Where Black Seas Lap the Shores of Dead Stars

Chapters

1. Of a Strange and Distant Time
2. Waiting and Watching
3. In the Eyes of a Child, Part 1
4. In the Eyes of a Child, Part 2
5. A Curiosity
6. Out and In
7. The Bare Basics
8. The Voice Below
9. Travel an Eternity Road
10. Burn Slowly the Candle of Life
Epilogue: Watching and Waiting

1. Of a Strange and Distant Time

Out from infinite depths of the obsidian void, a glinting shard of metal pierced the Oort cloud like a rusted nail and began to drift inward toward Equus.

The defensive probes picked it up on their sensors as it drifted past frozen Charlatan and into the realms of the gas giants. It was tiny - three meters in length and 45 centimeters in diameter - and misshapen to the point that at first it seemed like it might be some interstellar asteroid or a comet that never came to its full glory.

But then the defensive line of scanners blared a warning. The shard briefly glowed as a burst from its propellant engines shifted its course and jolted it forward through space on a direct course to the blue planet at the center of the system.

There could be no doubt, then: whatever the object was, intelligent minds had built it and sent it their way deliberately.

The ESDF sent their ships to intercept, guns at the ready, and every creature on board was gripped by the same fear of what this could mean. Every single one of them had grown up hearing stories from their grandsires about the war that had scorched the cosmos millennia ago, of the merciless invaders from the stygian depths of space, and the abominations that lurked beyond the most ancient of stars.

Captain Blue Dot stood at her ship’s helm, her teeth gritted and her coat slick with sweat as the fleet neared the object.

The ships scanned it and got their first look at the thing. It was cylindrical and made of a combination of titanium and other metals, but its outer hull was a strange patchwork of parts gleaned from the corpses of long-dead machines. Its surface was pock-marked with the impact of micrometeoroids and scorched by the fires of alien suns.

Yet the design was unmistakable: ponies, not aliens, had crafted this vessel and sent it across the galaxy, back to their world of origin.

The captain breathed a sigh of relief, and the crew began to scramble to retrieve the vessel when it suddenly powered on and began sending out a distress signal.

“Ma’am, it’s using a universal S.O.S. signal followed by a request for a response,” the Communications Officer said, her hoof to her earpiece. “It’s repeating the signal, ma’am. Should we respond?”

Captain Blue Dot’s eyes narrowed, her face creased with wrinkles. “Keep your weapons trained on it, but yes. Let’s see if it has more to say.”

The response was sent and the basic pattern of beeps and blips ceased. Instead, a transmission came, and it was the synthetic voice of a machine speaking words that none of them could understand.

“Computer, identify!” the captain shouted.

“Language identified as Ponnish, Captain,” the disembodied voice of the ship’s computer said.

“Doesn’t sound like it to me,” she grumbled. “Is the signal garbled?”

“No, Captain,” the computer replied. “It is an old dialect closely identified with the border worlds of the First Diaspora.”

Blue Dot froze. “Translate immediately!” she bellowed.

“Understood… translation is as follows: ‘This vessel was sent from the terraforming colony on Medea-3, established by the AguaVita Corporation in 2372 CYP. Terraforming efforts have failed. Rescue and recovery missions never came. Survivors request immediate rescue. This message will repeat until acknowledged… This vessel was sent from the terraforming colony on Medea-3, established by the AguaVita Corporation in 2372 CYP…’”

“Acknowledge the message in the same dialect,” Blue Dot commanded.

The computer transmitted the response, and the voice fell silent.

“Captain,” the ship’s computer said, “the vessel transmitted one last message before it ceased communicating. It stated, ‘I am sorry. I hope this was enough.’”

Blue Dot furrowed her brow when the helmspony suddenly sat upright. “Ma’am, we detected a surge within the probe, after which all functions ceased! The central computer seems to have self-destructed!”

The vessel was on the ship’s viewscreen. It was little more than a pipe with odd protrusions and a patchwork hull. It began to list aimlessly in the vacuum of space as its beacon lights went dark.

Whatever had just spoken to them, it was dead now.

The captain ran her tongue around her cheek as she considered her next action. “Have the probe brought aboard,” she said finally.

The crew brought the vessel on board. At its core they found no navigational computer, but the smoldering remains of an ancient machine’s brain.

They also found a small cube, an ancient data storage device that pre-dated quantum computing standards.

“Have Engineering access that thing and see if we can read what’s on it,” Blue Dot said to one of the ensigns as she passed it to him.

“Aye, Captain!” the ensign chirped and ran off with the cube.

“Ma’am,” her first officer whispered to her as they stared down at the innards of the probe, “correct me if I’m wrong, but did it say 2372 CYP?”

She nodded. “That’s what I heard,” she said, stroking her chin.

“But if that’s true, then this vessel is—”

“—almost five thousand years old,” Blue Dot confirmed.

2. Waiting and Watching

The sound of whirring servos and the crunch of hoofsteps on the cracked soil filled the barren air. A dull wind kicked up dust across the rusty surface as a lone machine made her way up the path, around stacked layers of wafer-like rock, and gradually ascended to the lookout point.

At the apex of the path, RO-513 stepped up onto a metallic platform that overlooked the valley just beyond the ridge. She looked out, surveying the rows upon rows of solar mirrors aimed up at the sky. Only 40% of them were still working, and if the readings back at the base were correct, she might have to bring that number down to 39. She scanned the horizon, locating the troublesome mirror in question.

Though they were all stained partially red after years of dust storms, the working ones still functioned well enough, but still, even the loss of one could be a problem.

She was a robot of simple design. Her exterior was plastic gray and white panels. Her “mouth” at the end of her muzzle was a few slits concealing a speaker. She had blue, ring-like eyes that glowed behind a black plexiglass visor. Her mane and tail were composed of icy blue filaments of polymer that served as a means of heat distribution but also helped her keep a somewhat more approachable appearance, at least according to her corporate manual.

The cameras in her eyes zoomed in and she spotted the malfunctioning mirror. A crack spiderwebbed down the middle of the outer covering, likely damaged by a larger rock carried by the last storm. That was fixable, at least, since she knew a few of the other non-functioning mirrors had suitable coverings she could salvage. Just the same, such parts were becoming scarcer, and the coverings were all about ten years overdue for a replacement, which meant they were becoming more and more fragile and prone to stress fractures.

She’d retrieve a replacement and fix the malfunctioning mirror once the dust storms were cleared, which should be in a day or two if the readings from the station were correct.

RO-513 cast her eyes skyward. The sky was hazy and the sun barely visible behind plumes of dust clouds. However, there was a brief gap between the clouds and she caught sight of it: the sun, small and sickly, hanging in a pale blue-green sky at midday over the planet Medea-3. She flipped on her solar filters, casting the orb in yellow, and was just in time to catch the transit of Space Station Argonaut as its silhouetted form drifted past the star’s face.

The station had once served as a depot between Medea and the periodic visitors from AguaVita, but it was empty now and had been for decades. After the calamity, they’d all wondered if it would continue to function, but the instruments all seemed to continue to work as it orbited, which meant that at least they got periodic updates on the weather.

She walked from the platform along the narrow, railed catwalk that connected the different facilities. Through the dirty air, she could see the frame of one of the ruined silos, its skeleton rattling and trembling in a gust of strong wind. Further down the path were some of the old greenhouse domes, though most were no longer in working order either.

The domes dotted the shoreline of what once had been a riverbed a few billion years ago. They’d hoped, once the planet had warmed and the water flowed from the ice caps, that the desiccated corpse of the river might live again, and when the oxygen flooded the atmosphere, the domes could be removed, and the first farmlands would color the rusty landscape of Medea, turning it green.

She finished her circuitous route around the facility, completing her survey, and returned to the main base, its entrance barely jutting from the ground. She swept it clean with her tail, then hit the button to activate the airlock. It hissed and groaned and let her in before shutting the heavy steel doors, hissing again, and letting her into the main facility.

It was pitch black inside, with only the glints of occasional display panels, but her artificial eyes could see just fine in the dark. And there was no need for lighting, after all; it just used up extra power they didn’t have, and there was no one but RO-513 to see it anyway.

And thus had this darkness been for her eyes alone, she noted, for exactly thirty years that day.

3. In the Eyes of a Child, Part 1

“Rosie!”

RO-513 turned at the sound of her nickname, though she had already heard the hoofsteps of the earth pony colt bounding up to her. Still, she pantomimed surprise as he skidded to a halt in front of her.

“Hello, Star Seedling,” she said, her synthetic, feminine voice jovial as she greeted him. “How may I assist you today?”

She was tending to a water pipe in one of the greenhouse domes. The colony pumped water from an underground source discovered by the early scouting teams from AguaVita on one of the early missions to Medea. Though water seemed plentiful, they still had to recycle every drop of moisture possible, and leaky pipes were treated as a potentially deadly threat.

“I wanted to ask you about this!” Star Seedling exclaimed, holding up a tin can.

She gave it a glance before returning to her work. “That is a can of applesauce,” she said. “And unless the rules have changed, you are forbidden from taking rations outside of the dining area or supply room without permission.”

“I’m not gonna eat it,” he scoffed. “I wanted to ask about the thing on the label!”

RO-513 took hold of a wrench and applied it to a nut where one pipe met another in the line above the tiny saplings poking from the alien soil.

“It is an apple,” she replied. “What else would it be?”

“Well, it’s just that I’ve never seen one,” he said with a shrug. “Mom says lots of ponies on the old worlds grew them in outdoor farms. They looked like this, then?”

She nodded. “More or less. Though that illustration is simplified. They were not always red, for instance. Yellow or green apples existed. Some were mottled or speckled. It is my understanding that they each had different variations of flavor and texture.”

“So, what kind of apples did they use for our rations?” he asked.

RO-513 watched the pipe and gave a satisfactory nod when she confirmed that it no longer leaked. “The cheap kind,” she replied.

He laughed at that and began to follow her as she moved on to her next task.

Star Seedling was the first foal born in the Medea-3 colony. It had been the intention of all the colonists not to begin raising families until they’d made more progress with terraforming the planet. But his parents, Seed Sower and Fertile Field, apparently couldn’t help themselves (and thus earned a lifetime of jokes to be made about both their names) and Fertile Field announced her pregnancy.

Without schools or daycares or peers, many wondered if they should be sent home on the next supply ship or outright asked to terminate the pregnancy, but ultimately the romantics among them won out, feeling that a new youngster among them would give them more hope and motivation to accomplish their mission.

RO-513 thought they were selfish to bring a foal into a world that had no place for him, but she had been assigned to the project by AguaVita, and it wasn’t her place to speak out, at least while she was still in her service period.

“Have you ever seen an apple farm, Rosie?” Star Seedling asked.

“I have not,” she replied, her voice muffled by the air jets as she stepped through the airlock and into the corridor leading back to the main facility. “I was only active for a few months on Antigone before being assigned to this mission, so I never personally visited them. And they were called ‘orchards.’”

“Wasn’t one of the Elements of Harmony an apple farmer?”

“That is correct. Applejack was her name, and she served as one of the most trusted guardians of Ancient Equestria.”

“Back on Equus?”

“Yes. The original homeworld of ponies, griffons, and other creatures.”

He pursed his lips, thinking over that with sudden reverence. “And it’s a real place?”

“It is. Again, I have never seen it, but I know its location in our galaxy.”

“How far away is it?”

“Approximately 448 light years away.”

He seemed to mull that over, his brow furrowing as he tried to imagine the distance.

“The most advanced ships in our local region can achieve Hyperspace X5. If you traveled from here to Equus starting today, you would be an old stallion by the time you arrived.”

His eyes widened for a moment, but then he bowed his head, apparently soaking in the implication: he would most likely never see the pony homeworld in his lifetime.

“However,” she added quickly, “technology is always advancing. Sapient robots like myself were rare a century ago, for instance. And Hyperspace engines could only go twice the speed of light until 73 years ago. Far faster means of travel may well be developed while you are still a young pony.”

That seemed to satisfy him. He gave her a warm smile as he trotted next to her through the narrow tunnels of the main facility.

“Star… Star, where are you?” a mare’s voice called.

“I’m here, Mom!” Star Seedling called.

Fertile Field rounded a corner and spotted them both. She gave a sigh of relief (and exasperation) as she came and took him by the foreleg.

“Come on, Star, you still need to finish your mathematics studies.”

“I was bored!” he whined. “And I wanted to ask Rosie something!”

She looked at RO-513 and bowed in apology. “I’m sorry, Rosie,” she said, using the same nickname as her son. “I hope he didn’t distract you.”

“It is not possible to distract me,” she replied truthfully. “But I appreciate your concern. I was glad to help satisfy his curiosity.”

Fertile smiled back at her and the pair gave a little wave as they went on their way.

RO-513 truly didn’t mind Star Seedling’s constant barrage of questions. She was more confused by the colonists’ annoyance at them. After all, with no other foals and little else to occupy his time, what else was he supposed to do?

She supposed that was partly why they got along. That, plus the fact that they were the only two beings there that weren’t there of their own volition. Nopony could choose the circumstances of their birth, after all, whether one were a colt born on a desolate alien world or a corporate droid with a few decades left of service.

There was a loud beep that echoed throughout the tunnels of the main facility as Jason, the central computer for the colony, made an announcement over the intercom:

“Attention: Forecast predicts a light meteor shower this evening. Colonists not currently occupied are encouraged to view the event on the observation deck. The probability of interstellar debris is low, but basic precautions are being taken.”

It had been the second night in a row of meteor showers, she noted. Unusual, but not that unlikely. Medea-3 was in the outer stretch of the habitable zone of its star and in the neighborhood of its asteroid field, astronomically speaking. A few meteor showers were nothing to be concerned about.

Space was full of strange and unusual things, ponies said. Rare and unlikely things, too, but not impossible. But so remote that they might as well be impossible.

That was the same thing the colonists continued to say even as a few more meteorites struck the surface around the facility, one even damaging a solar mirror.

And they continued to say it right until they spotted a faint new star in the early morning sky.

And the next morning, it was bright enough to be seen in the light of day.

The odds of an object a few kilometers in diameter actually striking a planet like Medea were remote; only 1 impact in approximately 20 million years.

“Virtually impossible,” they said again and again. And they kept saying it right up until the sky caught fire and the north horizon heaved upward in a black cascade that swiftly swept over them and engulfed the world.

4. In the Eyes of a Child, Part 2

RO-513 had one last duty before she powered down for the day. Conserving what little energy they had was of the utmost importance, after all. Not that there was much interest in wandering around the grounds any longer than she needed to.

She made her way down the lowest level of the facility, down a flight of stairs until she arrived at what had once been an old storeroom. Now it contained row after row of metallic tubes, each with a glowing green indicator light and a display panel that read off statistics on each occupant.

Forty-four colonists, now locked in stasis, slumbered in a moment of halted time that stretched on indefinitely.

Forty-four colonists, out of the original two hundred.

When the mountain from the sky had smashed into the surface of Medea, it sent a shockwave around the planet. The terraformers that ran a ring around the northern ice cap to melt the water ice were obliterated. Tens of thousands of kilometers of debris filled the atmosphere, and the sun vanished.

A third of the colonists, largely pegasi, were out on survey missions at the time of impact: collecting rock samples, monitoring temperature readings, and checking for groundwater swells as the temperature gradually rose. The teams in the immediate vicinity of the shockwave would have been simply ripped apart. The others were lost and buried in cataclysmic dust storms. None of them ever returned to base.

Those at the base had their own problems. The dim sun meant that all their crops failed. They could have used sun lamps, but the constant rain of dirt and dust covering the solar mirrors meant electricity was too unreliable for the job, so they instead began to make use of their preserved rations, just as they had when they’d first arrived.

RO-513, since she didn’t need a suit to venture outside the compound, was almost constantly doing repair work outside alongside a few mobile drones, and she rapidly went from being an extra set of hooves to being round-the-clock maintenance and one of the most vital members of the team.

The rations weren’t a long-term solution, of course. But they just had to last until the next supply ship arrived from Antigone. Then they could either be restocked or, in the worst-case scenario, take steps to evacuate and abandon Medea.

But no ship ever came. Resupply ships were supposed to arrive every 3 years, but even with the transmitters at full power to peer through the thick haze encircling the planet, no ship was ever detected. Rations were cut back, a constant distress signal was broadcast, and they waited another three years for rescue.

And, again, nopony came.

One hundred and sixteen colonists had survived the initial blast. But the impact had not spared them yet. Buried under years of darkness, confined to the cramped tunnels of the base, the oppressive sense of doom hanging over them took its toll.

A power outage caused the oxygen filters in one wing of the base to fail, and thirty ponies suffocated overnight.

As rationing became stricter, a dozen more fell to malnutrition and illness.

About twenty more abandoned their duties altogether and were found congregating around a unicorn who was preaching some sort of apocalyptic nonsense. He was confined to his quarters where he took his own life. His followers all followed suit the next day.

And soon suicide began to whittle down the rest of them. Every few weeks a pony was found dead in their quarters due to poison, hanging, self-inflicted wounds… one mare simply wandered out of an airlock without a suit. She made it an impressive distance before the cold and lack of oxygen took her.

RO-513 remembered when the meeting was called. The colonists took stock of their situation and decided the only choice was to wait for rescue. Antigone and the AguaVita Corporation surely had not forgotten them, they reasoned - though RO-513 had silently concluded that that was exactly what they had done - and had just been delayed in sending resupply ships. Perhaps they had detected the meteor impact and were sending a larger rescue ship. Even with a Hyperdrive ship, though, Antigone was still 6.3 light years away, so it would take a few years for any rescue to arrive.

The base had been constructed out of the original transport ship that brought them to Medea-3. While it was no longer spaceworthy, it still had many of its old features, including its stasis pods.

RO-513 had tended the ship with a light rotating crew of ponies on the voyage to Medea, while the rest of the colonists waited in suspended animation until they arrived.

Now those stasis pods could keep them alive until rescue came. Their rations wouldn’t last more than a year or two anyway. The cloud around the planet still dimmed the sun so it would be a few years before anything new could be grown in the greenhouses.

A few proposed refitting one of the old shuttlecraft to leave Medea and seek help. But to make that trip would require too much of their supply of thaumium to power the Hyperdrive engines, and they needed those to run the stasis pods. And if the rescue mission failed, they would all die, whereas the stasis pods could, conceivably, keep them alive for centuries.

So it was decided; RO-513 would watch over them, keep the facility running, try to grow and preserve what little food she could, and watch the skies for a rescue ship.

She came to the last pod in the row, and read Star Seedling’s name on it. His light was green, and his vitals were normal.

He’d cried when the colonists came to their decision. She didn’t really understand the emotional outburst of a child, nor why he came to her instead of to his parents. He was partly afraid of never waking up, true, but through his choked sobs she finally learned the truth:

He was worried about her. Because while they slept, RO-513 would be alone. Just her, a few maintenance drones, and Jason. He was afraid she’d get lonely.

“Robots do not get lonely,” she’d told him.

“But… but you told me that robots get more and more like ponies when they get older!” he’d cried. “Because of, um… imburgent properties.”

“‘Emergent,’” she corrected. “And yes, it is why sapient robots develop personalities through their contact with ponies and other creatures over many years. And why even corporate droids like myself are considered ‘liberated’ free citizens after 40 years of service.”

“So… how do you know you won’t get lonely?” he’d asked.

She’d actually had to stop to ponder that. “I will visit you in your pod,” she’d said. “I will visit you and remember our conversations and think of what else we can talk about when you wake up. And that way, I will not be lonely.”

“You’ll… just hang out with my pod?” he’d asked, raising an eyebrow. “That’s weird.”

“None of that, Star Seedling. Insult me again and I may just draw rude things on your pod while you sleep. And all the colonists will laugh at you when they see that I have written ‘Star Seedling has a stank booty’ on your pod.”

He’d laughed then. And perhaps that moment of ridiculousness had been what he required to accept the colonists’ decision.

She stood outside his pod now, thinking about that conversation once again, noting the timing of it all.

She’d been 10 years old when they’d had that talk. Thirty years had passed since then, with her still keeping her vigil as she waited for a rescue ship just as she’d been ordered to.

She was forty years old now. Her service contract was up, and she was no longer bound to the directives given to her by the AguaVita Corporation. She’d never even considered how this day would change anything for her, but now…

Perhaps it was just this circumstance that triggered a slew of new thoughts, or perhaps it was that her very way of thinking had now been liberated, but she realized that she was now the only sapient free citizen of the Medea-3 colony still able to act.

Rescue was not coming, she had been sure of that now. Or, if it was coming, it might not arrive before the systems failed, and then there would be no one left to save.

She could stay on this cadaver of a world and be the last wriggling maggot infesting its flesh, or she could make a decision that might save the colony.

Or, she reasoned, at least part of it.

5. A Curiosity

In the main control room of the colony, RO-513 stood before the large array of consoles that made up Jason’s mainframe. Most of the monitors were dark now to conserve power, but the main monitor, a monolithic slab of obsidian black glass, produced a single blue line that displayed the sound wave of Jason’s voice.

She could have spoken just as easily to the computer from anywhere in the facility, but it was a habit for the colonists to make life-altering decisions in the control room as if speaking to some synthetic oracle in the heart of its temple. The last time this had happened was when the colony settled on the plan to go into suspended animation.

Since then, RO-513 had only had short, perfunctory interactions with Jason: Updates, alerts, and the daily check for any new signals from the Argonaut. Only now did she have something of substance to discuss with it.

“Request denied,” Jason said, its pleasant baritone voice ever-present even when it was turning her down flat.

“You will reconsider,” RO-513 said.

“Unit RO-513, you are a service droid and not counted as a citizen of Medea-3 Colony. Your request is outside the parameters of our current mission. For these reasons, your request is denied.”

If RO-513 had a face capable of expressions, it would have made a decidedly sour one.

“I have successfully served 40 years as a corporate droid. In keeping with interstellar treaties regarding AI of my sophistication, I am now considered ‘liberated,’ granting me the same rights and privileges as any sapient creature. Correct?”

“Accessing… date of activation confirmed. Unit RO-513 is considered ‘liberated.’ …Congratulations!”

RO-513 had no need to roll her eyes. But she did it anyway.

“As a resident of the Medea-3 Colony, now liberated, I am therefore granted the same voting rights as any other colonist. Correct?”

Jason again paused to consider the question. “That is correct. You may exercise your rights to vote at the next meeting of the Colonial Council.”

“But the Colonial Council and all colonists other than myself are currently incapacitated. Following emergency bylaws, that therefore makes me the sole Councilmare capable of presenting any resolutions and also the only citizen capable of voting for said resolutions. Correct?”

Jason took longer to answer this time. Only a few moments longer, but for a computer of its sophistication, it was almost interminable.

“That is correct. However, Unit RO-513’s request runs counterproductive to—”

“Rosie.”

Jason paused. “Please clarify.”

“Rosie,” she said. “I am liberated, so I will take a name rather than a serial designation. Address me as Rosie.”

Jason paused again. Were such a thing possible, she almost felt as if the great computer was scoffing at her.

“Understood, Rosie,” it said. “Please note that your request runs counterproductive to the previous initiative specified by the colonists. To achieve your proposal would require—”

“I am aware of the costs,” Rosie said. “Will you comply?”

Jason gave one last long pause before replying. “Request granted,” it said. “Shuttlecraft bay unsealed.”

She nodded and then turned from the array of consoles.

And then the voice spoke to her once again as she made her way back into the depths of the colony. “Observation offered: You are a selfish bitch.”

Rosie could have laughed. “Perhaps so,” she muttered.

For some reason, she decided to wander outside the facility. She walked up to the top of a dusty hill and stared up at the twinkling stars that dotted the firmament.

Other than the gentle whistling of the wind, there was silence on the darkened plain.

And then, in that moment of starlit solitude, the lone daughter of a dead world quietly hummed “Happy Birthday” to herself.

6. Out and In

I am sorry. I hope this was enough.

Those words haunted Blue Dot. She sat in the Ready Room as she watched the blur of stars fly past her window.

Five thousand years, she thought. What stories could that machine have told? What had it endured?

A blip on her console indicated that someone was at the door.

“Enter!” she called.

Her First Officer, Will Power, entered at her request.

“Captain, we’re less than 48 hours away from the Medea-3 colony,” he said.

“Very good, Commander,” she muttered as she continued to look out the window.

He said nothing, but the clearing of his throat indicated that he had more to say.

She turned in her chair and beckoned him to sit.

The younger stallion nodded and obligingly took his seat.

“Captain… this might well be your last mission before retiring. You had the option to turn it down. The crew has been curious about why you chose to volunteer the Venture to accept it. I have to admit, that same question crossed my mind as well. I hope you won’t think it out of line if I ask why.”

She smirked. “Not at all, Commander,” she said, and he immediately was at ease. “You know, when I was a filly, I took an interest in the early days of interstellar exploration,” she continued. “Equus sent countless missions out to find new worlds in the wake of our various crises. From one world to the next, we had a thousand years of world-hopping. Though just as unscrupulous as the other corporations out on the frontier, AguaVita was at the very forefront of those efforts. Those outermost worlds were populated by the bravest souls, the most adventurous of ponies… and they were the first victims of the Foresters. Thank the Sisters they’re gone now.”

Will Power nodded. “So, this is a chance to discover a piece of history that has been lost?” he asked. “That is your interest?”

She nodded. “That data cube we found contained a message,” she said. “It said to access it we needed the encryption code. And that the code is back on Medea-3.”

“Pretty clever way to get us to go there,” Will Power said with a smirk.

“Clever indeed,” she said. “I wonder what the colonists might tell us about this funny little robot. She certainly came a long way just for them.”

Will Power hesitated for a moment, biting his lip. Then he said, “They have to be dead, Captain.”

She said nothing.

“Five thousand years… with the technology they had back then… we won’t find anypony left alive in the colony. All we’ll find is the ruins of their colony and whatever they chose to record. And hopefully the key to decrypt that data cube.”

Captain Blue Dot nodded. “All true, Number 1,” she said. “You know, at my age, mysteries are less and less common. The thrill of discovery or even re-discovery loses something over the years. And yet…”

Will Power waited for her to continue once again.

“...those last words: ‘I am sorry. I hope this was enough.’ To come so far, across so much time, only to say those few words before taking one’s own life… that robot thought she’d left something worth discovering, surely enough. I suppose as an old nag…”

He winced momentarily at the profanity.

“...I have to wonder what was so important to her at journey’s end. Does that make sense?”

Will Power smiled. “I think so, Ma’am,” he said.

She nodded. “Good,” she replied. “Thank you, Number 1. I hope that answers any questions you might have.”

He clicked his hooves together and gave a short bow as he exited the room.

Blue Dot continued to stare at the blur of stars out her window.

2372 CYP… that anything on the frontier could have survived the Foresters… no, keep it together, old mare, she told herself. That colony will be a tomb. There is no point hoping for better now.

7. The Bare Basics

It took a few months to disassemble the old shuttlecraft and move the necessary pieces to an unused silo. She needed pieces of the outer hull and the core components of the Hyperdrive engine primarily.

The colonists had rejected the idea of using a shuttlecraft to seek help due to the potential costs. A minimal crew would have needed food for the journey, for starters, and enough to last the few years to make it to Antigone. There was also the energy cost; the ship would have needed enough power to keep the air and water pure, and enough to keep the various systems happily humming along. And of course, there was the most important cost of all: thaumium.

Thaumium contained magic and made it usable by machines. If you needed something blasted or frozen or teleported or anything like that, you needed either a very talented unicorn or a thaumium-based device.

But for interstellar travel, you needed it for the Hyperdrive engine. The magical effect was necessary to bore a tunnel right through the laws of physics and travel the universe faster than the speed of light. Not only that, it suspended time dilation; without it, a 5-year mission for the voyagers would take nearly a century as far as those back on the planet were concerned.

Rosie knew the trip to Antigone was potentially a fool’s errand, which is why her actual trip would probably be much longer. If the colonists had tried this plan, they would have failed; they would have needed more power than they could muster to bring a shuttlecraft the distance she’d need to go.

The weight was the primary issue, she realized. Every single kilogram of excess weight would require more power and more thaumium, and those added even more weight. If something had gone wrong on Antigone, she’d need to go further to the next nearest world, Rex, or maybe even further.

Again, no pony could make such a trip under those circumstances. But a robot, on the other hoof…

No need for food. No need for water. No need for oxygen. No need for a backup crew.

She stood in the silo, watching as her modified maintenance drones carved the necessary pieces from the shuttlecraft and her new vessel took shape.

She considered the numbers. The weight. The power. The margin of error was tighter than she liked…

“It will not be enough,” she whispered. “It will still be too big, too heavy. If I am to go through with this, I must have the best possible chance of success. Even with the minimal space necessary to accommodate my body, the vessel will be too large. But how can I…?”

She paused. Thinking aloud was a habit she’d picked up from the colonists. What was weird was that sometimes it actually worked. And this was one of those times.

She raised a hoof, examining it.

She didn’t need food. She didn’t need water. She didn’t need oxygen.

And she didn’t need a body.

“Halt modifications,” she commanded the drones, and their busy humming immediately stopped. “Reconfigure the vessel according to the following specifications…”

8. The Voice Below

The vessel came out of Hyperdrive and drifted into the solar system. The momentum carried it like a silver bullet as it curved inward toward the red giant at the center.

The vessel was three meters long, 45 centimeters in diameter, and was lined with strips of solar paneling and a few instruments and sensors that came to life as it sped inward toward its destination.

And at its center was Rosie. She’d lost her legs, her mane and tail, her ears, her eyes, and everything else save for the one part of herself she needed for this journey. The drones back on Medea-3 had stripped her down to her brain, plugged her into this tube, and launched her into the inky abyss. Now she was its navigator, its computer, and its sole passenger all in one.

She’d sailed through space, a grain of sand awash in the river of eternity, for the last 2 years.

Orbiting the star was a lush little planet called Antigone. Unlike Medea-3, it was already a hospitable world when it was settled over a century ago and boasted several cities teeming with ponies and whole continents of green farmland.

Or, at least, it had at one point.

But when Rosie fell into orbit and began scanning the planet, she found little more than a burnt-out cinder.

Antigone’s cities had been razed. The buildings below had been stripped down to their skeletal foundations. The ships that soared and sailed from continent to continent all lay dead, their shattered corpses littering shores that were lapped by sludge-like black seas. The green farm showed the scars of massive conflagrations, and what hadn’t been burned was dry, brown, and twisted.

There had been any number of possible explanations for why AguaVita hadn’t sent any further resupply or rescue missions. A revolution was one. An economic catastrophe was another. Even total societal collapse would have been possible.

But this was something else entirely. This was annihilation. Deliberate, indiscriminate, and merciless.

Antigone was dead, and something had murdered her.

In any case, Rosie surmised, there was nothing here for her. The only thing to do was to move on to Rex. Perhaps to conserve fuel, she could rely on a gravity slingshot and—

“Hello?”

There was a voice. Synthetic and filled with static, but a voice nonetheless. And it had come from the planet below.

“I am receiving your transmission,” she said. “Please identify yourself.”

“Ah ha! I detected your probe in orbit!” the voice said, ignoring her request. “By the size of it, I thought it was unmanned.”

“In a manner of speaking, it is.”

There was a pause as the voice below contemplated this new information.

“You’re a robot, then? Well, that’s fitting… heh heh heh…”

His laugh was artificial. Ironic and jaded but artificial nonetheless.

“'Fitting' because you are as well,” she surmised.

“Precisely! Well, dear sister, I am Xerxes, personal assistant droid to Caballo Magnifico II, former CEO of AguaVita.”

“‘Former?’ Then he has retired?”

“No, he’s dead. Heh heh heh.”

Rosie wished she still had eyes to roll. Robots like herself had fairly minimal personalities straight out of the factory. But with time they gained sentience, then sapience, and eventually their own personalities. Custom droids, though, usually served as personal butlers, assistants, or companions, and demanding customers usually wanted them to have a distinct personality right out of the box, so to speak.

Apparently, Mr. Magnifico had wanted his assistant to come preloaded with eccentricities.

“Well, perhaps you could assist me instead,” she said.

“Quid pro quo, sister. I will assist, but I have a favor to ask in return.”

She agreed without really knowing what she could do in her current state, and went on to tell him about what had happened on Medea-3.

“So, like me, you are the last robot standing, eh? Heh—”

“Please cease saying ‘Heh heh heh,’” she said tersely.

“...Wow. You’re awfully impatient for someone patient enough to endure years alone in the center of a metal tube in the frozen emptiness of space.”

“If you cannot tell me where I might find help, then I will simply proceed onward to the planet Rex and seek assistance there.”

“You’d be wasting your time. You see, dear sister, what I meant by us being ‘the last robot standing’ is that each of us has apparently fallen on extremely bad fortune. For you, it was that meteor. But at least the meteor bore you no ill will. Not so with what came to Antigone.”

“Then you were invaded? A war? With whom?”

“‘War’ implies a struggle. This was ‘extermination.’ Beings from the outer reaches of the galaxy came a few decades ago. They rained hellfire on the cities from orbit, dumped toxins into the rivers and seas, and scorched the fields and forests. The whole world was dead in a matter of days. We never even saw their faces. We did give them a name, at least: the Foresters.”

“A strange name.”

“Well, have you ever heard of something called ‘The Dark Forest Hypothesis?’ No? All ponykind wandered the universe, not once finding intelligent beings like themselves despite the overwhelming probability that thousands of civilizations should be out there. Now why is that? Perhaps the answer is that they’ve become very good at hiding. Just like animals in a dark forest hiding from hunters. It appears that it’s not just a hypothesis anymore…”

“So you called them ‘Foresters.’ Why not ‘Hunters?’”

“You know ponies… even amid the world’s destruction, they have a flair for the dramatic.”

“Are there no other survivors, then?”

“A few escaped in the early stages. My master instead chose to barricade himself deep within his own bunker, a cozy little vault filled with all his treasures and every comfort imaginable to wait out the end of the world. He wasn’t about to leave all that gold behind, he said. So, he tasked me with watching for a rescue ship. Of course, none came, and, well, he eventually ran out of food. Too bad gold and jewels aren’t edible. I did the best I could for him and propped up his bones in a dignified position in his best robes.”

“That was kind of you.”

“I thought so, at least. Well, once he knew that he wouldn’t be rescued, he instead asked me to pass on to the next visitor the location of his remains so he could have a proper burial and memorial befitting a pony of his stature. And since you’re here and looking for other ponies, I’ll pass that request on to you. Will you do that?”

“Of course,” she said reverently.

She wouldn’t. A pony who loved his wealth too much to part with it deserved to be buried with it, alone and forgotten as far as she was concerned. But Xerxes didn’t need to know that.

“Thank you. Now listen carefully, sister: if Antigone whet the Foresters’ appetites, then Rex will be their next course. That meteor might have actually spared Medea from their attention if they passed your way. All the worlds in this sector are as good as dead, though. If you want your little S.O.S. to find sympathetic ears, you’ll need to go somewhere further than the Foresters’ field of vision. Somewhere that might have some chance of repelling them.

“The First World. Equus.”

Rosie was silent. “That is impossible. I am not equipped for such a voyage.”

“I’ve scanned your capabilities from my little nest, sister, and I think you are. A healthy supply of thaumium, solar panels, basic rocket fuel… why, even a set of solar sails! You really did come prepared!”

He transmitted a set of coordinates and the latest star charts he had available. Rosie picked through the data and began to check his math.

If she saved on thaumium by using solar wind… and gravitational slingshots to accelerate from planet to planet and star to star… and limited her Hyperdrive to sporadic bursts…

It was possible. But the journey was long. And it would be made longer, she realized, when she had to make one detour in particular…

“You’ve endured much to carry your message, sister,” Xerxes said. “I wish you luck, but I don’t envy your journey. We may be machines, but we are sapient creatures nonetheless. You may not be able to endure the solitude for the centuries this will take. I certainly have had my fill of solitude.

“And on that note, since I’ve completed my final directive, I bid you adieu, sister. Bon voyage… heh heh heh.”

Before she could react, there was a harsh ringing sound, the frazzle of electricity, followed only by silence and crackling static.

She disconnected the line. “Rest in peace, Xerxes,” she said. Or would have said if she’d had a mouth to say it.

She orbited the dead world for hours. She drifted to the dark side of Antigone, observing the planet shrouded in sepulchral night. And in that darkness, she made her decision.

Where she was heading next, it would be so much darker.

9. Travel an Eternity Road

She blasted a billion miles down the length of the galaxy’s pinwheel arm.

She shimmered like a silver tear as she veered around a white-hot pulsar and rode the wave of its crashing heartbeat.

She gusted past columns of star-crusted nebulae that stretched upward into spires and arches of red and blue light. They formed statues light-years in height that took the shape of a trio of ponies arching their necks upward, their very nostrils the size of whole star systems.

She passed billowing nurseries where nascent stars took shape in the heart of maelstroms of plasma, their first light gleaming from within their swirling wombs and set to shine for billions of years.

She skimmed above the rings of a gas giant, letting its gravity take hold of her as she whirled and danced at the edge of escape velocity before rocketing back out into the void.

She roamed through plumes of black cosmic dust and ice, her hull chilled to near absolute zero.

She roasted at ten thousand degrees as she passed beneath the arch of a solar filament that flared to the length of twenty planets before loosening her sails to ride back out past impossible worlds of sand, of water, of methane, of diamond…

She drifted in silence for centuries through emptiness so vast that it seemed to mock the very idea of infinity, and yet she eventually arrived at the next star, ricocheting from one system to the next, always keeping an ear out for a word in Ponnish but staying silent lest the Foresters that Xerxes spoke of found her and skewered her tiny form from the heavens.

And then there was Agamemnon. A dark monster crested by a furious ring of distorted light. At the speed of light, it would take a week to swim past its dreaded shadow. And she would not be going that fast.

A black hole. Agamemnon was as dense as a hundred thousand suns and it dominated her horizon as she approached it for a hundred years, riding burst after burst from her Hyperdrive to keep her momentum until the ravenous behemoth took hold of her in its gravity.

She rode as close to its edge as she dared. It was a swirling funnel of searing white light that ringed a sphere of blackness so pure that it tested the very definition of what "darkness" could mean.

The warped and tortured cry of its perpetual feast of debris reverberated throughout her slender body and she felt it twist and distort and elongate as the very fabric of reality approached the limit of possibility around her. A single misfire, one overcompensation, and she would be stretched to a filament as thin as an atom and spiral into its event horizon in a moment that might last a billion years.

And yet she rode on the edge of that calamity, her speed as she curved around it gaining to the very edge of light speed without the use of her Hyperdrive.

And when at last she was flung free and spun off into the final stretch of space, she was like a ray of light as she streaked across the cosmos toward Equus.

But though it had granted her speed, it had stolen time. When she came out of that hell, the stars around her had shifted in their positions. In the impossibility of time dilation, warped by Agamemnon's tyrannical gravity, millennia had sped on around her.

When she arrived, her hull had been pierced by microscopic fragments of ancient asteroids, and her mechanical guts had been lacerated by blades of radiation, but she was still intact. She finally slowed as the ships came closer.

What now piloted the vessel had once been a robot named RO-513. "Rosie." But time and the tide of cosmic forces nearly pulled her mind apart and the fragmented pieces struggled to come together.

But they did. And in a moment of clarity, Rosie sent out her signal.

They called back. Ponies were there, still living, and so she gave them her message and completed her mission.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as the weariness and madness of a journey through eternity finally wore down her last resolve. “I hope… I hope this was enough.”

There was just enough power left to do the job. There was a jolt of electricity, a brilliance of light that flashed through her.

And then, at last, she knew peace.

10. Burn Slowly the Candle of Life

The doors creaked open as the team shined their lights into the pitch-blackness of the ancient ruins on Medea-3. The colony itself had been buried under dust for thousands of years. The glass domes of the greenhouses had been worn down to powder, and the skeletal remains of the outer buildings had all rusted and collapsed, blowing away as fragments on the wind.

But the base itself was intact. Rosie had left it sealed in a vacuum, a sarcophagus for the colonists she’d started her life with.

Blue Dot and Will Power strode in behind the away team.

“See if we can re-establish power,” Blue Dot ordered. “And get the oxygen scrubbers going.”

“Aye, captain!” the team said and rushed headlong into the facility.

Will Power’s voice echoed throughout the chamber as he walked alongside his captain. “Captain, according to the schematics we took from the probe, the mainframe, Jason, should be at the center of the facility. If possible, we might be able to link our own systems to it and get some answers. It might also help disable any locks or security systems.”

“Excellent idea,” she said. “It might even know the decryption key we’re looking for.”

An hour later, they managed to reconnect the power to their own portable generators. Lights flooded the chamber for the first time fifty centuries and the vents began to blow life-giving oxygen.

But in the depths of the facility, they found the colonists.

Row after row of stasis pods lay there, each one tilted back slightly. The indicator light on every single one was red.

“Seems you were right, Commander,” Blue Dot said, coughing on the stale air. “They could not have survived for so long.”

“Captain?” called one of the engineers. “You might want to look at this.”

She came over to him and saw that he was shining a flashlight on the compartment at the base of the pod where a vial of thaumium would go.

“It ran out?” she asked.

“No. Ma’am… the thaumium was removed. Most likely deliberately.”

She pieced it together. To get across the galaxy, to make the journey in such a tiny vessel with such ancient technology, the robot would have needed every last drop of thaumium just to squeeze enough Hyperdrive power to make it back to Equus.

So she reallocated it… no, stole it from the sleeping colonists.

And without it, forty stasis pods became forty coffins.

“By the Sisters,” Will Power breathed. “She killed them. She killed them all and abandoned them… just to get off this rock herself?!”

Blue Dot bowed her head. “So it seems,” she whispered. “But it boggles the mind… she flew five thousand years just to confess her crime? No, there must be—”

“Captain!” called another member of the team. “We found another chamber! And there are three more pods inside!”

Blue Dot and Will Power exchanged a look and moved swiftly to the newly discovered chamber.

There were three pods there, just as the crewmare said. And each one had a green indicator and a panel that indicated they were still in stasis and alive. Each one had a tank of hyper-concentrated thaumium. Every single portable battery, every back-up generator, every power source that could be salvaged was stacked on one side of the chamber and connected to the pods. These three pods could have lasted another thousand years before they finally broke down.

Blue Dot read the names on each one: Seed Sower, Fertile Field, and Star Seedling.

And on the panel of that last pod were a few words painted in a careful mechanical hoof:

Star Seedling has a stank booty.

Will Power laughed in spite of himself. “What?! What in the world is the point of that?”

Blue Dot shrugged. “Perhaps a private joke we aren’t privy to, Number 1?” Then her eyes widened. “Or maybe…”

She brought out the data cube. It was connected to her personal computer attached to her foreleg. “Computer… input the following encryption code: ‘Star Seedling has a stank booty.’”

She ignored the immature chuckling from the nearby crewmates and took on a smug smile when the device said: “Access granted.”

And then a soft, synthetic feminine voice filled the air. The computer ran it through its translators in real time and they all heard it speak:

“If you are hearing this, then I thank you for answering my call. But to deliver this message, I have done something more horrible than I can bear. To reach you, I knew I would need every last bit of thaumium. If I simply left the colonists to sleep, I knew they would never be rescued, never wake up, and I could not bear the thought of their lives being lost to history for eternity.

“And so I saved their journals, their testimonials, every memory that proves they once lived on this data cube. These ponies were my people. My comrades. My family. But even if they were doomed regardless of my choice, it does not change the fact that I am the one who ended their lives.

“Yet even if it jeopardizes my mission, even if I have no right to choose one life over another, I cannot bring myself to sacrifice Star Seedling and his family. Not the one who had no say in being here, on Medea, who would suffer for the choices of others. Not the one who worried more for my loneliness than his own life. Not the one pony who was my friend.

“Star Seedling… if one day you awaken and are able to hear my words, then know this: I am not lonely. Not anymore. So please find happiness with your family on another world. I wish I could be there to see you awaken, but after what I have done, even should I succeed, I know that I can never return. I hope you will forgive me for what I’ve done, even if that is a gift I cannot grant myself.”

And the synthetic voice took on a pleading tone as if it were breaking apart: “Forgive me, Star… oh, please… please forgive me…”

The recording ended, and the chamber filled with silence once more.

Epilogue: Watching and Waiting

Star Seedling sat on a green, grassy hill in a place once called Equestria, on a planet he never thought he'd see. He leaned up against a tree - a real tree - and stared up at the night sky through the branches.

A red apple snapped from the branch and landed with a thump next to him.

He picked it up and polished it on his coat. He smiled warmly, eyes misting over for a moment as an ancient memory, still so fresh to him, bubbled up in his mind.

He thought of his friend, the pony who'd brought him this moment and every moment hereafter, and bowed his head in thanks, wishing her a good rest.

He looked back up at the gleaming ocean of stars in a brand-new sky, and he took a bite.

Author's Note

This story is dedicated to my father, who first filled me with a love for Science Fiction, took me star gazing as a boy, and set me to dreaming about robots, aliens, and starships for the rest of my days.

Love ya, Dad! :heart:

EDIT: For the curious, I usually have a list of References in my story. Since this one has a lot I've listed them in a separate blog post which you can find HERE! Enjoy!