most of it wasn’t of any use to her, but a computer sat on a desk in the far corner. She ran over, knocking down the trash can next to the door in her rush.

There was a lone cup of coffee on the desk, still half-full. Applejack grabbed it and took a big swallow. It was lukewarm and far too bitter, but it was better than nothing. She tapped at the computer’s touchscreen and, to her glee, found that it still had power. She logged on, gazed upon her desktop, and-

-didn’t know what to do next.

Applejack stared blankly at the screen. What was she expecting to do? Sit down, crack her fetlocks, and COMPUTER her way to victory? She didn’t know a dang thing about computers beyond the surface level. She only had her own very limited functionality, little more than form-submission programs, the station’s personnel tracker, and a few games she never touched. Nothing that could help her with- whatever was down here with her.

Something maybe skittered behind her. Applejack spun around; her flashlight illuminated the empty doorframe and two knocked-over trash cans. She waited. Silence and stillness. It didn’t take much thinking for her to close and lock the door.

At least she had a place to hole up. There was only one way in or out. She still didn’t know where her memory had gone; might as well stay here until she did, or at least found where it stopped. Applejack closed her eyes and thought.

---

Hey, sis!

Sorry I couldn’t schedule a video call, but things are pretty crazy down here. Twittermite Energy just suddenly took off and I spend all day running around, even with Dynamo’s help. It’s wild! We’ll probably have to expand. Anyway, I’m doing fine. Sorry I don’t have more to say, but it’d all be boring business stuff. Don’t have enough free time to be interesting at the moment.

I don’t know if you heard, but Sugar Belle’s finally pregnant! When Big Mac heard the news, we couldn’t get him to shut up, he was so happy. They don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl yet and they haven’t settled on a name. Feel free to suggest any. It’s gonna be weird, being an aunt. How did you feel when I was born? Can you even remember? You might’ve been too young for that.

You’re probably waiting to hear some bad news about Granny Smith after being gone for so long, but nope! She’s as spry as ever. (I know that’s not very, but still.) I think she’s immortal. She loved the last strain of apple seeds you sent, says they feel nice, and the trees have been growing nice and strong for their age. She’s been out in the orchards a lot whenever I visit; I bet she wants some arcanobionic legs so she can get back to just a little bit of proper apple-bucking (or as close to proper as you can get with arcanobionics).

Sweet Apple Acres is (are?) still talking about the harvesters with Filthy Rich. They’ve been working alright, but he went back on the contract and wants more money than we have at the moment, and the trees in the new fields won’t be apple-ready for two or three more years. Sugar Belle’s been haggling with him and I think she’s wearing him down to delay our payments for a while. I wish we could just get rid of them, but even Granny knows that then we wouldn’t be able to compete with other, larger orchards. Dad’d probably say something like “quality over quantity”, but quantity has a quality of its own, right? We’ll just have to see how it all turns out.

We all miss you. Hope you get home safe.

Apple Bloom

Applejack scrolled back up through the TranScribe on her uniform’s fetlock and squinted at the penultimate paragraph in the computer’s tiny screen. Harvesters, harvesters, harvesters. Couldn’t they just get back to good old-fashioned bucking? Of course not. They couldn’t collect enough apples to keep up with the competition, which would mean they couldn’t sell enough apples to manage the upkeep of the farm. And once apple-bucking, of all things, was gone, what else would inevitably follow? In a decade, her own home would be unrecognizable.

She flicked off her TranScribe and sighed. “Can I get a beer?” she asked the bartender. Golden Oaks managed to have a real bartender for the Yellow Tulip, apparently because it helped morale more than just having a robot. And Applejack needed some morale at the moment.

“Any kind in particular?” asked Joe. “Or just cheap and strong?”

“Cheap an’ strong, more o’ the strong.”

A few seconds and one exchange of cryptobits later, Applejack had a glass of some kind of beer sitting in front of her. She took a long swig and nearly gagged. Beer was the worst part of trying to get drunk, tasting like burning chemical runoff. But she had to struggle through it, and so she did.

She heard the door open behind her; several ponies gasped and the volume level in the lounge dropped a few decibels. Applejack just kept staring at her cup. Princess Twilight sat down next to her and chirped, “There you are, Applejack! I’ve been looking for you everywhere! How’re things up here? They’d be great for me, since this is a space station, but I’m not you, so I don’t know!”

“Does anypony really like beer?” Applejack mumbled. “Or does everyone just give into peer pressure?”

“I have no idea, but if the latter, it’s a prime example of the Abilene paradox!” Twilight smiled and flared her wings, a sure sign she was going to launch into some psychological explanation, then said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothin’,” grunted Applejack. “I don’t wanna bother you.”

“You clamming up like that bothers me.”

“…Homesick. And the home I’m sick for ain’t the home I’m goin’ back to.” Applejack sipped at her beer, waiting for drunkenness to overtake her. “You know how things’ve been goin’ down on the farm, right?”

“More automation than you’re comfortable with, yeah.”

“Well, I… When y’offered me the job, the only reason I said ‘yes’ was ’cause I wanted to work with my own four hooves. Real farmin’. I jus’… I wanted t’get away from the fancy-schmancy machines we were usin’. Now I want t’feel some real earth ’neath my hooves for the first time in years, but the farm’s worse’n before and I don’t know if’n I wanna see it again.”

“Even though it’s your home,” Twilight said for her.

“Yeah.” Another sip. “It’s… It’s too easy. Farmin’ ain’t supposed to be oilin’ motors an’ chargin’ batteries, for land sakes! It’s backbreakin’ an’ hard and work!”

“I know what you mean,” said Twilight. “Search engines take all the fun out of research.”

Applejack snorted. “Really? Findin’ exactly what y’need in an instant’s borin’?”

“Yes! It’s just point A to B, with no points C, D, or E. It’s so… unchallenging. And you don’t even get to learn anything interesting on the way! My brother lost an eye in the Royal Guard, did I ever tell you that? And he got it healed, but I was wondering if losing one eye would really affect depth perception all that much, so I started looking through every scientific journal or book I could find about depth perception. And along the way, I learned that there are some species of spider that use depth of field to judge distance.”

“Depth of…?”

“Field. It’s how much something blurs when it’s not in focus.” Twilight grinned. “Isn’t that neat? We all share the same general sense of vision, but they use it in a completely different way! And if I’d used Yahoof to look it up, I never would’ve found it! I could’ve just typed in something like ‘monocular depth perception’ and found the answers I was looking for and nothing more. Can you imagine?”

Maybe. Kinda. Not really. Yes. It was close enough. Even at her most inept, Twilight still tried. But- “That’s all fine an’ dandy, but I ran from my problems. Comin’ up here when y’asked, jus’ to work with my hooves?” Applejack laughed bitterly. “An’ then I got me a fine case o’ astrophobia or whatever. On a good day, I do alright, but I ain’t supposed t’be here.”

“Maybe not. But you are here. And personally?” Twilight whispered in Applejack’s ear. “I think you’re doing a pretty good job. I know change isn’t easy — I didn’t even have these four years ago!-” She flexed her wings. “-but sometimes, accepting it’s all you can do.”

Applejack stared at her beer. She knew that. She’d known that for a while. But she’d kept on being presented with options to avoid mechanical harvesters if she got just a little more extreme. This fertilizer for bigger apples. Those irrigation techniques for faster watering. And now, hey, your own personal garden above the sky. The change she had to accept now was bigger than ever, and who knew what kind of shock she’d feel? She’d kept all this secret. Even her own family didn’t know. But if she was going to talk about this with Twilight, she needed to tell her everything.

In private, of course. “Can we, uh, go to one o’ the personal rooms in Habitation?” Applejack asked. “I… got somethin’ I need t’get off my chest.”

“Of course.” Twilight glanced at Applejack’s glass. “You gonna finish that first?”

“Might as well.” Applejack downed the last of her beer and pushed away from the bar.

---

And that was the last thing Applejack remembered. The rest of her memory, up to the trash compactor, had been cleanly scooped away.

Huh. Why there? It was too much of a coincidence, too clean, for her memory to cut out right before she and Twilight were about to have some sort of heart-to-heart. It meant something. It had to. But what?

As she stared into the stark white of the computer screen, Applejack reflected that, meaning something or not, she was no closer to learning what the hay was going on. Trying to remember had just made things more confusing and she still didn’t know where, exactly, she was in Golden Oaks. She didn’t even know where anypony else wa-

Ding.

Given the size of Golden Oaks, CelesTech workers wore tracking anklets to make it easier to find employees on board. Why bother spending half a day wandering through the station, looking for So-and-So, when you could immediately be pointed towards the Hardware module? It’d saved Applejack countless hours during work. It even helped the medical workers, monitoring employees’ overall health. She idly went to the crew system, finding the locations of her coworkers. It was hardly perfect, but it was a start.

Then she saw the results.

Every single one of the other arboretum workers was dead.

Applejack — Gardener and engineer — Healthy — Neurothaumatics Maintenance
Berry Punch — Gardener — Dead — Arboretum
Blossomforth — Gardener — Dead — Arboretum
Caramel — Gardener — Dead — Central Executive
Catskill — Security — Dead — Server Storage
Cherry Berry — Botanist — Dead — Shuttlebay

No. No. This… This couldn’t be happening. It just- couldn’t. Applejack scrolled down a line.

Daisy — Gardener — Dead — Life Support

Oh, Celestia, no.

Golden Harvest — Botanist — Dead — Arboretum

This was a dream. A bad dream. She’d wake up at any moment.

Lily Valley — Gardener — Dead — Medical Bay

Yet the same statuses kept flashing past her.

Roseluck — Gardener — Dead — Lobby

Tears filled her eyes and Applejack brought a hoof to her mouth in horror.

Swan Dive — Security — Dead — Reactor

She was at the bottom of the list, yet she kept mechanically punching the down arrow, as if that would conjure ponies from the aether who were still alive. Applejack felt numb. She’d spent years working with all of those ponies, and now…

“Easy, girl, easy,” she whispered to herself. She took a long, shuddering breath. “You can… You can… This ain’t…”

She couldn’t even convince herself. Applejack hung her head in her hooves and sobbed, tears trickling down her legs. She couldn’t do this. She wasn’t a soldier. She wasn’t some action heroine. She was a farmer, stranded on a dead space station in the empty void, thousands of miles from literally anything. She didn’t know what was going on and she had a massive hole in her memory. She had no plan and clue of what to even think of doing.

Granny Smith had long gone on about the Apple family determination. They could get through anything, she said. In fact, the current Apple family only existed because Bright Mac had pushed through the pigheadedness of all the previous Apples. They had weathered all the paradigm shifts of the past hundred years and would weather all the ones of the hundred years to come. No matter what the world threw at them, an Apple would stand as tall and strong as one of their trees.

Maybe back on Equus, Applejack thought. On the farm, where she belonged. But not now. She didn’t even know what had gone wrong.

She was alone and she was going to die up here.

Desperate for some small shred of comfort, her chest heaving, Applejack grabbed the coffee cup and tilted it back for another drink, but it was empty. She sighed and squinted at the inside, the last forlorn little hope that there might be something. But, no, there was nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

She frowned and wiped away her tears. The cup was so clean, it was like there’d never been any coffee inside at all. She sniffed. No smell.

She looked at the desk again. There was another mug sitting there. Even though there’d only been one mug when she sat down. Applejack looked at the mug in her hoof. So what was-?

With an ear-splitting screech, the mug exploded in a buckball-sized blob of black goo and whipped itself tightly around Applejack’s body.

Comments

[Mix-up]

well this was a hard turn of events compared to the last chapter that AJ was just talking to her coworkers not so long ago and then boom.

[Level Dasher]

Ooooooooooh shi-eeeeeeeeeeeeet...

[Crack-Fic Casey]

Hm... Is Applejack secretly the monster?

[Blaster M]

And now the story begins

[FridayPie]

This mimic is less skilled... one that caused breach had emulated coffee as well

[Mocha Star]

Ooo. I'm liking this story a lot already.