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When the world ends, he is a college student and she is a videogame tester. They meet in a bomb shelter next to a spaceship that’s going to the moon, when he trips over a chair and falls onto her console.
“I’m sorry.” he says, as he extracts himself from her lap. She seems completely absorbed in her game, and there’s a part of him that wants to ask her where she’s getting batteries from, for the world is a wasteland, devoid of supplies.
“...why do you want to leave?” she asks, for she’s surrounded by people who want to get off this wasteland, whose motives span the gamut from selfish to selfless. There are more people in this shelter than she’s ever seen, but this man is the first one who seems to have noticed her existence.
“I… just feel like I should be doing something to help, and if we can develop the moon into a livable place, more people can survive in a place that isn’t plague-ridden.” he answers, and she goes back to looking down at the screen.
Have I seen you before? You look familiar.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Hinata Hajime.” he answers, wondering why this strange woman finds him interesting.
“Nanami Chiaki. It’s… nice to meet you.” she says, as she offers him her hand. He takes it, as a loudspeaker blares that the only flight off Earth is departing in three minutes, and anyone who doesn’t get on is going to be left behind.
“So it’s like one of those simulation games, where you get to build your own world?”
If he closes his eyes, he can pretend that Nanami isn’t dying. Even with his eyes open, she looks like a peaceful angel, fully content to sleep forever.
“Hinata… I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I’m sick.”
It wasn’t contagious, but that didn’t matter to the other people on board, who were going to abandon her in a makeshift quarantine building until he volunteered to stay with her. Since then, they’ve mostly been trying to turn a box-like building into a sort of home, and seeing if anything can grow on the moon.
All in all, it hadn’t been that bad of a life.
“I’ll be the queen of the moon, and you’ll be my king, okay?”
Nanami opens her eyes. For a minute, he thinks he’s dreaming, but she lifts one of her hands and beckons him to join her at her bedside.
“...thank you…” she says, and her voice is like a whisper, but she used to be so energetic…
“For what?” he asks, for he hasn’t done anything. He knew that she was dying this whole time, and never bothered to research medicine or find a cure. She never brought her illness up, so he forgot about it until the day she collapsed.
“...staying with me…”
“Listen, Nanami, I’m not going to let you waste away in the middle of nowhere, okay? I promise.”
But that wasn’t enough. It gave them three years in their little kingdom on the moon, but he should’ve given her more. He should’ve started calling her by her first name and asked her more about who she was before the world ended or her family, but he didn’t and she is dying.
The day after Nanami dies, he remains by her side. He has been holding her hand for at least twenty-four hours, when a red-haired girl materializes in her room.
“Why are you here?!” he exclaims, for of course the first non-Nanami person he has to interact with shows up the day after she dies.
“Hinata Hajime, do you want to avert disaster?” she asks, and he has no idea how she knows his name, but that doesn’t quite matter in the face of her offer. If he can save Nanami, and the billions of people who’ve died on Earth, he can make up for his failures.
“Yes.”
The red-haired girl offers him her hand, and he takes it, releasing Nanami as he does so.
There is a way to avert the end of the world. It involves robots and clones and time-travel, and if Nanami was here, she’d say that it sounded like an awesome plot for a videogame.
But in videogames, people can come back from the dead, and she… can’t.
He is locked inside the room that used to be their living-room, where she’d talk about videogames and he’d tell her about how their plants were doing. Now, he’s alone with a stack of blueprints, as he tries to rebuild her as a robot.
I have years to make her perfect.
But would a robot version of Nanami be the same as her?
“You know that you have at least another thirty years to get this right, Kamukura.” a red-haired woman says as she walks into the room.
Kamukura Izuru is not a failure, and that’s why he changed his name. The red-haired woman seems to understand, for she switches between Otonashi and Enoshima at random. Even calling her the red-haired woman is inaccurate, for her hair is sometimes strawberry blonde.
“I want to give her another shot at life.” he says, as she drops off another notebook filled with blueprints and plans for averting the end of the world.
Where the fuck am I?!
The last thing Hinata Hajime remembers is writing his thesis, and he was sitting down. He definitely was not in an elevator, and he has no idea who the strange blue-haired girl next to him even is.
“Well, you woke up soon enough.” the girl says, as the doors open. “Do you want me to help you out?”
There’s a part of him that wants to say yes and another part of him that’s wondering why this girl’s being patronizing, and the latter part wins out. She takes a step out of the elevator, and he follows her, where they’re greeted by seven other random strangers.
“Who are you?” he blurts out.
She’s about to answer, when a bear emerges from out of nowhere and tells that that they’re all trapped in this building because he wants to play a game of mutual killing with them. However, there is an escape route somewhere…
He feels like he should be listening to the bear, but his eyes are drawn to a girl with silvery-violet hair in a blue jacket who calls herself Chiaki. She looks familiar, and he wonders where he recognizes her from.
There is a research facility in the desert that’s studying the possibilities of living on Mars. This is also the place where a virus will emerge and kill six billion people.
And he is here to avert that disaster.
Most of the other people here think that he’s a mildly delusional recluse who likes wandering around buildings at random and letting women justify his bizarre actions. There’s a part of him that wants to tell them the truth, but who the hell is going to believe that one-third of the people in this building are time-travellers trying to avert the apocalypse?
It sounds like the plot of a movie… or a videogame…
“Are you okay?” someone asks, and he realizes that he’s been so absorbed in his thoughts that he tripped over something and fell. He picks himself off the ground, and realizes that the person he tripped over is Nanami.
“I guess…” he answers, for Nanami is here and alive and he wants to tell her everything, but she wouldn’t believe him. No one would believe him.
Would she blame me for killing her?
Nanami, in another life, we met in a bomb shelter and went to the moon and made it our kingdom….
“By the way, what’s your name? I’m Nanami Chiaki” she asks, as she turns back to her videogames.
“Hinata Hajime… it’s nice to… meet you, Nanami….” he answers, and it’s the first time he’s used that name in years, but he will not fail this time.
She offers him her hand, and he takes it as they begin to wander through the building.