Chapter 1- The Idea

It was a terrible idea.

Carmen lay on her bed after crying a bucket of tears and contemplated her existence as she stared at the light blue ceiling of her room. A song could be heard from her laptop, which showed the end credits of the last episode of The Last Planet.

"Why did I ever do this?" Carmen asked herself as she stared into oblivion in a sad attempt at finding a good reason for her current mistake.

"Why am I here? Why are any of us here?"

The existential questions that have been going around in her head have started to slip out into the quiet atmosphere of her room. She had turned off her room lights a while ago, and her blinds blocked out most of the moonlight that usually illuminated her room, turning it into a nest of shadows with only the light of her laptop keeping her sight intact.

The family had arrived some time after midnight from the park and immediately went to their respective rooms for the night. It has only been a couple of weeks after graduation day, and her life has already crumbled to pieces. Her family was seemingly unaware of her constant crying and muffled screaming. It's almost as if the world just went on acting as if Carmen's entire perspective on life hasn't totally been changed by the tragic ending of an anime show.

Well almost all of the world.

Unfortunately for her mentor, Carmen decided that it would be a good idea to invite him for a mini show watch party in order to help her brainstorm some ideas on a new simulation. Phineas was currently on a video call with her looking extremely concerned at his sobbing protege. Sadly he could sympathize with her as he too was crying a bit at the shows ending due to it reminding about his brother on Mars that he couldn't contact at the moment. That didn't meant he was going to sit here and let his friend cry herself to sleep over a show tho.

"Hey the ending might be not what you wanted but at least the show didn't get cancelled halfway through production like most animated shows nowadays. Besides I think the idea you had of trying to replicate some of the characters from the show to work on the Free Will Protocol project you proposed back at Kai-O would make you feel better. You could just make the fictional characters into AI models in the simulation. That way you wont be too sad about everything," suggested Phineas with a reassuring smile as he took of his glasses to wipe a few tears away from his eyes. Carmen just nodded along to what he was saying but her mind was already elsewhere at the moment.

Yeah, it's not like she wasn't going through the motions of the five stages of grief over the course of the last half hour for a group of fictional characters. Yeah, it wasn't that drastic.

Carmen stayed completely still and quiet for a solid minute as she stared at the rolling credits on her laptop before she quickly snatched a nearby pillow and screamed as high as her current lung capacity could allow her. Which wasn't that much since she already wasted her energy crying for the last thirty minutes, but still...

Yeah, it was that drastic.

Phineas just sighed in defeat before going back to working on his satellite communication experiment. He was working around the clock to find a way to communicate with his brother due to the fact NASA and any other organization involved with the Mars mission were not giving him any update information at the moment. Yet he still choose to stay on the call since he wanted to have company at the moment to keep him from going on a three 24/7 work crunch again.

After another five minutes of yelling profanities at the cruelty of the world and apologizing to Phineas for almost destroying his sense of hearing, she finally took the pillow off her face to take a much-needed breath of air. A couple minutes after calming down, she blinked at her bedroom ceiling, almost as if she were trying to find something or someone there to blink back at her.

"Why did you guys have to go and die?"

Ah, yes, the main reason she was balling her eyes out is because the main characters of the show, a found family who she empathized with from the start, had found themselves in an intergalactic war that they fought in to keep their families on Earth safe despite their young age at the time. Unfortunately, they soon committed the most horrible sin one could do.

They fucking died.

"You do know that they can't hear or respond to you, right?," reminded Phineas with a chuckle as he looked up from is worksheets to Carmen with a raised eyebrow.

"Yeah no shit, Sherlock. I'm just casually losing my fucking mind over a tragic ending of a TV show and you sir have a front row seat to watch it all go down. But trust me-," said Carmen as she sat up from her bed," - wait for the Dovecast award nominations later this year and I bet you this show would be nominated for a dozen categories. Especially for best animated show of the year. It's a literal masterpiece! A masterpiece of a tragedy but a masterpiece no less."

"Well that's the spirit. Almost thought you were going to take a bit longer to process the ending like you did when we watched Prime Arca," said Phineas a bit relieved that Carmen has finally finished her pity party. Not that he didn't mind her presence during such events but still it is a bit concerning to watch her go on an hour long rant about the ending like a conspiracy theorist. Not that he could say he never did that as well when he was younger but he would never admit that.

"Oh no I am still going through the five stages of grief at the moment. I just needed a quick break for a moment. Now back to my mental breakdown."

Phineas sighs once again in defeat before shaking his head in mild amusement as he returned to his work. She turns towards her laptop only to see that the episode had ended a minute ago and it was now showing the anime show home screen instead of the rolling credits she previously watched with emptiness and sadness. The main characters stared at her with joyful smiles on the cover image of the home screen. They seemed to be looking straight into her soul, which only irritated her by the second.

She soon crawled over to the other side of her bed and grabbed the laptop before lifting it up a few inches from her face so she could give the characters on the home screen a blood-piercing gaze.

"Why did you think that was necessary?

She waited a few seconds, almost as if she were expecting the characters on the screen to come to life and respond to her. Unfortunately, the technology needed for the fictional characters to come alive and apologize for their decision-making that led to their deaths only existed in the cyberpunk world of the show.

For now at least.

She soon shook her laptop in pure frustration and growing rage, hoping it could somehow bring the characters to life.

"Did you really have to go and hit the bucket?!"

She only increased the speed of her shaking as she felt herself becoming more enraged at the fictional characters.

"Answer me, you piece of shit! You weren't supposed to leave your families! You made a promise, remember!"

Tears started to slowly come pouring down her face one by one, but she didn't have the heart to care anymore and just let them fall onto her laptop screen.

"You were supposed to go visit the moon with them after the war. They just wanted you there. They all just wanted you safe. They just wanted you all alive."

The more she spoke, the more quiet she got, and she soon put her laptop out of its misery by putting it down in front of her. She wiped off the droplets of tears that dotted her laptop screen and found herself looking at the image of one of the main characters, Piers, on the home screen. They seemed happy and unaware of the tragic events that took place in the show. The image of Piers on the home screen looked far off from the last time she saw them at the end of the last episode, who seemed to be tired and accepting death. In the end of the show, to close a growing space rift the enemy created during a battle, they had to sacrifice their space mecha to seal it and in turn themselves as well.

Carmen went back to the last episode and skipped all the way towards the last few minutes where Piers brother, Matteo, was on the moon like he always dreamed of. Except he was alone on the moon. For he was the last surviving member of his family since Piers and their twin siblings Ivory and Zacharias sacrificed themselves during the war and his parents died off in the alien invasion that happened during the last few seasons of the show.

She paused the screen to turn to her window, which was covered in blinds. After pulling the blinds up, there was no moon but only the dark image of her backyard. The direction her window faced didn't allow her to see the moon as much as she wanted to. She soon turned to the next best thing, which was a poster of the moon that was pinned on the wall next to her door.

"Now...they're all alone."

She soon started to quietly laugh to herself, but it was devoid of happiness and rather filled with a sense of irony and deprecation.

"And to think I watched this to learn how to write love since there was a couple in the main cast and all I got was heartbroken."

The said couple were two main characters, Laren and Keito, who were also part of the group that had to sacrifice themselves for the faith of humanity. And to think they planned to get married on the moon at the end of the war. What a cruel joke.

After composing herself from her mini-pity party, all she felt was more resolute and a bit wiser in the aspect of relationships. Sometimes the only thing one wants for someone is to be safe, but it's their loved ones decision in the end. Not theirs.

"They gave everything to help their families be safe, yet they neglected their own. They saw no purpose for themselves beyond the war, so they put their whole soul into the fight, and that is what killed them. Yet the rest didn't want them to sacrifice themselves for them. All they wanted was for them to be okay. To be safe. But by the time they found out, it was already too late. There was no going back."

The reason why she sympathized with the main characters so much was because their actions reflected her own in the aspect of making everyone happy. She fondly remembers the time when she had dreams of her own, but now the longer she looks back at those days, the more jealous she becomes of her perfect younger self. She had everything going for her. Yet now she's already graduated, and she has no direction for her future. She can't even pick what job she wants to work towards. She doesn't even know if she can fully being a robotic engineer or become a video game maker or an animator. The career paths for her future were endless.

She soon picked herself up and walked towards her shelf to find a photo of her elementary school self with her mom in the district science fair. As she went to gently hold it in her hand, she smiled bitterly at herself.

"To think I wanted to be a nobel prize winner in robotic engineering and now I can't even get any project ideas without getting heartbroken. Figures."

"Your just like Satoshi when it comes to shows you know," spoke Phineas in a low voice which caused Carmen to turn back to her laptop to see Phineas looking at her with a small smile.

Satoshi. An old childhood friend of Phineas who was a star astronaut for NASA's space program on the moon base a few years ago. Everybody back then knew of the young astronaut who regularly lead rescue missions on the moon and would occasionally visit high schools to talk about the importance of team work.

He was also the older brother of her friend Keito but he doesn't like to talk about him much these days. Not since the Moon Crasher incident.

"Really?," asked Carmen curiously as she sat in her work chair while placing the laptop on her desk.

"Yeah he also had the tendency to get really attached to shows that we would watch when we were younger. Sometimes he would make me go with him for a movie premiere so he could rant about it for the next week with me. He especially loved shows surrounding the science fiction genre since he loved the idea of exploring space. So it's okay to want to win a Nobel prize and to get emotionally invested into shows. That's just how we people are in the end. Multi faceted."

Phineas mention of his old friends having a similar love to shows like her made her feel a bit better since she had a hard time nowadays to figure out if her behavior was suited for a nineteen year old robotics protegee. Her gaze soon turned back to the photo in her hands. Her mother in the photo, who seemed to be just happy to be there for her. She still remembers how encouraging her mother was of her science project, even if it didn't win any recognition or awards. She soon glanced over to a gold medal that she had won in her last year at high school during the annual STEM expo.

'Even if I might never win a Nobel prize at least this is enough,' she thought to herself happily.

 She stood up from her chair and placed the photo back on the shelf before plopping herself back in her seat. She stared at the shows menu screen on her laptop for a few minutes as the gears started to turn in her head at rapid speed.

"I recognize that face anywhere. You thinking something up in that brain of yours kid?," asked Phineas with a grin. He had witness his protegee brainstorm impressive projects long enough for him to recognize the look she would have when she came up with a new idea. Carmen nodded to him again as she continued to ramble to herself for a few more minutes.

"After watching the show, I noticed that people fly through space in giant mechs like they make in the Kai-O Foundation. People tend to model them in Hologlobe as cosmetics but never as vehicles due to their complex design. Yet I want to create something more...immersive."

"How immersive do you want it to be?"

"I don't know but I don't want to control it from the outside that's for sure."

As she pondered to herself, she glanced back at her laptop screen to see it display the show trailer over and over again since she left it alone. The trailer showed the cyberpunk aspects of the show and highlighted a major technology present in it called "Pantheon", which is said to be the most powerful mech in the entire show. A short scene in the trailer showed the main characters connecting to "Pantheon" through a headwear device called a gauntlet.

"Wait a minute! Why don't I just make an actual mech?! It is technically just a giant robot. A giant space faring weaponized robot. But a robot none the less. I could make a world so I can text out real world situations with it by using physic simulations!"

She continued to bounce around her room in joy for a few minutes after coming up with the brilliant idea before she stopped in her tracks and slowly turned back around to face the laptop with a nervous face.

"But where should I even start?"

"Baby steps kid. We lay out the basics first before figuring out the hard parts. Now let's plan this out shall we?," said Phineas before he pulled up a hologram board on his side of the video call. Carmen exited out of the streaming service and put on her VR headset to connect with Phineas on the other side of the screen.

After brainstorming the first steps of her simulation for a bit Phineas had to leave to go to an emergency meeting leaving Carmen to figure out the rest of her plan on her own. After a while of brainstorming by looking around her room for ideas she finds herself facing the same wall where she placed her moon poster on. Her eyes soon widen with a glint of determination as she realizes the endless possibilities that are open to her.

"Of course. Why try to go to the moon if you could just make one? I could just test the thing on a virtual moon!"

She soon stood up and grabbed a red pen and a sticky note from her shelf before quickly scribbling something down. After she finished sketching on the note, she walked over and placed it on the poster. The sticky note showed a quick sketch of her in an astronaut suit holding a flag with a lotus flower on it. One of her mother's favorite flowers.

She stepped back to admire her work.

"Don't you worry, guys. I know what I'm going to do now. I'm going to take us to the moon!"

She quietly cheered to herself so she wouldn't wake up her family. Now all she needed to do was make the sim. It's going to take some time and effort, but once she makes it, everything will be alright.

Hopefully.