Episode 1: Space Hazards

The twin head-lamps fastened to each side of his helmet illuminated the narrow cavern and set the jagged, teeth-like protrusions of milky and rose quartz twinkling against its dull siliceous groundmass. Edging himself forward gently, he watched as the sableye scraped against the silicate rock encasing a crystal on the cavern wall in a feverish attempt to expose the mineral. "Easy," he said into his headset. "Easy now." The tiny purple pokémon, in a jittery motion, rapidly flicked its head in Doron's direction, blue gemstone eyes reflecting back the rays of light from his head-lamps. He had strapped a small belt about the pokémon's waist on which was attached the frequency receiver with cords stretching up to a single earpiece and small microphone so that the sableye could hear his commands. Pausing only long enough to offer Doron an eerie, glistening razor-toothed grin, the sableye quickly returned to its task. Doron, pulling himself further into the cavern meter-by-meter, climbing horizontally, slowly swept past the pokémon, deeper into the asteroid. As he passed, the sableye began gnawing and grinding the quartz, giggling as it fed.

The asteroid was roughly 6 km in diameter and one of maybe a dozen in the cluster, most of which were much smaller. Doron recalled that the smallest he measured was only a few meters across. He'd explored the topography of many of the larger asteroids as well, but only a few had traces of quartz, rhodonite, amethyst, and various other silicate minerals. In fact, he had found that most were carbonaceous, up to 80%, with only traces of silicate and heavy metals like iron and lead. Sprinkled within the cluster, however, were asteroids like this one-like O13-Z-those of whose origin, he was almost certain, were not of this star system.

The tunnel terminated into a semi-open chamber in which ancient collisions with nearby asteroids had exposed the natural enclosure to the frigid space beyond. He glided into the chamber head-first, feet outstretched behind him, reaching now for his camera bound to his belt. "Activate camera application," he said. To the right of his visor appeared a digital readout in dull green that indicated pixilation, zoom, frame width, and, at the bottom, the battery life percentage. As he neared the center of the chamber, he muttered, "Terminate velocity." Pressurized air blew from the two small hoses positioned on either shoulder, bringing him to rest. He was suspended momentarily in the middle of the chamber as he adjusted the camera lens. Slowly, the asteroid's gravity brought him to the chamber floor.

Before him emerged a massive vein of quartz surrounded by a crown of what appeared to be basaltic rock with red flakes of iron oxides. He knelt down, holding the camera outstretched, the image appearing on the translucent screen inside his visor. He snapped a few pictures, and put the camera away. "Close camera application," he said. Just then, he felt something tugging on the leg of his suit.

"Sable, sable!" the sableye cried, staring up at him. "Sable… sableye."

Doron nodded. "Yes, yes, you can have some of this, too."

"Sable!" the pokémon shrieked, grinning. It leapt forward towards the vein, but miscalculated the necessary velocity. It squealed as it zoomed right over the vein, only managing to scrape its claws across it as it went by, and smashed into the chamber wall.

"Sableye," Doron scorned. "Be careful."

The sableye scratched its sore head, grimacing. "Sable… eye," it groaned.

"Stop fooling around," Doron said, removing his pick and brush from his belt. "Help me get a sample of this quartz." The sableye crawled towards him, keeping its body low to the ground. "Be sure to get some of the surrounding rock. I don't think this vein is native."

"Sableye?" the pokémon said, curious.

Doron pointed at the various holes in the chamber walls. "See those? This asteroid has been impacted several times." The sableye looked up and wooed at the sight of the twinkling stars visible beyond the dark chamber walls. "There's no oxygen here," he said, going on. "Quartz is a mineral that requires oxygen to form." He struck a crevice between a crystal and its silicate mantle. "It couldn't have come from space," he explained. The sableye scraped at the vein's base, darting its gaze back and forth between Doron and the glistening quartz, occasionally grinding its teeth in hungry anticipation. "Not that oxygen matters to you, eh?"

The pokémon stopped, glanced up, grinned wildly. Doron laughed. "No, not to you. But most life on Gãia needs it. Without oxygen, most living things on the planet would cease to exist." He retrieved a small sealable bag from a belt-pouch, and unzipped it. Carefully, he added the samples into the bag. "Oxygen is the central component to metabolism, you know."

"Sable, sable," the pokémon said, bored. It pointed at the crystal and then back at its mouth. "Sable!" it cried.

"Just a bit more," Doron said, patiently. "We want to be thorough."

Suddenly, a ringing tone began playing in his helmet and across his visor screen were the words, in red, INCOMING CALL. "Answer," he said.

"Dr. Woeth?" the voice on the other end said.

"Yes, Ahmed. We're almost finished here," Doron said into his mouthpiece. "ETA 20 minutes."

"Affirmative. I was just calling to let you know that a call came in over the 'com for you a few minutes ago. From VU," Ahmed said.

"Oh?" Doron rolled his eyes. "What do they want?"

"You to be at some conference. I don't remember, doc. I wrote down the date."

"How long?"

"Long?"

Doron sighed. "When's this 'conference?'"

"In a week, I think."

"A week?" Doron said, incredulous. "We'd have to leave immediately to get there in time!"

"Yeah, I guess that's the bad news."

Doron groaned. They will expect me to present, and I haven't any of my notes together, he thought. The university was infamous for its poor planning of so-called 'conferences'-in reality, Doron felt they were little more than social gatherings in which scientists who hadn't researched in the field in years sat around comfortably to critique those who still grinded day to day. They will want to hear all about the minerals. They will want to know my explanations. He sighed. He knew that they would drill him on his methodology, on his cluster selection, on his decision to spend so much of the university's research grant money on passage to the outer belt and whether it had yielded any tangible results. Had it? he thought to himself. He had spent six years of his graduate career researching pokémon evolution in Todd Sweeney's lab-at the time, quite poorly funded but open-armed to new grad students. He had chosen the evolution of mineral-associated pokémon as his study species due to a rather obscure paper he'd read as an undergraduate by the physical chemist, Julio Vasquez. In it, Vasquez had argued that the mineral-associated pokémon did not represent some anomaly in pokémon evolution, but rather the ancestral state of the first space-faring-and, ultimately, Gãia colonizing-pokémon species.

"Dr. Woeth? You there?" Ahmed said, breaking Doron's train of thought.

"Yes, apologies," he said. "Where are you in orbit?"

"Position 270°," Ahmed said. "Relative velocity is… 50 m/s."

Doron sighed in exasperation. "Do the math, Ahmed. I haven't a calculator."

"Sure you do," Ahmed joked. "Use your calculator app on your visor interface."

Doron had forgotten about that. As a biologist, he'd spent much of his schooling around organic, biological organisms-he often found himself wholly ignorant of emerging technology. "Fine, give me a second," he said. "Activate calculator application." A transparent, scientific calculator appeared on the right-hand side of his visor interface. Alright, Ahmed is in orbit around the asteroid cluster at 50 m/s. He's at position 270°, which is (0, -1) of the unit circle, as we defined the positions. Luckily, I'm at the 90° position, or (0, 1), exactly 180° from Ahmed. The computers indicated that the circumference of the cluster was… he thought for a moment. 70 km. Okay, so if circumference is C = πd, then the diameter is the circumference divided by π. "Calculator," he said. "70 / π." The interface responded: "22.28." Alright, so he's 22.28 km away, on the opposite side of the cluster. Doron knew that he'd need to convert this value into meters. He closed his eyes and attempted the multiplication in his head. Okay, since there are 1,000 meters in 1 kilometer, I just need to shift the decimal point over the same number of 0's as in the equivalent meters. That means that he's… 22,280 m away. Traveling at 50 m/s, he'll be here in… "Calculator. 22,280 / 50."

Interface: "445.6"

That's in seconds, he thought. "445.6 / 60," he said. Interface: "7.4."

"I'll be there in five minutes," Doron said, finally.

Ahmed laughed heartily on the other end of the line. "I'll be right behind you, doctor!"

Doron signed off the calculator application and began returning his tools to the proper slots on his belt. His movements were clumsy and lumbering due to the immense girth of his suit. The temperature in the asteroid's chamber was the same as space-about 3 K, or -270.15°C. This meant that the bulk of his suit's size was dedicated to insulating him-much different than the suits he wore while strolling around the portcullis or the catwalk outside the university. There, in the suspended atmosphere above Vion's volcanic surface, he needed only an aluminized fire proximity suit-light-weight and flexible, save for the oxygen tank he was forced to lug around. Why they decided to build the system's most elite university in the atmosphere of a molten planet is still a mystery to me, he thought.

"Sable, sable!" the sableye cried as it chipped off chunks of crystal and stuffed them into its mouth.

"Time to go," he said. "Come on." He lifted his feet off the ground, allowing the lack of gravity to leave him suspended above the chamber floor, and reached out to grab the protruding rocks to propel him forward. "And Sableye," he said, turning back to the little purple pokémon that had now climbed wholly atop the vein and proceeded to attempt to fit the entire quartz cluster into its mouth, "do be careful, will you?"

"Shabshabshab," it uttered, its mouth full of crystals.

Doron scoured. "Don't talk with your mouth full. Now come on."

They propelled weightlessly through the asteroid's shallow cavern, the rays of his head-lamps bouncing prettily off the jutting crystal veins surrounding them, the sableye's gemstone eyes glistening as it gazed at each of them, gnashing its teeth. They reached the cavern's mouth within minutes, and Doron tethered himself to the rocky threshold with a hook attached to an elastic rope. He gazed out across the asteroid's surface-the rising, silt-covered hills and the smooth plains intersecting the crooked, pointed cliffs, craters that formed an array of tiny basins along the periphery of the cavern's mouth. Above them, twirling freely in the expanse of space as if in eternal cosmic dance were many other smaller asteroids, some coated with gray dust and others entirely encased in ice. Beyond these, he could see the Neȋndur nebula, a cascading amorphous cloud of hydrogen and carbonaceous dust particles radiating green and purple against the blackness, and from within three bright, new stars glimmered. Even hundreds of light-years away, he thought, the sight is still breath-taking.

From behind the mountainous distance emerged the Kalos. The vessel was one of the largest of its kind, half a kilometer in length from nose to thrusters, with two halo-chambers on either side of its midsagittal plane. These chambers were narrow, circular compartments that rotated about a central disk, utilizing centripetal force to simulate gravity. The ship sported both a dorsal and ventral saw-toothed fin, each of which were painted turquoise, while only the former had the letters S scrawled across it. The entire ship, Doron was told, had to be assembled in space because it was too massive to escape the planet's atmosphere, and too dangerous to be launched with traditional fuels. The nose was blunt and painted to look like the pokémon Sharpedo, complete with red eyes shadowed by dark, semi-circular lines on a field of blue; whereas the underbelly was painted white. The ship appeared to be gliding as it approached-Ahmed was utilizing the cluster's gravity to hold the ship in orbit, only firing the thrusters to correct if necessary.

"To the pod," Doron said, gesturing to the small landing pod they had used to touchdown on the surface. He bent over and extended the hook-rack at the nose and heel of his boots, and drew his pick. "Easy, now," he said. "Not too fast." The sableye nodded, holding itself to the rocky surface and slowly crawling towards the pod. Doron cautiously placed one boot after the other-the last thing he wanted was to move too fast and sail right off the asteroid. The gravity should be enough to keep me surface-bound if I don't move too fast, he thought as he inched forward.

"Sableye! Sable!" the pokémon called back to Doron as it climbed aboard the pod. The pod was anchored by a series of hooks around each extended metallic leg. Sableye opened the hatch at the top of the pod, and gestured for Doron. "Sable!" it cried.

"What're you screaming about?" he called. "I'll be there in-"

Doron never saw the asteroid spiraling towards him, and even after it slammed into the surface, just meters behind him, he didn't realize it until he felt the shockwave that sent him head-over-heels into space. As he twirled, all he could hear was the sableye crying into his headset, "Sable! Sable! Sable! Sable!"

"Argh!" he shouted, arms flailing, trying to stop the spinning but completely helpless to do so. "Terminate velocity!" he screamed. "Terminate velocity!" The twin hose shot out puffs of air, but the computer was incapable of recognizing that Doron was spinning. The air sent him sprawling back onto the asteroid. The force knocked his breath out and he struggled to regain it, crawling away from the impact sight as debris sprayed in all directions. He could feel pellets of rock pelting his back and legs, and he cried out in pain as he tried to drag himself away. He rolled over to sit up, but as he did his visor was slammed by a chunk of rock that sent a crack spider-webbing across the glass.

I'm going to die, he thought, falling onto his back from the impact. I'm going to die out here in space on this terrible asteroid. I'm going to get pulverized. The computer interface snapped off and on, a robotic voice over his intercom fading in and out, saying, "Oxygen… this… a… warning… oxygen… depletion… imminent…" He began gasping for air and he watched as frost rapidly gathered on the inside of his helmet as the moisture reacted with the near zero degree temperature outside.

As he began fading out, a figure appeared standing over him. It seemed to have tentacles-or multiple arms-and it knelt down over Doron. Just before he passed out, he saw into its gaping white eyes a single black dot that he thought could have been the moment of the universe's singularity.