The DESTINY Exploration

Chapter 7: Starswirl

Jonah walked over to the vacant seat directly across from me and sat down. It was about a few months since I last talked with him face-to-face, even though we had been stuck in the same docking bay for a few weeks. The thought of him being my co-pilot for an expedition into deep space sounded too good to be true; people would write comic strips about our struggles, triumphs, and adventure into the void.

The project manager cleared his throat, requesting the attention of the assembly in the room.

“As you all know, the government has asked us to enlist volunteers for the mission, and we have before us a pair of brave men to pilot our creation, DESTINY, our first intra-galactic manned explorer.” The director stood and paced the back of the room. “They will provide all the necessary tutorials in a period of three months. This normally takes astronauts a few years, so they will be condensing major concepts.”

Jonah and I exchanged a look of dismay at the thought of having so little time to prepare.  But then he smiled, and extended a fist in my direction. I returned the action with a grin. We both knew that the trials ahead would stretch our limits, but it had been something we’d become familiar with ever since we joined the Project.

When we had first become team members, I only programmed the mess hall interfaces, and Jonah simply typed conversion formulas into the hydrogen conversion unit’s software system. Once the project team became short-handed, we were asked to do more than we had signed up to do.

Pretty soon, both me and Jonah became key leaders in our own departments, and rose to a type of fame within our circles of co-workers. But unlike Jonah, I produced friction between myself and the other programmers, even over simple fixes like our style of coding.

“Listen, Jim, whenever I look over the module you wrote for reassigning magnetic power to a specific location, your comments don’t even make sense half the time!”

“It’s really simple, Tom, so simple. It’s all abbreviated so it doesn’t clutter the code!”

“But you need to make sure people know what each section does, or we can’t repair anything!”

“But then people can’t scan the code without a wall of text distracting them!”

Whether my logic made sense or it didn’t, the programmers learned to revere my hyper-criticism with caution. The coffee machine incident still comes back to haunt me sometimes during our brainstorming sessions. I’ll often get asked “Is my coffee ready for takeoff?” whenever I make a comment on someone’s algorithm design.

Without warning, I was wrenched back into the black empty space in my mind, and I could sense the Princess filtering my memories before the launch out. The launch day was skimmed over in front of me, recalling the moments after the rockets fired on, and we were launched into outer space for the first time.

One day appeared in front of my mind, three months after our launch, and we had just passed Saturn. The rings of ice and Saturn’s moons were in sight, and the planet’s massive size was imposing. Jonah and I had just finished collecting images and samples of the rings as we made our way past the sixth planet of our Solar System.

I saw Jonah keel over the mess hall sink, ready to vomit. “Jonah, you okay, bud? Did your stomach not agree with that imitation New York Strip? Ha ha!”

Jonah loosed some of the steak from his body into the sink. Not a sight I wanted to watch.

“Blech…ugh…Tom, I think I’ll be fine. After three months, I thought I would be over this whole ‘space bends’ ordeal…”

“It’s not the ‘space bends’, it’s because of that exposure we discovered on your side of the ship. The magnetic field let in some solar radiation, and cooked your belly a bit, that’s all.”

“Whatever you say, Tom! Not a big deal if I’m still alive, right?” Jonah winked, and turned back to his only friend at that moment, the sink. He continued his one-way conversation with his emancipated steak.

I immediately withdrew myself from the memory and began to convulse in my mind. I knew what memory the Princess had spotted next, and she had no idea what was about to transpire next. But I did. I tried with all my might to sound out an alarm to her, but my thoughts couldn’t penetrate her mind.

Princess! You need to stop now! You’ve seen enough! STOP!

Then the memory came. It was a week after we had passed Saturn, and I was sitting on the bridge, whistling “Good Morning” by the Beatles. I did a sweep over all our systems and everything looked the same as they usually were.

The room darkened and the blue alert had resounded throughout the ship. I ran to the control station, and saw where the alert’s source had been: the hydrogen conversion module where Jonah had been earlier that morning. The system read the alert reason on the marquee:

“PERSONNEL INJURY REPORT; BRUISING IN LOWER RIGHT ABDOMEN, REQUIRES IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION”

I ran as fast as I could to the conversion dock one level below me. After about a minute of running, I came across Jonah crawling out of the module with his hands grasping at his abdomen, and blood dripping out of his mouth. He reached for my hand, but could not bring himself to stand.

“Jonah, can you run with me to the medical wing? We need to figure out what’s wrong!”

“*cough* …Tom, my appendix burst last week.”

“…How did you figure this out? I thought you had said it was the radiation that got to you!”

Jonah coughed some more, and the blood followed after. “I…checked myself after what you said, and the computer…called it ‘acute appendicitis’, and waived it off as insignificant. The radiation probably aggravated the issue, and now…*HACK*”

Jonah was not doing well at all. I coaxed him to ride on my back up to the medical wing, and with each step, he screamed out, trying to recoil into a ball. I knew it was hurting him to stretch out like this, but he needed surgery.

The medical wing’s doors slid open, and I laid him on the inspection table. Typing in my passcode, the physician program turned on and gave his body a couple key scans in the area he experienced his pain. The program returned this diagnosis:

“BURST APPENDIX; MAJOR ORGANS INFECTED – STOMACH, KIDNEYS, AND COLON”

This is a fatal disease right now!

“Jonah! You need surgery immediately! You’ll die if we don’t remove that thing!”

“…Tom, do you remember our training, that wall over there next to the information console?”

Jonah lifted his finger and pointed at a section of the wall that read “Suspended Animation Cell”. He was suggesting that I place him in there while he had this in him? Far from it; I asked the surgical console to perform an emergency appendix removal. The marquee then read: “APPENDECTOMY IN PROGRESS”.

While the procedure happened, Jonah grabbed my arm and said something I already knew I didn’t want to hear.

“Tom, this can’t heal my other organs…you know that, don’t you?”

His words rang too true in my head; I was hoping for something that wasn’t coming.

“But, Tom…if you throw me into that animation thing, my body might recover on its own…”

Hearing Jonah’s idea, I ran to the information console, and made my request known to the computer.

“Computer, confirm current status of patient ‘Jonah’.”

APPENDICITIS, DAMAGED STOMACH, LEFT KIDNEY, AND COLON

“Project time needed to recover in the Suspended Animation Cell…”

RECOVERY UNLIKELY, 15% CHANCE FOR ONE YEAR IN ISOLATION

“COMPUTER! What can increase his chance of survival?!”

PARTITION HYDROGEN CELLS TO ANIMATION CHAMBER, INCREASES SURVIVABILITY TO 75%

“Do it now. Confirm!”

PARTITION CONFIRMED; PREPARE PATIENT FOR 1 YEAR SUSPENSION

I lifted Jonah and his scarred abdomen to the suspension pod. Setting his feet on the platform, his body laid limp on the incline and his expression turned to fear. My face contorted into a shape of agony as my friend began to speak into me.

“Tom, promise me you will finish this mission and take me home. Do this for me and the project team; don’t concern yourself with MEEEEE-“He screamed out as another sharp pain ran from his chest upward. He gasped for breath, and relaxed again.

“Jonah, I will bring you home. Please don’t die before we get there! I…I’m sorry!!!”

“Tom…” Jonah couldn’t hold back his tears any longer. “TOM. Make it out there for me! See this galaxy of ours! See where our DESTINY is capable of taking us! Go and…”

The chamber shut, and he relaxed into an artificial sleep, no longer speaking. His vitals appeared on the glass, showing an unstable heartbeat and high blood pressure. The glass fogged, and the wall shut away my view of his body, leaving only his vitals displayed. I took a couple steps back and fell to my knees, crying out deeply for relief.

"JONAH, NO! PLEASE!"

CELESTIA, GET ME OUT OF THIS NOW! STOP IT!

She had heard me, and my eyes tore open, and I rang out the gripping pain in my heart, my body’s trembling merely a twinge in comparison. The whole group of ponies winced and galloped away from my bed, unaware of what the Princess had unearthed in my mind. Celestia jerked away from me and began to sob uncontrollably, empathizing with that moment of pure hopelessness with Jonah.

Twilight ran up to the Princess, but she extended a hoof at her, pleading with her to step away. Twilight stood helpless to comfort either of us as we shared equally in the events leading up to Jonah’s suspension.

“Twi…light. This colt can be trusted. I’m so sorry, Tom. You have been through an unimaginable time. I was a fool to dig into that, not knowing what it would bring back. You have not lied once to me, and I have been uncaring.”

I wanted so badly to just burst into a tirade against Princess Celestia. She had done to me what nobody in the world should have the ability to do. She violated my soul, my mind when she dug up that horrible day…

But I understood why she did it; her country must have dealt with incredible threats in the past. If I want to survive, if I want Jonah to live, I need to accept her authority, just as much as she needs to sympathize with my cause. I knew by allowing her access, that day was likely to return to me.

“Your Highness…how do you intend on ridding me of this pent-up magical energy? Twilight said it will kill me eventually. And I have no way to release it from my body.”

The Princess composed herself, and summoned her magic to comfort my body again.

“Tom, Applejack, Twilight, it is about time that I explain in a little more detail about how Starswirl rose to prominence in Equestria. There is a lengthy history with him that I won’t go into now, but what I will say may surprise even you, Twilight.”

With her disclaimer finished, the Princess casted her magic and before us manifested a hologram of a young, gray colt robed in cobalt blue, with a set of constellations on the hind parts of the outfit. His mage cap wore a few golden bells, with the top dangling forward just above his forehead. This was the famous Starswirl the Bearded who touched a similar meteorite to mine.

Twilight looked shocked and confused at the hologram. “But Princess, Starswirl started his career with the Equestrian Magician’s Guild in his old age. Why are you showing him like this?”

The Princess smirked and explained the image. “Twilight, this IS Starswirl in his old age. In this, he is about 80 years old.”

80 years old?! But he looks as young as I am!

Twilight rang out a protest. “But Princess! That would mean that he must have been hundreds of years old before he passed away!”

“Twilight, that meteorite not only gave him increased intelligence, but the meteorite also reacted to the green solution: the rock possessed magical attributes of both the blue and green chemicals.”

“Starswirl never received his cutie mark until I permitted him to touch the meteorite. By then, he was advanced in age, around 60 years old. After he touched the rock, his body transformed into that of his youth, and his wisdom sharpened to a degree that rivals my own. His power was nothing more than a blessing from me rather than something he worked hard to achieve.”

The Princess took away the hologram, and paced around the room, searching for words.

“…Tom, the reason why Starswirl is so important is not how he obtained his power, but what he chose to do with it. You also have a choice, and you made that choice without knowing it. You chose to touch the rock. You chose magic. Because of your choice, you have been tied to a destiny that must be worked out here in Equestria: that prophecy was about the Starswirl Meteor.”

The meteor was named after him? I don’t think any of this is an accident anymore.

I began to inquire about the meteor’s namesake. “Your Highness, why is this meteor named after him?”

“Starswirl had written that prophecy before he passed away. But before he left us, that same meteor was set to orbit our planet again before it took its long return back around. Starswirl collected his remaining blessing from the rock, and launched it at the meteor. With that, his life ended without anypony knowing what he had done, except me. I named it after him so nopony would forget him.”

The prophecy had come full circle, and the power that was given to Starswirl was passed down to me. I didn’t know what was going to happen next, but if the Princess didn’t resolve the issue soon, I could perish, and Jonah would be doomed to fade away. But how did she plan on releasing the stranglehold the magic had on me?

Princess Celestia motioned the others to move away from me, and she beckoned Twilight next to her. “Twilight, lend me your magic, and I’ll channel it through mine.”

The two auras, gold and lavender, twisted together and hit my forehead. The pain that existed in me before returned, more furious that ever. I kept whimpering loudly as the energy that circulated in my body started to boil. My body lifted off the ground and hovered in the air. My entire being glowed a bright white while I was suspended in midair, and a stream of energy started to rotate around me. The aura of light set me on the ground, and dissipated.

My forehead began to swell and tear apart, and I screamed out in anguish before collapsing to the ground. The pain had left me for good, and a strange wave of calm filtered through my body. I sat up and sheepishly grinning at me were Applejack and Twilight. Both of the mares expressed great delight and began to skip around the room, apparently happy that I was suffering.

“Um, ladies, why are you cheering? I was just in intense pain, and you’re happy?!”

Applejack pointed me upward. “No, ya silly varmint, we’re happy because of ‘that’.”

Sure enough, I looked up, and the center of my vision was blocked. I couldn’t figure out what was blocking it, so I lifted a hoof up to try and move the obstruction away. My hoof made contact with the mystery blocking my sight. I doubled back, and gave a frightened stare at the Princess, and she smiled back at me. I looked back up and that’s when I figured it out what it was. The Princess then addressed me with a formal tone.

“Welcome back to us, Starswirl. Your horn is as gallant as ever.”