Gravity is agency.
Gravity is what makes us human.
Twilight knows this. She feels it deep in her bones. It is an immutable truth. Stray too far from the gravity well, and your start to just… go. The part of you that’s you just stops, in bits and pieces, like a city going to sleep. The lights flicker and go off.
Like this research station, torn to shreds by a joyriding pilot and her illegal mech ship-self.
Twilight moves her ship-self, the Mare Crisium, through the scattered debris cloud surrounding the wreckage. The young pilot--she wasn’t sure which one, for though she knew all of the young pilots in space, Celestial Mechanics was not exactly on speaking terms with her own masters--had caused a lot of physical havoc as she escaped her employers. She reached out and pushed a spinning section of what had once been a Hab ring out of the way of her flight, and scowled. Sloppy. Reckless. Inefficient. Still didn’t narrow her list of possible suspects much.
God, who was even with Celestial Mechanics, anyway? If Celestia would just let her whole Mysterious Iron Lady shit go for five minutes, maybe Twilight wouldn’t be sifting through other people’s shitty garbage trying to pick up the trail of a long-gone prototype.
And it was long gone, that much was obvious now. She’d hoped to catch it still lingering, possibly even fighting some other Mechanics ship-selves, but reality was never as convenient as that.
She lands on the intact outer armor of the Celestial Mechanics research station, the one that had been a Memorial Foundation research station up until, oh, yesterday. Really wild how much breaking a carefully planned out treaty against mech development and then not keeping one bored twentyish-year-old woman under control changes things.
The Mare Crisium’s tidal reactors swell, and light bleeds through the wound on its chest that would never, ever close. The station’s armor, designed to resist the hard light weapons of the Cold War, trembles before Memorial Foundation’s ace pilot.
Twilight has to do all the math in her head. Mare Crisium, like herself, is out of time and out of place. They’re both prototypes that never got around to being mothballed. There’s no direct link, and there’s no reality shifting bullshit inside her head. She can’t bend the narrative, and she can’t bend space with her thought. So she does all the math in her head, and the tidal push--weak as hers should be--is enough. She points her long rifle down between her mech’s legs and fires at the weakened point, burning through it.
Again. Again. She is deliberate. She has been since she was a small girl doing her homework in a sunbeam in Celestia’s Canterlot office. Precision is air, air is life, life is gravity.
She has to be. She breaks through the bulkhead and into the vastness inside, the mech-hanger.
And something happens. Twilight feels like a car has rolled over on her chest or like someone has dropped a dozen weights on her stomach from a height. She forgets to carry the one. The constant streams of numbers and figures and force diagrams sputter.
And somewhere she feels it too, the moment when her own tidal forces touch Twilight’s inside the facility.
There is no point beyond this in which Twilight could have hid the truth from herself. She knows who is creating this pressure in her gut, in her heart, in her head. She knows that only one woman in the galaxy can bring to bear the will that would break the stars and make playthings of their bones.
So when her ship-self’s sensor readouts alert her that Rarity’s massive ship-self has emerged from the shadow of Jupiter’s gravity well, she pays them no mind because she already knows.
She’s going to peel this station’s skin apart like an orange for the sweetness inside. Her tidal energies reach out kilometers at a time, and the station shakes around Twilight. The discarded prototypes that rest in the darkness shake also, all around her. The observation deck from which the whole hanger can be seen, which comes down on a single pillar from the bulkhead, begins to shake and sway.
Twilight reboots her battle-sense by brute force. The calculations continue. Her hands tighten around the controls and lurches her ship-self out of the open. Rarity will be on her before she can clear the wreckage, and as long as she’s in the open, she’ll be forever on other’s timetables. So she finds shelter behind a support column, swimming through the shattered glass of its broken turbolifts.
The long rifle comes up, its barrel touching Mare Crisium’s anubis-like head. Wait. Breathe. Wait for her to come, and then react. Twilight prefers to be proactive, but in a pinch merely being correct will do.
So comes Krun Macula, the mother of stars, rending the bulkheads like the firmament at rapture.
There is a short silence.
And then there is a very different kind of silence. The one where you talk, but not with a voice. This silence was the one that separates older generations of pilots from the strange newer generations, and the one that had separated her from Rarity.
Not that it stopped Rarity for a heartbeat. Nothing seemed to be able to do that. She spoke without words or mouths or hands, mind to mind.
“Well? Aren’t you going to say something, dear?” Twilight can feel her smiling. “The ability to render you utterly speechless has long been something I’ve coveted.”
Twilight, who of course watches her filling the gap and blotting out the stars, says nothing. Her cameras, tiny eyes on stalks originating in the plastic-like carapace of her ship-self, just watch.
But Rarity compels. No one can just ignore her. No one can leave her questions unanswered. Twilight tries to remember how it felt, doing this.
“It suits you.”
Rarity--or her ship self--is massive. It is not merely impressive. It defies logic just as it defies gravity and the conventions of space. It is not merely perspective that makes Rarity’s Krun Macula seem to blot out the stars--she’s bending space itself to her will, filling all of the heavens around with more of herself.
Twilight twists her mouth into a grimace. She takes a deep breath, lets it go. Her hands have not left the controls, and yet she feels frozen in place. Rarity’s mech switches on its lights and combs through the hanger. But Twilight’s cameras are so small, so hard to see, and her ship-self is hidden well.
“What did you want me to say?” she asks. “That I’m sorry? I told you the day I left that I would regretted betraying you and everyone else in Cradle’s Graces. That hasn’t changed. I told you I always would.”
Rarity tsks, and it echoes in her mind. The lights sweep over her pillar, but nothing happens.
“Now, now. None of that. You seem to be laboring under the impression that I’m mad at you, darling. That simply won’t do.”
Twilight continues to grimace. She grimaces an awful lot, these days.
“I wouldn’t be mad at you for, oh, not having enough faith in me or in Cradle’s Graces, or in all of our friends and pilots and the colonists and what have you, or for giving up on the dream of a new home for humanity in space. I’m just mad at you for not having faith in yourself, really--and of course for leaving me even more work to do!”
She hummed. It was such a sweet song. Her voice was a bit like gravity. It pulled you in, filled the emptiness.
“Oops,” she continued. The lights stopped roaming and shut off. “I guess I am a bit upset, but not really mad.”
“Not mad. Just disappointed. Do I understand?” Twilight says.
“Always looking for clarity.”
“Without it, we die. Clarity is certainty, certainty is gravity. Gravity is agency--”
“And we are that, what stars are made of.”
“Not how it goes.”
Rarity simply hums. Her lights continue to plumb the darkness in search of Twilight’s lone mech, though that’s probably mostly to stall for time.
Twilight has heard of Krun Macula, but not seen it. Everyone’s heard about it. Or, rather, everyone in space has heard rumors based on rumors, more than likely themselves based on deliberate lies and misinformation by Cradle’s Graces. The grungy streets of Mons and the neon-bathed wall-cities of the Mares echo with tales of a machine built to be a God. It’s hiding somewhere on Pluto, they say, still being tinkered with and perfected. The rebels, the Cradle folks, they’re putting it together out of the parts from a dozen ruined colonies, and stealing everything they can. Without the bonds of Earth to keep them down, they’ve dreamed twisted and wild dreams, and they’ve channeled all of that into a single creation.
Armaments? Capabilities? Operational range? Official Memorial Foundation reports are as helpful as street rumors. No one has seen it in action. She is the first.
It’s a variable, and more than that, it’s an absolute unknown. She hates it. She hates that feeling of not knowing more than anything in the universe and she wishes that it was physical. She’d give herself away and die if she could strangle the life out of the unknown.
“I’m going to destroy this station,” Rarity said after a moment. “Sooner or later, with or without you inside, I’m going to tear it to pieces. It was wrong of Celestial Mechanics to make it. The station, I mean. I haven’t seen the ship-self that was stolen. I’m sure it’s lovely. But I don’t like the idea of going back on one’s word.”
“You’re not going to get me to talk to you more by jabbing at my conscience,” Twilight says.
“And yet, there you are, talking.”
The lights stop moving.
Twilight, her face feeling hot, says nothing in as pointed a manner as she can. Rarity does not continue her search. There’s no movement at all within the cavernous installation.
It’s a stalemate, but an artificial one. Rarity either has the capability to end the stand-off at will or she doesn’t, but Twilight certainly doesn’t. The Mare Crisium is at her best at a distance, where Twilight can calculate the arc of gravity’s pull on each perfect sniper round. Up close, all of her options are just bridges to an inevitable swift retreat. Her ship-self's combat knife, big as the old world tanks, is just a way to buy time and space.
So why doesn’t she move?
“Spite doesn’t become you,” Rarity thinks at her, breaking the silence.
Twilight can’t decide if she hates having other thoughts touch her own or not. She can’t tell if the presence, the certainty of other minds is the one kind of certainty that she hates or not.
“It’s not spite. I don’t have time for conversations about nothing.”
She can feel Rarity’s hurt. Because she wants you to, Twilight thinks to herself, and only to herself. Emotions--mostly other’s emotions--distress her. They feel heavy and foreign and eventually frightening. So she attaches motive to emoting. If it’s on the outside, it’s there as a tactic. It’s all part of her normal spiel. Lure her in, lure her in, and when Twilight is invested the cat springs her trap.
It’s happened before.
“I don’t think emotional attachments are traps. That’s beyond cynical, Twilight.”
“Stay out of my mind.” Twilight scrambles to reconstruct her wards. She scoots back in her seat, and movement frees more moisture on her face to drip down onto her flightsuit. “I hate that. I hate it. You know I hate it. God.”
“I’ve done nothing. You just started shouting about it,” Rarity shot back, irritation palpable over the connection. “I’m less constructing a trap and more… Well, isn’t it obvious?”
“What’s obvious is that you haven’t changed at all.”
Rarity doesn’t answer right away. The lights turn back on, but their search seems listless.
“I wonder if you have, Twilight,” Rarity thinks. It feels… glum? Soft. Somber. Twilight cycles through words trying to categorize it but stops. She can’t get caught. She has to keep herself above involvement. She has to see every moving part.
That’s how this all began, after all.
She’d left because Cradle’s Graces dreams of mankind among the stars, forever and forever, were beyond foolish. They were baseless. “We can’t live without gravity,” or so Celestia had said to her years ago. Twilight had believed in the dream, believed it more fervently than anyone else had. Papers published anonymously on Earth and Luna before Cradle’s Graces had even been truly born, when it had just been a gleam in their collective eyes. It had been Twilight who had built the mantra that Rarity had repeated as she harnessed her powers beyond the pale in the testing rooms of the Pilot’s Academy, saying to herself--Correct action. Correct thought. Correct belief.--If Rarity believed it, she never said, but Twilight did.
And the Dream was just that, a dream. Too many moving parts. Too much uncertainty. Too much to lose, and nothing to go on.
“I wonder,” Rarity thinks at her, even softer, “I wonder if you changed at all. Or perhaps, you have always been this way. I wonder, I wonder. I’m torn. You’ve nowhere to go, and I’ve no one to talk to. Well, not no one. Starlight says hello, by the way.”
“I’m sure you’ll tell them hello for me,” Twilight both said and thought.
Images, uncalled for but urgent: Starlight giving her an oversized grin from her ship-self’s open hatch. Climbing into the great pods for simulations, for games, for fun. Running in the yard and racing, always racing. Starlight, taking notes as Twilight sketched out the workings of the tidal reactor on a holoboard for her, voice rising and falling in steady rhythm.
“Don’t do that.”
Rarity in a wheelchair, her body frail from the last of her many batteries of surgery and augmentation. The perfect and promised child, the last-firstborn of Creation, the pinnacle of humanity’s war against an Existential Threat, the ghost-reflection of ourselves across the boundaries of the gravity well. Twilight pushing her along, humming in studied cadance a marching song of old Earth, one-two-three-four, a jaunty tune for a miserable girl who only wants to run unhindered for once by walls and weak legs.
Twilight’s cockpit was like a sauna. Her instruments warned her that Rarity’s tidal reactor and its ungodly gravity well were beginning to push her own gravity back. More than that, her own personal gravity well was starting to collapse in on itself, to self-cannibalize. That didn’t make sense. Nothing about it made sense. Rarity and Krun Macula broke everything. To be in proximity was to be drawn into a world which was mindless absurdity that made a hideous, beautiful sense.
Twilight firmly throws herself forward, straining the harness that keeps her in place, and then flings her head back against the chair. She shakes herself until she sees tiny specks of light.
But Rarity was out of her head.
“Don’t you dare,” she hisses. Not because she’s furious but because she’s terrified of being drawn in again. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you taunt me with what I can’t have.”
“I could have taught you at any moment, you stubborn girl,” Rarity retorted.
Twilight, eyes unclouded, looked back down at her controls. The strange readings were gone--the parts about sense and beauty--and behind the delusions she saw again the raw numbers. The bit about Krun Macula’s presence bending space to the extent that it would render her inoperable wasn’t exaggeration. She’d be paralyzed and then drawn in if she delayed even a moment more.
The station is in bad shape. The hole she entered through has been twisted by all of the shuddering motion, but it’s still large enough that she could conceivably leave through it. Krun Macula may be large, but is it fast? Is it faster than a sniper on the run? Could Rarity’s conviction outrun her certainty? She’d find out or die.
If Rarity even killed her.
For some reason, not being killed felt worse. It was easier to imagine.
“I want to teach you a lesson, Twilight. I want to teach you a lesson like you taught all of us, years ago. Or maybe I’m wrong, and you’ll teach me. But either way, if you don’t give me a fight worth having, I won’t forgive you. I know you’re about to move. I can feel it. I can hear you. I can hear your heart beating beneath your beautiful skin,” Rarity’s voice purred in her mind. “I can feel the salt deposits left when the sweat dries between your nose and eyes, and I can smell the faint taste of ozone you secretly love that fills that cabin. Fight me like you actually believe the dream is dead. If you left us over something so foolish as you said before, then I won’t forgive you. I may not forgive you even if you left for something worth believing in.”
Twilight doesn’t answer.
Because she’s finally acted. She’s slammed her hands forward on the controls, igniting the rockets on the soles of Mare Crisium’s feet. She flies through the light debris, and it falls off her in a wave of tinkling glass in the vacuum.
Krun Macula’s hand and Rarity’s thought-shattering cry reached for her, but Twilight was a veteran of two decades of war. She had raced the shadows from across the gravity well, beyond the shadow of Pluto. She had gone toe to toe alone against one of Earth’s unkillable automated units and dodged every single lethal shot. Nothing could catch her.
She clears the breach and weaves in and out, avoiding the fragment cloud’s more dangerous hazards, and then turns to bring her gun up.
Krun Macula is not close behind, but even a fool could see that it is only seconds from crushing her. The station buckles and finally ruptures apart as Rarity destroys it and all of its many secrets. Twilight does not have time to curse or regret.
Time slows. Twilight holds her breath as Rarity’s ship-self emerges at last in all of its glory from the remains. Now visible in full to the naked eye, it is bigger than she could have imagined. Does it blot out the planet, or does it warp light? No, its just mind tricks. Mind tricks on top of mind tricks. All of the pilots learned to play with reality like it was a story written in crayon, easily scrawled over and replaced. All of them but Twilight.
She lines up her shot. She feels each micrometer of movement--she has trained herself to connect to the servos and motivators, not with her heart but with her mind. She knows how Mare Crisium moves even before it moves.
She fires. Once. Twice. Hard light races forward and pierces Krun Macula’s chest, and it seems taken aback. Again. Again. She sees no weapons but she pierces its hands. Again. Again. It’s neck. It’s--
A wave of raw force knocks her into a spin, and Twilight does the unthinkable--her right hand comes off the controls. She forces it back into place, roaring, and initiates another burn to move her out of the way of any follow up. In the space she once occupied, Krun Macula has lunged with a two-pronged spear of hard light.
Countermeasures. Twilight lives and dies by rote. Proximity to target: divert attention, slow response time, disengage. Relocate, set, fire until relocation. Repeat. She pulls a machine pistol from her mech’s leg compartment and sprays in Rarity’s general direction before releasing a screen of chaff and rocketing off.
They dance.
A ship-self is a fragile thing, and its weapons are fragile. It fights with hard light. It fights with the innuendo and picture of struggle, the intensity and the rush of combat, but not with death-dealing lead. On Old Earth, you killed the body and mechanistically the brain died, and there was silence and absence. In space, the ship-selves danced with image and light and fought shadows and hurt the Soul connected to space by way of the ship-self as bridge. To fight this way hurt and rejuvenated in ways impossible in terrestrial climes.
And Twilight loves it. She loves it so much that she burns right then and there to laugh, to boast, to flirt across the tenuous connection, and she feels Rarity do the same.
Rarity lunges into space where Twilight is no longer. She fires hard light from her hand and finds it scattered into harmless rays by chaff. Twilight scores hit after hit, but Rarity’s soul is hardened and her resolve will never waver no matter the agony.
The close-misses become less close. Twilight’s quick escapes become messier. The spear nicks her leg and sends her spinning again. Hard light impacts on her armor and she cries out, feeling despite herself, even dulled by her mulelike refusal to feel beyond the confines of her body, she feels it like a deaf woman feels the vibrations of music, and she suffers.
“It changes you!” she shouts. “It changes you, doesn’t it? Fighting!”
Rarity answers without words, bombarding her with image and sound and touch and sensation of every kind imaginable, and some which Twilight has no faculties to understand. The rush of adrenaline, the savage connection of battle, the closeness of struggle, the feeling of kissing someone as they push you down--
They exhaust themselves.
Or really, Twilight is exhausted. Muscles are limited, weak, unable to keep up forever with the mind or the heart. Great heart cannot be denied, but the body can. She shakes. She sweats. She hurts in a dozen places, and Mare Crisium leaks from just as many, coolant and light.
Krun Macula, mysterious and unbroken, hovers before her at a fair distance.
Hard light won’t break its armor enough. But it can open holes. She sees so many. Where rifles fail, knives can yet break. A good combat knife between the battered folds of armor is worth more than machine gun nests at the right time.
“You did better than I had hoped. And not as well as I had hoped,” Rarity thinks to her.
Twilight, panting, thinks back as hard as she can. “I’ve got a lot more I can do, you know. I’m not done yet.”
“I think you are.”
“You’ve been wrong before.”
A knife right where it hurts. Sever connections, break bones, split flesh and spill blood.
A touch right where it hurts. She has so many ways. She has a hand--a ghostly hand, a possible touch--for every kind of contact. She has a thousand avenues of assault, of touch, and she considers them all in between thundering heartbeats.
Angle in such a way--caught by a hand and crushed. Angle in another--lose traction, strain her already strained gravity and lose control. Another--failure. Another--failure. Certain. She keeps thinking. She keeps doing the math until it comes out right.
“I have been, yes. Or maybe I haven’t been. Why did you leave? Why did you really leave?”
“I’m the one being the adult here!” Twilight seethes. “I’m the one who realized it was all a dream. We can’t live out here! We can’t. I don’t want to be human this way. I can’t be.”
“We all could. We all can. We all shall be human like this.”
More failed avenues of approach. She keeps looking. She keeps thinking. There is a path to victory in every instance. To total and complete victory, not a good-enough, not a pyrrhic sort, but true and absolute victory. There is always one road.
“Earth is all we have and we ever will have,” Twilight rasps. She is talking aloud now, but Rarity seems to hear her anyway. Her mind is everywhere at once like a comforting embrace. Like a lover pinning you down beneath her weight. “Space doesn’t have enough. There’s not enough to go on. There’s no data. There’s just nothing. There’s nothing holding us together. Earth is where we live now, and where we can live forever. Earth and Luna, where things make sense, where we can make them make sense!”
She has it. She has her path. There is always a path to victory.
“To tear us from heaven is a cruel future, Twilight,” Rarity whispers in her ear.
Rarity is there with her in the cockpit. Her mind is her Self, her ship is her Self. She is with her now, in the ozone-taste and the sweat, as she once was. Her arms slip under Twilight’s arms and meet beneath her breasts, squeezing gently. She repeats. “It’s a cruel future, Twilight, to live half-blind and alone, without this. Wouldn’t you miss this?”
“We can have this there,” Twilight rasps. “We can wake up from the dream and we can make it real.”
“That’s what I want to do.”
Twilight grinds her teeth. Move, she commands her arms, but they will not move. “I know. But you won’t. You’ll… you’ll… MOVE. Move, dammit! Get out of my head!”
“I’m not in your head.”
Twilight screams.
She doesn’t want to win.
She wants to win. She needs to win.
She needs to beat them all senseless and bring them home. They don’t understand. They don’t understand. She has looked into the cold, dead, mechanized eyes of the future and seen Earth’s endless automated swarm. Memorial Foundation will fail and then Earth will step in, and every girl in her perfect toy ship-self, free among the stars, will be dead. They’ll all be in their beautiful wreckage. Or they won’t be, but they will grow strange and distant and spread out so far that gravity no longer reaches them, and turn away and scatter and atomize. The limp body pierced by a single death-dealing armor-piercing bullet or the slow death of dissolution as their souls dissolve far out in the lonely, useless dark. She can’t, she can’t--
She moves.
She lunges. She charges. Mare Crisium moves with all of its might and all of its strength, with every ounce of heart that Twilight has.
But Krun Macula catches her easily, even with Twilight’s knife firmly in its chest up to the hilt, and it seems unfazed and untouched, larger than even before, endless and understanding and enigmatic.
And Rarity before her and around her, kissing her earlobe and her neck--squeezing the life out of her mech--kissing her hands and feet--saying: “Why did you leave?”
She’s crying. She’s lost reality. She hasn’t left her seat. Mare Crisium floats in space. It never moved. It never made that last desperate attack. Twilight is barely even in her own ship-self now, but somewhere in the space between Mare Crisium and Krun Macula, on Rarity’s lap, her hair a riotous mess, her body scarred all over, her chest heaving, warm even in space.
“I didn’t want to lose anyone,” she says, “And I don’t have to. I won’t. On Earth I can solve it all, I can solve it all. I can keep us all together and alive and happy. On Earth, in gravity, at Home. We can’t make them all come up to meet us, and we can’t change into something we shouldn’t be, that we don’t want to be just to spite them. We can change ourselves and when we land we’ll change everything else.”
She is whispering, trying to say what she needs to say. But she can’t. She can’t continue.
Twilight blinks and is back in her seat, in the cockpit. Her mech hasn’t moved at all. It still stands in the void, one hand down to grasp the hilt of her combat knife.
“You can try,” Rarity says. “But I’ve broken through. I won’t continue to… if you want to fight. If you want to try one more time. I won’t touch your mind or your heart at all. If you don’t want me to.”
“Do I have another choice?” Twilight asks. She sounds haggard. Worn. Even to herself, she sounds defeated. She hates it.
“Fly away,” Rarity says. “Fly away, and live to fight another day, and meet me again. We’re all going the same way. We’ll all end up on Mars, and we’ll all end up on Luna in the end. You know that. Six days until Earth has enough. They said as much.”
“If they step in, we die.”
Rarity chuckles and it floats across to tap her on the nose as if she were a silly pet.
“Maybe. Brave little Twilight. Now who is helping who? I think I know why you left now. You want to save us all, don’t you? We all do. I haven’t forgiven you yet. But I want you to come find me. Again, and again, and again, until I forgive you”
Twilight didn’t answer.
“She does too, by the by. Dash. I already met the joyrider. She’s so cute.” Another chuckle. “Fly away, Twilight, and come find me again. And we’ll kiss, or fight, or dance, or whatever else we want.”
Twilight’s every single fiber wants to return. Her whole body cries out for return.
Come find me again. Come fight me again. Repeat and repeat until we understand everything together.
With a grunt, and not even a goodbye, she turns tail and runs.
Author's Note
Sorry it's been such a long time.
Writing has been really difficult for like, the last... month? two months?
For Awhile.
I hope you're doing well.
