🅿🅾🅽🅸🅴🆂 🅸🅽 🆂🅿🅰🅲🅴❢ With Cool Jazz Soundtrack Courtesy of Kamasi Washington
Author's Note
👨‍🚀 S P A C E . J A Z Z . S O U N D . T R A C K 👩‍🚀
S P A C E T R U C K I N
Space! The Final Frontier! The last bastion of the unknown! The Great Beyond! The--
Ahem
Sorry, sorry. I just get so excited talking about space.
Anyway, space. If I can wax eloquent:
One of the best parts of space, or one of the worst actually, is that it’s a kind of zero-sum game. That’s not the right phrase. It’s… Right, so you only have what you bring with you. Keep that in mind. That’s rule one. What you have is all you have. You got the air, the food, the ponies, all that. You can’t get air from outside. You can’t grow oats in the void. You might be able to find ponies out here but honestly I’m not sure anyone wants to.
But once you get over all that, Space is pretty fun! You go zoom! Zoom through space! You float around and stuff! Yeah… space.
Say, perhaps you too could visit space. We have the technology. Would you like to visit space?
You step into the rocket ship. It is not very large. They say that the first rockets had to launch their way out of the atmosphere, but now we simply teleport our ships out to the stars. You step into the rocket ship and buckle up.
You know, I’m a little sad that you don’t have the anticipation of atmospheric launch. The rattling, the clanging. The smell of ozone and the heat all around you. What must it have been like, to sit encased in a vessel of fire? What kind of thoughts spring to life at the heart of a rising star?
Heh. Sorry.
Space itself is… mixed? On one hand, looking down on the planet below is breathtaking. Literally, I forgot how to breathe for a beat. It was just too much. It’s vast. Except it isn’t, not really. After a few seconds your eyes slowly notice the horizon. They find the fuzzy liminal space between the sky and the Heavens. You stray just a tick up, and that’s when it hits you.
Space is so empty.
Space is nothing. Space is the absence of life, of light, of sound, of air, of gravity, of the things that give our lives some kind of frame. It’s like a pony with no skeleton. Friggin’ weird, right? That’s what space is. You can see planets below you, but where you are there’s just nothing. Everywhere is defined by Somewhere Else.
So is travelling up here. You’re always headed somewhere. Back home, you can just set up in a cafe and sip at something and watch. You can lay in the grass (or eat it, if you’re that kind of pony). You can just Be. In space you can’t just Be.
Two hours to the Moon, ten minutes to get clearance and dock at Lunar City. Two hours for loading and fueling. Everything happens in minute, discrete pockets of time. You don’t stay still in space. You’re always going, and you’re always aware of yourself as less a fixed point and more of a ray, just trucking on into the dark. Space Trucking!
Your craft has finished fueling, and so, without hesitation, you reboard the vessel. Oh, we forgot to tell you the name of the vessel. It’s the SuperWulf. What a magnificant name for a spaceship. The SuperWulf switches back over to rockets for this launch off the moon, since it is more fuel efficient than energy intensive teleportation. Still, this is little fire compared to the mighty launches of old. You look out the window and watch the moon peel away, and the craft flies on to its next destination: Asteroid Falabella.
Over the next few days, time passes slowly. You explore the craft, familiarize yourself with every nook and cranny. You feel trapped, as if on an island. And really, is a ship not a mechanized island perpetually in motion?
No mare’s an island, indeed.
I say days, but truthfully there are no days in the dark. We try to fake them. We set the lights in cycles, to dim and brighten. We try to keep schedules vaguely like at home, with a “Day” shift and a “night” shift. We talk about today and tomorrow.
But that’s just a little bit of illusion, magic-free. You only have what you bring, within reason, and wherever ponies go in the stars we take home with us. We map it and ourselves with it onto the emptiness. How could we not bring some of home’s gravity with us? We would fall apart without it. Not our bodies, yes, but it might as well be our bodies.
But alas, time is finite, and so is the journey, and eventually, a speck of dust on the horizon solidifies into a rock. A rather large rock. Welcome, my friend, to astroid Falabella.
Falabella is a mining astroid. Fifteen miles long, seven miles wide, four miles deep. Potato shaped. 50,000 ponies call this place home. And now you are a tourist among them.
What is mined on Falabella? Why, Silicate of course. How are us ponies to have a technological revolution when our own planet is so silicon-poor? We must import it from elsewhere. And this is elsewhere! Yes, Falabella is the outpost fueling the future!
Okay, so, bear with me. I slept through a lot of school, but I remember my old ponish. Okay, I remember like, a couple of sentences, but… Nos numerus sumus et fruges consumere nati. We’re numbers, born to consume resources. Morbid, ain’t it? But it’s kinda true.
You walk around in these halls, and you see the docks and refineries, the hab blocks and the warehouses, and you’ll have that sentence stuck in your head too.
We’re small. We’re so very small. We’re ants and we think the antbeds we make are so vast and all-encompassing, and then we go ove the top and the sun up there is blinding and the grass is taller than ten of us piled on top of each other, and sometimes a massive hoof comes down and devestates entire platoons of us by the random, arbitrary whims of… I was going to say fate, but fate is dumb as hell. Fate isn’t real. Fate’s just like the day/night cycle on a space ship or birthday parties or the games we make up as foals. It’s not real.
Celestia, I’m sorry. I know I’m rambling. And you’ve been so patient.
Did you draw? When you were young, I mean. A box of crayons and paper, and you would get to work. Maybe you’re like me and you sucked at coloring in the lines. You hated lines. Lines were dumb. You wanted to draw your own lines. So you did that on the back of the coloring sheet. You drew and you drew and you made your own picture and it was awesome, and there were dragons, and you were proud of it. You would hold it up triumphantly like you’d won some kind of medal and you’d say, hey, look at this! Look at this cool shit! Okay, you wouldn’t say it like that, but you know. It meant something, right? It was a picture of something, right?
No it wasn’t. It was a bunch of assorted lines. The lines are real. The crayon residue is real. The picture is not Real.
Gah. Sorry. I’m not sure why I even need to tell you this. But I can’t help but think about it, and I know you don’t, and I want someone to think about it. Somepony who isn’t me.
We’re both spacers. You, me. Everybody here is or was one. We can talk about every run we’ve done, and when I say day shift is always So Loud and night shift is always So Depressing, you’ll laugh. Cause we get it. We know the Game. But, like, do we?
Yeah, I want more. Look, do I look like the kind of ungulate who turns down synthvodka?
God I hate this shit. It’s like, they worked so hard to keep only the worst parts of actual vodka.
I guess what I mean is that sometimes it feels like nobody gets it, and nobody is else is freaked out by all this. But, uh. Right. I was telling you about the asteroid. What happened and shit.
So This asteroid, inhabited by the brave ponies who make the silicate flow, it has artificial gravity and its own atmosphere, so you can trot outside and see a hundred million stars almost completely unobscured. It’s amazing. Beautiful. Speaking of beautiful, guess who you run into at the local Falabella supermarket.
“Hey, I recognize you from the brochure,” you say, energized. Aren’t you Princess Snicker Doodle?”
She turns, a svelte tan pegasus mare with a clearly fake alicorn strapped to her head. Despite her name, her cutie mark is indeed a blossoming dandelion plant, just like the guidebook (in the “Notable residents” section) said “Uh, yes, I am. And you are?”
“Oh, I am but a lowly tourist,” you reply meekly. “But my name is Tannhauser Gate, and it is an honor to meet you.
“A tourist, eh? We don’t get too many tourists this far out. What brings you to our lovely asteroid?”
So, you’re not great with the People. Everypony sort of knows it. I mean, I assume they do. You just try your best.
She smiles at you. It was really endearing, I have to say. “I’m apprenticing! I came out here to learn until I can sign on to haul cargo on my own. It’s been pretty great. I haven’t taken anything Homebound, but I’ve done some short runs around the asteroids!”
You smile back at her. “Sounds fun. Also sounds like its a lot of work. Hauling can be a lonely job.”
“I know. But… well, it’s only lonely cause ponies don’t see it the right way.”
You arch an eyebrow at her. Condescending, you know. You know that now. You didn’t mean it like that. “Oh? And what way should they? I’m even more curious now.”
“Everybody needs stuff!” she says, almost bouncing. “They all need things like water, and new parts, and foodstuffs, and batteries, and--whoops sorry, hehe. But I’m gonna be the one that brings it. I’ve always wanted to be the one that drops out of the sky with exactly what everyone needs to be safe and happy. I grew up in Baltimare, so I didn’t know much about what its like to live out here. But, you know, I always had this idea that space must be really lonely, right? And it must suck to have to rely on other ponies to show up with what you need just to keep whatever colony or station you’re on working. But then I realized that isn’t lonely at all. It’s the opposite of lonely. It’s like everyone working together--ponies and griffs and zebras and even dragons--and you have to rely on each other, and you don’t have the option to just, hide in your little apartment on the docks and isn’t that awesome and--”
She rambles. You listen. Honestly, at the time you were trying not to have your eyes glaze over too much. But… you can see it. You guess you can. Everything that rises off the ground converges here in the Heavens. We all need each other, one way or another. You get it. You don’t feel it, but you get it.
So here we are, not lost, but found in space. And after all this rambling, you feel you sort of know this weird, not-so-lonely mare. Even though you’ve only known her a few minutes in the frozen foods aisle of a supermarket on an asteroid. And you may never see her again, but your life is that much richer for having met her here. Up here, we are all pinpricks of light bouncing off each other. Up here, we are all just ponies in space.
