"The stars have gone dark. Not only all those distant suns, but the planets as well." There were tears in her eyes.
"Hmmm." It was the most I could say without my voice cracking. My little girl was hurting. She had been hurting for weeks, for months, for years, ever since this slow apocalypse started.
"Has it truly come so far now? Is a look at the stars too much to ask for? This is... it's worse than being bombed into the dark ages." Comparing our apocalypse with hypotheticals could have been gallows' humour, but neither of us is laughing. "The sun could be revolving around the Earth now, and we would have no way of knowing. Galileo undone after seven centuries, and there's not even a church left to blame."
"Hmmm," I said. Failing to protect her. Failing to give her hope. And now, in this night without stars, not even able to adequately share her sorrow. What a father I was.
She cried. A few minutes passed, or maybe hours. I had no way of telling: my wristwatch has been a useless lump of plastic for a while now. The computers had been one of the first things to go, and by now, not even a mechanical watch would work reliably anymore. I counted my daughter's tears, counted the seconds, and soon lost track.
Finally, she stopped crying. "It's the fourteenth of July, 2288." Of course she still knew the date; she could tell it by the stars. Or at least, she used to, when the stars had still been in the sky.
I wondered, not for the first time, whether I would have made it this long without her. She was... capable. Enough to scare me, sometimes, like when she remembered nutrition facts about plants she had read about just once, decades ago. The time when she cleaned and sewed a cut on my leg as though she had done it a thousand times. Or when she had stabbed a man to death for killing her mother. I remembered the abyss in her eyes when she looked at me over his corpse. The tears and blood mixing on her face, and the way they sparkled in the light. The sudden, staggering clarity of that scene had made it seem epochal, the end of an age. Thinking back, that man had probably been the last human beside the two of us.
"There will be a lunar eclipse tonight," she continued, and I was once again in awe at her recall. I felt a flash of pride, but it didn't seem appropriate to express. I had no illusions about the worthlessness of my approval.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"It's a benchmark. We can confirm if shadows still exist on the scale of the solar system. Just another data point to feed the estimates."
The estimates. She never stopped attempting to quantify the end of the world. "How could any estimate help us now?" I couldn't help sounding bitter.
"We need to understand. Having a rough grasp of how fast it progresses will help in allocating our resources."
"Resources!" I laughed derisively, and hated myself for only being able to offer negativity. "Those limp, tasteless leaves we chew on, unaware whether they even contain nutrients anymore? It's August. Even the wild plants should be bearing fruit, but there's nothing. Just another detail that's gone forever."
"Still, we need to plan for the long term."
"And what does "the long term" mean, now? The next two months? One? How much longer do we have?"
"Dad? Shut up and let me find out."
So I did. It was good that she had called me out, really. She had saved me from the downward spiral, that mental trap I so often fell into these days. I wondered whether she had meant to keep me from my dark mood, or whether she had just been annoyed. Given her straightforward nature, I suspected the latter.
I took a deep breath. I couldn't remember when I had last smelled something. There was no way of telling when that detail had gone away.
I sat beside my daughter and looked at the moon. There had been craters, once, so big that they had been visible with the naked eye. So big that people of old had called them oceans, unknowing that those vast bowls had never held anything but dust. Now, the moon was a featureless silver disk. Its light still reached Earth, but perhaps that, too, was fake. Any number of cheap tricks could be used to avoid tracing rays through four hundred thousand kilometers of space.
"It's a wonder we're still alive," I said.
My daughter ignored me, but I kept talking. "Plant biology is breaking down. Everything is getting blurry, and I know it's not my eyesight getting worse. I found a rock today on which I swore I could count the polygons. Atoms have probably been gone for years at this point, and we just didn't notice until now, but somehow we are still alive. Heck, we probably should have died back when the computers broke down, or even earlier. Humans are full of vital details."
"Not this again."
"It's just... it's clear to me that there's a will behind all of this. An intention."
"We've talked about this! I agree that it cannot be a coincidence, but praying to any kind of God won't help. After all, if They wanted us to, They could have painted a message across the sky in flaming letters twenty feet high."
"Not God. Maybe we're in a simulation. There have been people arguing this since the middle of the twentieth century. There's an absolute limit on speed, smallest units of space and time, and even a fundamental relationship that limits the detail to which speed and location can be determined. Perhaps someone was trying to limit the data requirements and now, server space is running out."
"Dad," my daughter said, still looking at the moon. "Shut up."
I knew I had truly annoyed her now. Still, I couldn't have helped it. Maybe she was right, and my hypothesis didn't change anything. At the same time, I couldn't stop thinking about it. If there was a God, even if it was but an overworked lab technician in charge of a universal simulation, they could help. They were helping already, if I was correct.
Or maybe I was deluding myself.
I looked over at my daughter. The years in the wilderness had been harsh on her. Malnutrition had emaciated her, made her hair and skin brittle to the point of open sores, but there was still a light in her eyes. It was harsher than it had once been, sharper, but no less bright.
As I watched, it went out. Her eyes widened, her jaw slacked, a bright flush filling her face even before she consciously reacted.
"No!" she screamed. "Fuck no!"
Shocked, I followed her gaze. Where the moon should have been was nothing but pitch-black sky. The light around us, though still the same pale grey, no longer had any appreciable direction and threw no shadows.
"Fuck you!" she screamed. "Fuck you, God, simulator, whatever you are!"
She broke down crying. I put a hand on her shoulder, but she slapped it away.
I wondered how much longer it would take for the sun to rise. The pale mountaintops adorning the horizon seemed brighter than before, but that may have been a result of the strange imitation that had replaced the moonlight. All my life, I had been fond of mountains, and even now, as the world died around me, they enchanted me. Idly, I thought whether it was possible to reach them before I died.
The change happened while I was watching. A peak crumbled; a flank became smoother than was possible. One by one, the mountains were simplified into flat triangles, like a parody of themselves, until whatever force ate details decided that even that was too much. I stared at the flat horizon, and for the first time since my wife died, I, too, cried.
"It only seems like it's getting faster," my daughter said, and there was a terrible hollowness in her voice. "For years, it took away what no one would miss, and now, it's finally running out of background details. Now that the changes can't avoid being noticeable, we're almost done."
"And then?" In spite of the tears, my voice was calm.
"Humans are full of details. When there is nothing else left, it will start to simplify us, until we are fully abstracted away."
Death. After years of wasting away, it was imminent, and my body reacted. Heartrate quickening, blood pressure rising, a sudden urge to stop thinking and do something as my lizardbrain took over.
Pain bloomed in my gut. I looked at the knife handle protruding out of my shirt in disbelief. "What?"
"I need to plan for the long term. You'll buy me weeks, and —"
She didn't finish the sentence because some animal part of me had taken the knife and rammed it into her chest again and again and again until she stopped twitching.
The sun rose on a meadow of beautiful individual blades of grass, each covered in drops of blood and dew, and every single drop broke a sunray into its own little rainbow. The world was sharper and clearer than it had been in months, but I saw it only blurred through tears.
Her death bought me weeks. Weeks she would have used to research and investigate, to carefully record every detail that vanished around her, to spend her every living breath on a solution to the problem. Even at the very end, she had spoken of the long term. The slight chance at a future she was willing to sacrifice everything for. She had always been stronger than me.
Her death bought me weeks, and her knife shortened them to hours.
I was proud of her until the very last moment.