I opened my eyes to the void. Stars and galaxies took their places on a blackbody background at a chilly 2.7 Kelvin.

I once dreamed of being an astronaut. As a kid in the mentoring program I loathed the day they shipped me off for a visit to the home of the living dead. Well, the retirement home, but same thing. I figured Mrs. Thomson would be a creaky old bag of bones, but she was one tough motherfucker. Nearly broke my fingers when I tried to steal a snack from her kitchen.

She told me stories of her time working at mission control for the first manned spaceflights. She gave the astronauts pretty pictures of herself dolled up in tight bright colored dresses and then joked about catastrophic life support failures when they exited the craft for spacewalks.

I had dreams of waltzing through the front door of Hoenn's Mossdeep Space Center in a spacesuit and proclaiming to the men at mission control, "I'm ready for space. Send me up, boys."

Well I made it. I am cold and wet and weightless. My legs effortlessly sway through the vacuum and my hair extends toward the far reaches of space like the arms of an underwater seaweed.

It's so cold up here. I can see an abnormally bright light on the sky. Perhaps it's the sun, but if so then I am a long way from home. I suppose that doesn't matter now that I am dead.

Death is so cold.

I am wet.

I am… wet? Seems odd. I don't know why I'd still be wet. My arms are solid. So is the rest of my body. Perhaps the afterlife is similar to the living world. Will I still have to pee even though I'm dead?

But now the stars are moving. I don't understand, it's not even a coherent motion from my own rotation, it's random like the atoms of a cold gas. They aren't stars at all.

They're water droplets.

They're all reflecting light from the bright object in my peripheral vision. I reach out and touch them. My hand gets wet. I see now, they've been slowly and gently raining on me this whole time. This must be how it rains without gravity.

"Hello? Hello?" I can still talk.

What happened to me? It was raining. Nidoking charged. John fell. Faraday failed. Gyarados killed me with a Hyper Beam.

"John? Faraday?" Unless it didn't. "Hello?"

How is that possible? Am I still alive? "No…"

This isn't space.

Well of course it is space, but not the kind a thousand kilometers above the surface of the earth. This is curved space. This is a distortion. I'm breathing oxygen and I'm not instantly freezing but gravity is gone and the bending has begun.

It is an icy hand wrapped around my heart. I can't breathe. "John? John! Where the hell are you? Say something!" My head is spinning. I'm still going to die.

No I'm not going to die. The bending has taken hold of my emotions and repeatedly bashed them into the dry dusty ground like Sam's Growlithe did to Sarah's Eevee. It's just so hard to keep a level head.

But yes, I am going to die. It's only been theoretical to this point but I must be in a disconnected manifold. One of Alcubierre's colleagues theorized that it could be possible to distort space so severely with the Marsh tensor field that closed bubbles of spacetime would disconnect from the universe for an indeterminate amount of time before reconnecting, if they ever did at all. Those in academia called it "bubble theory" and they thought it was a complete joke, but I suppose I'll prove them all wrong.

Well, not if I die here first.

"John! Say something!" He has to be out there somewhere. I don't want to die alone. Please God don't let me die alone.

"John!" I'm so cold.

Faraday must be out there too. "Faraday! Do your shocky thing so I can see you. Are you out there?"

I can't hear anything else. I open my mouth to scream John's name but nothing comes out. I can't speak.

Oh god I can't speak. Why can't I speak?

"John?" It comes out barely a whisper but at least I can still talk. Please God don't let me die alone.

But he doesn't call out to me. I don't know what to do. I wonder how I will die now. Probably dehydration. That would be awful. Well maybe I can drink enough rain. Then starvation? Also horrible. I can't tell exactly how big the bubble is, and it seems large, but maybe I'll be lucky and it's small enough that I'll run out of oxygen before anything else. Technically carbon dioxide poisoning. That would be pleasant. Just fall into an endless sleep.

Or maybe I'll reconnect with the universe before then. Ha! Wouldn't that be nice. I'm so cold.

I hear something.

"John? Faraday?"

It sounds like sharp gasps. "Oh my god, John." He's drifting behind me, eyes wincing closed every time he inhales.

"John, say something." He doesn't respond to me. He just keeps inhaling and clenching his fists like he can't hear me. "John?" He still doesn't respond but he is drifting ever so slowly in my direction. He should reach me soon. "Listen, we're trapped in a bubble universe and I don't know if we'll ever get out but please just come here." It's the most ridiculous thing I've said in a long while. I know he has no control over his trajectory in an empty weightless space, but I ask him anyway.

No. Oh no no no. He's not drifting toward me. His path is angled far enough away from me that we won't collide. "John! Look at me!"

He doesn't respond so I unzip my soaking pants and slip them off. But they're not long enough. After tossing the end of a pant leg out like a fishing line it's clear that he is much further away.

"John!" I mash my pants up into a ball and think for a moment that I'm lucky they're dense material and soaking wet. I throw them in the opposite direction and the recoil launches me ever so slowly toward John. The toss has also increased my rotation, so the trip is a bit disorienting.

I start frantically tossing anything else I can to propel myself faster. Shoes, jacket, shirt, I almost throw my phone but it isn't so massive and I convince myself I may need it still.

"Ow." Finally the back of my head hits John's elbow. "John." I pull him toward me and squeeze him tight before pulling back and examining his face in the dim light. He's stopped gasping but there are tears floating away from his eyes and he's shivering.

"John, look at me." I place my hands on his shoulders and shake him a bit and finally he recognizes me.

"Liz?" He starts sobbing and hugs me.

"It's okay, we're together." I stroke his back until he stops crying.

"Where are we?" he asks.

"Bubble dimension." I explain the bubble theory to him without mentioning that we're going to die in here.

"How did it form? And what's that light?"

"Well I'm not sure but…" What is that light? The bubble theory says nothing about that. It should just be a closed space, trapping whatever matter inside. John and I are here. So are the raindrops. Maybe Faraday. I don't know what the light is.

"Could it be Faraday?" John asks.

"No, he couldn't sustain such a constant brightness for so long."

We both cling to each other while we stare at the light.

"You're almost naked," he says, shivering.

I am almost naked. "Take off your clothes, they're soaking wet and taking the heat from your body."

He looks at me skeptically while slowly removing his shirt.

"I had to use my clothes as propellant to get to you," I say, "but now that they're off I'm not cold anymore."

He shrugs and continues undressing while I awkwardly try to keep hold of him so he doesn't drift away into the darkness. "I'm still pretty cold," he says.

I grab his clothes and throw them away from us.

"What'd you do that for?" He tries to reach for them but they float away.

"I lied. I'm still cold. I just didn't want to be the only one."

"Are you fucking serious?"

"Yes! Just… we're bending and we're all fucked up in the head so let me be crazy."

"Are you fucking serious? You couldn't just not throw them away?"

It suddenly occurs to me where we could find a powerful light source. "Hyper Beam!"

John furrows his brow at me. "What? You gonna blast me?"

"Gyarados shot a Hyper Beam. That's where the light is coming from. We're not going to die!" I laugh and smile and kiss him.

"What are you talking about?"

I look back to the light source. "This isn't a bubble universe, it's just a regular old spatial distortion. Well, a very large and asymmetric one, but still a spatial distortion. Of course it isn't a bubble universe, how fucking stupid am I? Bubble theory is ridiculous. We can exit."

John just shakes his head.

"Okay, we must be trapped inside a spatial distortion that almost everywhere looks locally like a three-sphere, but the global topological structure is still connected to the rest of space at a localized two-sphere boundary."

He nods his head. "Oh yeah, I understood all of that perfectly. Great explanation, Liz."

"Oh fuck off. We're in a… almost bubble. We're in a pimple."

"A pimple universe?"

"Not a separate universe, just a large pimple on the fabric of space."

"What does that have to do with Hyper Beam?"

I smile. "What is the only light source bright enough to make that light?"

He nods. "The Gyarados Hyper Beam."

"Yes."

"So as we float here, Gyarados is still firing its Hyper Beam at the edge of this pimple universe?"

I can feel the smile vanish from my face. "Time passes differently in curved space."

He nods. "So if we ever do get out of here, we're going to feel the rest of that Hyper Beam?" he asks.

We're still going to die.

I guess we both realize this. Neither of us speaks. We just reach our arms around each other and lock into a tender embrace. We're going to die, but at least I won't die alone. The touch of his cold wet bare skin against mine is oddly comforting. Our breathing falls into sync and he twirls his fingers through the floating strands of my weightless hair.

"I'm sorry Liz."

I place a hand on the back of his head and run my fingers back and forth through his hair.

"I do… like you. It's just…"

I bring my head up to look him in the eyes. I place a hand on his cheek and I'm consumed with the overwhelming urge to feel his lips on mine one last time. I know we're under the influence of bending, but I can tell neither of us cares about that anymore. We are all that exist in this moment.

"You're intimidating," he says.

"What?"

"You're intimidating."

I resist the urge to scream at him and confirm his accusation. "What do you mean?"

"You asked me before, you know, why I don't like you. And I do, but you're intimidating."

"And you decided to answer my question right now?"

"I'm feeling honest. I thought we were having an intimate moment. We're about to die so I wanted to say."

"Not that kind of intimate, John. What the fuck does that even mean? I'm intimidating?"

"Oh come on, you know what it means." He starts imitating me. "Let's go see the distortion. Let's stare at the angry Steelix. Let's fight a Rhydon. Let's fuck while my boyfriend's away. Let's go chase Zapdos. I don't know, sometimes it's exhausting keeping up."

"How is that intimidating? Those are all awesome. And the Rhydon was your idea. This goddamn trip was your idea. How does that make us different?"

"Okay that's not what I meant." He pauses and struggles for words. "It's like I can never measure up."

"What, measure up to me? Have I robbed you of your masculinity? Are you fucking kidding me?"

"That's not what I mean."

"Oh bullshit! I know, I'm a girl. I'm not supposed to do all the badass guy things. You remember what they called me in high school?"

"I know, the mutant girl, and I'm tired of hearing your same old tired feminist shit."

"Well that same old tired feminist shit is there because butthurt guys like you need an excuse when a girl shows you up. Every time I outscored someone on a test or ran faster in gym or got moved into an advanced course they called it a cheap gene hack, like being genetically engineered is some kind of inhuman advantage. Fuck you. Go back to the void, crying and gasping like when I found you. This intimidating enough for you?"

He says nothing and I notice how much more uncomfortable this argument is since we're still clinging to each other in nothing but damp underwear.

He looks away for a long while before speaking again. "Sorry."

I take a breath and his skin tingles under my fingertips once more.

He smirks. "Well I guess zero-gee sex isn't gonna happen now."

"What?"

"Relax, it's a fucking joke."

"Let's do it." My bra is already floating away when I reach for his underwear.

"What the hell? Are you serious?"

We're facing each other naked now. "You are an unbelievable asshole and I can't talk to you right now, but we are going to die and we are in zero gravity." I slide his cock inside me. "So shut up and fuck me."

The stars in the background of our universe collide and time stretches out toward our inevitable demise and I don't know how long we've been oscillating in free space when something other than John's outstretched palm hits my ass.

I turn around and notice the unconscious body. "Carlos?"