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 canceled 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, Marcy, on the home screen. They seemed happy and unaware of the tragic events that took place in the show. The image of Marcy 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 Marcy’s brother, Payton, 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, Lorenzo and Kageyama, 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,” said Carmen as she lowered her gaze to the floor in deep thought.

A long period of silence fell over the two after that statement. It’s like a cold front entered the room due to her words yet Carmen didn’t know why until she saw Phineas expression when she looked up to face him. He looked utterly exhausted with dark eye bags and disheveled hair yet his eyes were the most alarming part. He appeared to be staring into space with wide open eyes that were almost unmoving. It almost seemed like he was remembering something important yet to terrifying to want to recall.

“Uh Phineas are you okay?”

The mentioning of his name caused him to snap out of his daze and shake his head as a means to gain his focus again.

“Sorry sorry I just – remembered something it doesn’t matter.”

“Oh okay…,” responded Carmen who didn’t seem convinced for a moment but didn’t want to bug him about it.

A minute of silence passed again but the feeling of awkwardness was gone. Phineas eyed a picture on his office desk that was not visible to Carmen. He soon sighed and turned back to Carmen who seemed to be fiddling with a figurine on her desk that resembled a dragon.

“Carmen, you do know that that’s how things are in this world right? With what you said.”

Carmen paused at the piece of information from her mentor before looking back up to stare at him with mild confusion.

“It might seem depressing when you think about it but people that go into military service or the ones that work as public safety officials such as firefighters, they know the sacrifice that needs to be made. They make peace with it in a way. They know there’s a high chance of them never clocking back out from work one day yet they choose to continue their work. Do you know why?”

Carmen hesitated for a moment before answering.

“Because they want to help people?”

“Yes but that’s not the only reason. They not only want to help people but they also know that not many people would want to take the risk to do so. When we’re little most of us want to become Kaiju Mech pilots or Space Force pilots like in the news but once we grow up and realize that the job has a high fatality rate most of us quit dreaming about the job. It’s not that most people are cowards but that we all have an innate sense of self preservation and some of us can’t risk getting into cockpit if people rely on us to stay alive. The people that do these jobs know that they don’t have a guarantee they would come out unscathed and yet they do it anyways because somebody has to take care of the rest. Somebody has to be Atlas.”

Somebody has to be Atlas.

Those words echoed in Carmen’s head for a moment as she finally realized why Phineas was bringing up this conversation.

“I just want you to know that. Because I’ve been meaning to talk about this with you for some time and I was waiting for the right moment but there really isn’t one in the end. I can’t – promise you that Mizu and Conner would always make it out of every fight. You understand right?,” continued Phineas in a steady voice.

There it is. The truth. The hard cold truth that made Carmen stare at the floor and clench the side of her wooden chair with an iron grip.

It was common knowledge that mech pilots have a high fatality rate when it comes to Kaiju battles to the point that the Kai-O foundation made a special cemetery dedicated to them. Carmen worked as Phineas assistant for she wanted to learn robotics and he was the head of the robotic research division at Kai-O. He helped create features and equipments during mech production and in the process gets to meet the foundations pilots and even managed to befriend some like Mizu and Conner. Mizu and Conner are mech pilots known for their stellar team work and long win streak against the Kaijus that threaten the Gulf of Mexico. Carmen met them through Phineas and quickly came to admire them due to their strength and heroism.

Yet that didn’t mean they were immortal.

“I understand,” responded Carmen.

She really wished she didn’t tho.