Chapter 1: The End

My university offered math history classes once. At first I was bothered that it existed – why would it help me with math or science? I thought it must have existed solely to please people’s egos while wasting them of their time and money. But it sounded easy way to pick up elective credits, and university was hard enough as it is. I took it and ended up learning more about math and science than any other course.

Throughout many lectures describing how math and science were developed to solve problems, the lessons on Descartes stuck out to me – a Malamar from Grass Continent’s renewal era. He developed important ideas like the cartesian coordinates – plotting x and y on a graph – but his most important contribution was the statement “I think, therefore I am”. I’ve heard the statement before but I didn’t understand why this was important to math until my professor illustrated to me that the problem isn’t so much that we do exist, but everything else may not. Our senses are limited and prone to error. We can’t even tell the difference between dream and reality. Math, and therefore science, were tools made to predict things based on what few things we can be sure of. We can not see atoms just as much as we can’t see Arceus, but we know about the former because we can measure them.

Unfortunately, we can’t measure what makes someone a person. Nor can we quantify love on a scale or describe life as numbers, so these things don’t exist in the mind of science. In a way, it’s because it’s true. Atoms moving around by chained chemical reactions is what causes a heartbeat to raise, we just have poor rules to then call that love. I don’t actually believe everything is like this, but this draconic mindset has helped me solve many problems in math or life. A lot of obstacles turn out to only exist because we assume they’re real.

But science believes itself may be wrong. It’s ultimately just a bunch of rules we guess reality follows. Yet even if everything else may or may not exist, our minds still, because we use them. It’s a small comfort to know, although I don’t think everything else is going to exist much longer.

I am dragging a raft with a clean, silvery rope. My space suit isn’t flexible enough to let me heave it over my shoulder, or tuck it under my arm, so I swing it in wide arcs. My feet struggle to dig into the thin layer of white sand beneath, finding little friction before I’m bounced into the air. It’s exhausting moving like this. My breath is heavy and fogs up the visor. I hear my heavy heartbeat and nothing else in this void world. Darkness is above and a vast wasteland of moon dust mirrors it below.

A spark of radio static interrupts my focus. “Hey. Take a break.”

I look to my side. A Kommo-o co-engineer, now survival buddy, has let go of his rope and rests his hands on his knees. His space suit is bulkier than mine, looking like a plump Tyrunt with how he hunches over. His snout extends into his long yellow-tinted helmet and his eye glances aside to me. A thick glove presses his chest. “Seriously. We shouldn’t ignore exhaustion. Let’s take a five-minute break.”

I look ahead. Our lander out of here is there. It’s a tin can of orange and grey metal, beams and struts around its legs bare. We were lucky nobody bothered to put it away and it hasn’t collapsed with age.

I want to finish this final stretch, but he’s right. I let go and bend over to get some air into my lungs as well. My hand wipes the front of my helmet instinctively – I wish I can wipe the sweat dripping down my fur.

I peek out our stock. The raft we carried still has its goods strapped down. Spare oxygen tanks, tools, scrap parts, a computer, stockades of rations, batteries, and smaller stuff I’ve forgotten about. That’s good. Trailing behind it is a long, messy line etched in the sand.

The horizon beyond looks worse though. Fragments of the moon still hang in the sky, massive islands that refuse to fall. Bases of other guilds still lie on them, hanging upside down. Dark holes puncture between them. Glowing pink fluid collects at the bottom of these holes and seeps out, like tears.

I press my chest’s communication button. “That shimmering stuff. Is more falling down from before?”

He looks up. His head shakes. “I’m not thinking about it.”

I don’t stop thinking about it. I watch heaps of it drip out onto the moon. The biggest hole on the largest fragment had a thin, steady stream spilling out, filling up a pool in a distant crater.

Our break takes longer than five minutes. We shouldn’t be pushing the luck we had that we were far away from when the moon cracked open. When we arrived back at our base, nobody was there. There were only black holes around and puddles of pink ooze that trail away. All the spacecraft there had those uncanny blemishes and wouldn’t work as if essential components stopped existing. Radios did work, but no one picked up. We still don’t know what’s going on.

My friend stretches as far as his suit allows him. “Okay, Lucario. Time to move again.” He clumsily picks up the plastic rope with his bulky claw glove. He makes funny bunny hops heaving it forward. I join him.

I look back once more. Far, far away, a trail of the shimmering pink fluid zigzags toward our direction. I think Kommo-o saw it too.

We both know we were going to die. We’re pretending otherwise.