The formula for how to end the world got published the same day I married the girl who used to bully me in middle school.

We found out about it the morning after, on the first day of our honeymoon in Cozumel. I got out of the shower in our small bungalow and Minju was sitting in bed, staring at her laptop.

Minju, tiny and gorgeous and cruel. Lips curled in a perpetual moue. Black hair shorn close to her scalp. She always looked younger in the mornings, before she put on her makeup, and I liked waking up before her just so I could see her this way, this version of her no one else got to see.

“Have you seen the news?” she said.

“What news?”

“Someone found a really easy way to kill everyone on Earth. They’re calling it Pandora’s Formula.”

“What do you mean, kill everyone on Earth?”

She turned her laptop around so I could see what she was looking at. She watched me read it, as though daring me to tell her she was wrong.

It was a Reddit post about a new scientific discovery. According to the post, biochemists had discovered an easy way to create a gaseous substance that would kill any human who breathed it in. For some reason, something related to our specific neurochemistry, it didn’t work on all mammals—just us.

Executing Pandora’s Formula wouldn’t take any specialized knowledge or equipment. It would cost less than 500 USD to buy all the necessary supplies, most of which could be found at normal drugstores and hardware stores, and you’d probably need no more than a high-school-level understanding of chemistry to put it all together.

Once it was activated, the gas would become self-perpetuating, needing to react only with oxygen to continue expanding, which meant that there was no way to stop it from filling the whole atmosphere. The effects would begin locally, with the near-instant death of everyone in the room. And then it would sweep outward, its radius ballooning unchecked. It would take about a day for the effects to be felt on the other side of the world. Twenty-four hours, after which there would be no one left alive, except for maybe billionaires hiding in their airtight bunkers, futilely delaying the end.

I laughed, because I couldn’t think of any better way to react. “This sounds like a hoax.”

“It’s real, Em,” she said, taking my hand and squeezing it softly.

“Says who? Reddit?”

“Not just Reddit. Everyone. The formula’s been independently peer-reviewed by scientists at multiple institutions.”

I shrugged. “Okay, fine, so maybe it’s real. Even if the formula works, nobody will actually use it.”

“It would only take one person,” she said, clutching my hand harder now, so hard it hurt a little. “And the formula’s all over the internet. Anyone can access it.”

“I’ll keep you safe,” I joked, leaning in closer.

“How?” she said, a challenge in her voice, but the kind that started a flirtation, not a fight.

I kissed her on the forehead, ignoring the prickle of discomfort that had started coiling in my belly. Kissed her on the bridge of her nose, the soft bow of her mouth.

We’d picked Cozumel because it had offered one of the cheapest honeymoon suite packages, and we didn’t get enough sunshine in San Francisco, where the weather felt the same year-round.

I’d constructed a detailed honeymoon itinerary in advance, slacking off at work for hours to toggle between travel guides and Google reviews. Snorkeling was on the agenda for our first day, since it was the main thing Cozumel was known for. White sand beaches, vibrant coral reefs, water so blue it hurt our eyes. An island paradise.

Minju had packed so many bikinis they were spilling out of both our suitcases, lavender and violet and cheetah-print. She wore my favorite: a bright pink one with a little keyhole cutout in the front. I went with my usual black shorts and sports bra.

The beach was bustling with tourists. We weren’t allowed to approach the coral reefs alone, so we got split into groups and assigned to different tour guides. A white American family with four young kids. The rowdiest kid kept asking if he could keep a fish as a pet, and our increasingly frazzled tour guide kept telling him no.

In the water, the kid was forced to be silent, and the world felt calmer. The reef frothed with life. A lobster, half hidden in the sand, bobbed sleepily with the waves. A school of silver fish darted by us, so fast I almost missed it.

I pointed; Minju wasn’t even looking. She had poked her head above the surface to stare back at the beach.

As soon as we got back to the shore, Minju wrapped herself in her beach towel and checked her phone. “It’s in all the major newspapers now. Look.”

She showed me her feed. Front-page news, all over the world. The Sun, China Daily, The New York Times. Headlines like “What You Need to Know About Pandora’s Formula” and “Has Science Gone Too Far This Time?” and “We Are Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.”

“Look at this one,” said Minju. She clicked into an article about how an organization of angry internet citizens had tracked down the scientists responsible for publishing Pandora’s Formula and pressured them into issuing a public apology for irresponsibly disseminating dangerous information. The scientists had taken their original discovery down, but thousands of duplicates had already been published in other places.

Minju paced back and forth in the sand, drawing stares from the other tourists. “Why would they do that? That’s only going to make it worse. The more publicity this gets, the sooner someone’s gonna try it.”

“Do we need to be talking about this right now?” I said. “We’re supposed to be having fun.”

Her mouth twisted cruelly. “This is a big deal, Em. This is the beginning of the end of everything, and you’re not even paying attention.”

Minju would say that kind of thing a lot. She’d said it about the melting glaciers; she’d said it about the pandemic; she’d said it about the recession. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d said it about the rise of smartphones when they first became popular, back when she was just a kid in elementary school, fierce and angry and already afraid.

“We’re on our honeymoon,” I pointed out. “I think that’s worth paying attention to, too.”

She opened her mouth, like she was going to argue. Then she loosened. “Fine. You’re right.” She put her phone back down. “I’m sorry.”

Apologies were rare from Minju. Every time she said “sorry,” the word seemed to carry extra weight, like she was apologizing for the entire history of all the wrongs she’d ever committed, instead of just one specific thing.

And there was plenty of history there. In middle school, I’d been the tall, shy softball player with a classic Asian-kid bowl cut and a perpetually bad case of acne. Minju was one of the popular girls, barely five feet tall with heels on, wavy black hair and padded bras and pink lip gloss. It was always just small things: a mean note stuck onto my locker, an accidental shove in the hallways. Dyke, she’d call me, getting all the popular girls to join in. Loser.

She’d cut off her hair a month before our wedding. The new look suited her, made the flawlessness of her bone structure more striking, but secretly I missed her long hair, the way it used to feel between my fingers. In middle school, I’d sometimes daydream about braiding it for her, if she ever invited me to one of those sleepover parties she always had with the popular girls. Sometimes, when she’d really hurt my feelings, I’d wish I could grab it and pull until she begged me to stop.

That night, I stayed up after Minju had fallen asleep, sitting at the coffee table that was the closest thing the bungalow had to a desk, reading about Pandora’s Formula.

Minju was right: Everyone was talking about it. And everyone was afraid. The thing about Pandora’s Formula, the thing that hadn’t fully sunk in at first, was that it could truly be used by anyone.

Really, anyone. Like the first roommate I lived with after college, who used to set dumpsters on fire for fun. Or the classmate we’d had in middle school who’d gotten expelled for threatening to bring his dad’s gun to class. Or some eco-fascist activist somewhere who believed we deserved to be punished for how we’ve ravaged our planet. Or a philosophy professor who believed that minimizing global suffering was the highest moral imperative. Or a religious fundamentalist who thought the afterlife would be better than the world we’re in now. Or a megalomaniac who just wanted to go down in history textbooks, even if there would no longer be history textbooks after they were done.

One person’s decision, and all of this would end. Shopping malls and reality TV shows and social media and name-brand sneakers; homophobia and sexism and racism; the 385,000 childbirths that happened throughout the world every day, and the 115,000 weddings; the books, the movies, the plays; the life Minju and I had planned to build together. Gone, all of it. The quiet blinking out of humankind.

“What are you working on?” Minju mumbled from the bed, voice thick with sleep. “Come to bed.”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” I said.

I waited until her breathing slowed down again, and then I started Googling underground bunkers that could sustain their own air supplies. The results were unpromising. Most of the ones mentioned in online forums seemed like scams, and even if they were legitimate, there was no way we could afford their exorbitant prices.

In those same forums, though, there were other people like me who were anxious about Pandora’s Formula, people working on finding possible solutions outside of just hiding away. There were petitions I could sign to get the formula taken off the internet entirely, some extension of the right to be forgotten. There were lawmakers I could write letters to, asking for stricter regulation of the key ingredients the formula involved. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

Minju whimpered in her sleep. Another one of her nightmares.

I wanted to bundle her up in bubble wrap. Take her to a hiding place somewhere, away from everyone on Earth who might do something stupid. Trade the air from my lungs to hers, without any interaction with the rest of the atmosphere. Keep her safe.

I put my name in a petition. Then another, and another. These small, quiet things—the only things I could do.

The next day, Minju wore a tiny white sundress, almost bridal. We’d set aside today for touring the shopping districts, which everyone had raved about online.

The sun burned down on our necks. The streets were crammed with shops full of cheap colorful tchotchkes, with someone at every storefront shouting “Hola!” or “Hello!” or just hollering things at us that would be considered racist in the US, like “Konnichiwa!” or “Nee how!” or, in the case of one particularly exuberant storekeeper: “Chinatown, Chinatown, welcome to Chinatown!”

Even on our honeymoon, we hid behind their assumptions about us: that we were sisters, perhaps, or just best friends. We were careful about when we held hands. Sometimes they’d put two and two together, looking at our short hair or the ways we carried ourselves, and their stares would turn colder.

A man wolf-whistled at us, and Minju cursed him out in her near-fluent Spanish, a long chain of words I didn’t understand. I couldn’t tell what she’d said, but whatever it was, it surprised him, and he slunk away.

It occurred to me that Minju probably wasn’t having fun. Worse yet, I wasn’t, either. I was exhausted from having stayed up so late, and too hot from an entire day in the sun. We were both pretending to enjoy ourselves, for each other’s sakes.

“Are you hungry?” I asked. “That taco place across the street looks pretty good.”

She pursed her lips. “Actually, there was this other place I was looking at.”

She led me back the way we’d come, into one of the main streets, to a two-story Italian restaurant with a menu on a stand by the door. It looked like one of those tourist traps that charged exorbitant prices.

“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” I said. We’d meticulously calculated a budget for our wedding and our honeymoon combined, and for the past few months, between Minju’s nonprofit salary and my freelance consulting, we’d been barely scraping by.

“Why not?” said Minju. “We’ve always been so careful with money. We deserve a splurge.”

“The food probably isn’t even good. Who gets Italian food in Mexico?”

“I’m craving pasta,” she said curtly. With that, she opened the door and greeted the host with a dazzling smile.

There were only a few people dining inside, all of whom looked like tourists. A family with Australian accents; a grey-haired South Asian couple.

There was only one server inside, a young Black woman with box braids and braces, who looked slightly frazzled. The daily specials she described to us were painfully topical: Pandora’s Pasta, Apocalypse Martinis. Minju ordered a full meal. Appetizer, entree, salad, dessert. I wondered if she was splurging because she genuinely wanted to, or because she thought we wouldn’t need money anymore after the end of the world.

The TV screen above the bar was playing a news channel talking about the first publicized attempt to use Pandora’s Formula. A woman in Berlin had discovered her twenty-year-old son’s experiment in a set of mason jars in the basement. He’d just been dumped by his girlfriend, and apparently thought ending the world would be an appropriate form of revenge.

Everyone stopped to watch. A man said, “Jesus Christ.”

It felt like being at a sporting event, or maybe like watching news coverage of a major election. There was a sense of camaraderie about it, like we were all on the same team, relieved that our opponents had failed to score against us.

Glass smashed somewhere behind us. Everyone turned to look. The server had dropped a tray of cocktails, sending shards and droplets all over the floor. It took me a second to realize she’d done it on purpose.

She laughed, a high and hysterical laugh, braces glittering in the bright sunlight. Then she took off her apron, set it down on the bar counter, and she walked out of the restaurant, letting the door slam closed unceremoniously behind her.

“I would have done the same thing,” the South Asian woman said to her husband. “Who wants to spend their last days waiting tables?”

I found a broom in the staff closet and swept up the broken glass on the floor, so nobody would step in it by accident. On the TV, the news anchor started telling us that the twenty-year-old was potentially facing jail time, though there was little precedence, in Germany or anywhere else, for the law to handle a case like this.

“That kid won’t be the last one we hear about,” Minju told me grimly, spearing a piece of pasta with her fork. “I bet a lot more people are going to try it now.”

“Most people like being alive,” I said. “And even the ones who don’t wouldn’t want to hurt the people they love.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d experienced the worst side of humanity.”

“Because you’ve seen so much of that, growing up in the suburbs of Petaluma?”

“You don’t get it,” said Minju. “Every person on Earth right now has more power than Oppenheimer did when he set off the atomic bomb. That doesn’t scare you?”

“Of course it scares me.”

“Then how can you still keep burying your head in the sand?”

“I’m not. I’m doing all the things I can. I sent some petitions to our legislators last night.”

I hadn’t been planning to tell her that. I’d wanted to fix it quietly, behind the scenes, so she didn’t have to worry.

She narrowed her eyes. “How is a letter going to help? You think there’s anything a legislator can do? It’s too late for that.”

I didn’t know what she wanted from me. What she wanted me to do, or to say. It felt like every possible choice was wrong. We ate the rest of our subpar fettuccine in silence.

When we made it back to the bungalow, I slipped the strap of her sundress down her arm. Kissed the top of her shoulder, where her skin had started to burn and peel from several days in the sun.

She was elsewhere. I could feel her worry radiating from her, like heat.

Sometimes I wondered if we had different emotional landscapes entirely, a different range of feeling that was accessible to each of us. The way Minju responded to things was so different from the way I did. I defaulted to assuming everything could be fixed, while Minju responded to everything with an undertone of fear, like relaxation was on a shelf too high for her to reach.

She turned away. “I’m tired,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

On the third day, we’d signed up for a chocolate-making workshop on the beach. The teacher was a short Mayan woman wearing a colorful square-collared dress and traditional beaded jewelry.

There was no one else there except for us. Maybe there’d been a lot of last-minute cancellations, or maybe it just wasn’t a very popular workshop. Still, our teacher powered on with the class. She gave us our own cacao beans and explained to us their cultural significance, along with the history of the ways chocolate-making technology had evolved and adapted over the centuries.

“This is made of volcanic rock, and it’s over a thousand years old,” she said, showing us a heavy grindstone and pestle. “We keep it in the family. In our culture, we pass heirlooms down to the youngest child, instead of the oldest. My youngest daughter will inherit this someday.”

“Increasingly unlikely,” Minju whispered to me under her breath.

I nudged her with my elbow. “Be kind.”

Outside, we could see the beach, the same bright blue Caribbean Sea we’d gone snorkeling in two days ago. A whole world of life hiding under the surface.

Under the Mayan woman’s guidance, Minju and I ground the stones against the cacao beans, transforming them slowly from solid chunks into a smooth, buttery paste. It felt good to work my arms that way, a repetitive motion that felt like I was accomplishing something.

As soon as our teacher left the room, Minju pulled out her phone to check the news again.

I dipped my pinky in the cacao paste and tasted it. “It’s not bad. Here, try some.”

Minju sucked it off my finger, eyes still fixed on her phone screen.

“Maybe we should go,” I said.

She didn’t even look at me. “Go where?”

That was the question, the question with no answer. It had the same sense of inevitability as when Americans talked about emigrating after each election cycle. We’d made this problem ourselves. Wherever we went, there would still be us.

“Home,” I said.

Minju’s gaze finally flicked up to my face, with pity maybe, or possibly contempt. “What would we have at home that we don’t have here?”

“At least we’d be with all the people we love. In case anything does happen.”

“And doing what? Going to our office jobs? No thanks. We might as well stay on vacation.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that.

I watched over her shoulder as she scrolled through her feeds. Today’s headlines were about how several nations had started using Pandora’s Formula as leverage. North Korea had issued a statement saying they’d deploy it if they didn’t get their way. Within hours, China had responded in kind, and then Russia, and then the US.

For the first time, though, nobody online seemed to be paying much attention to what nations were saying. Pandora’s Formula belonged to all of us. We didn’t need to fear nations any more than we feared each other.

There was something almost beautiful about that, the fact that it was such an egalitarian curse, if you looked at it in a certain light. Chances were good that the apocalypse wouldn’t be decided by a war council. Just a normal person, like all the rest of us.

“Any one of us could single-handedly destroy our species,” said Minju. “We’re all little nations, with our own nuclear arsenals. We’re like small gods.”

“I like that,” I said. “The idea of being small gods.”

“I don’t. I really hate it, actually. Not a single one of us deserves to have that much power.”

It was strange to hear that coming from Minju. Maybe because part of me felt like Minju did deserve power like that. Or maybe it felt she’d always had it.

Once, back in middle school, Minju had defied our math teacher when he tried to kick another girl out of class for wearing a tank top that he said was too distracting. Minju had gotten right in his face and asked him why he was paying so much attention to a teenage girl’s cleavage, as brutally and gracefully as a lightning bolt striking a tree. The teacher had threatened to escalate it up to the principal, and she’d left the classroom to tell the principal about the entire confrontation on the spot. That was the kind of power I could never have wielded, the kind that had always come so easily to her.

The next morning, by some unspoken consensus, we let go of trying to follow our agenda. Instead, we stayed in our bungalow, leaving only to take turns bringing back cocktails from the tiki bar on the beach. We still had the foil-wrapped packets of chocolate from yesterday's workshop, and we took turns nibbling from these.

Minju spent the morning in bed, online shopping. She ordered three new dresses; two new pairs of Jimmy Choos; a whole drawer’s worth of new makeup products from her favorite Korean brands. For me, she bought the espresso machine I’d had my eye on for months, the one so expensive I’d told her I didn’t want it.

We were already worryingly close to maxing out our joint credit card, the only one we’d agreed to use on this trip, because it charged no foreign transaction fees. But I didn’t say anything. It didn’t seem worth it to start a fight. I could feel the fight hovering outside the door, like an unwanted houseguest, just waiting for me to slip up and let it in the room.

I kept my distance. I sat at the dining table and looked for more organizations to call. There were still people out there trying to protect each other, even if Minju was right, even if we were too late.

There were more optimistic stories in the news now, mixed in with all the apocalyptic ones. Scientists at leading institutions were already racing to find a Pandora’s Antidote, a way to protect us from the lethal gas if it ever did get created, or to stop it from becoming self-perpetuating. The optimists among us still hoped we could fight science with science.

In the meantime, while we waited for the scientists, people were doing everything they could to prevent the formula from being deployed. Philanthropists had started offering direct monetary rewards to anyone who would pledge not to ever deploy Pandora’s Formula. Suicide hotlines were beginning to expand their services, with more donations and more volunteers. Co-ops were offering new ways for people to contribute to their communities.

Deep down, I didn’t know if any of those things would work. There were too many people out there for us to affect all of them. But still, it was eye-opening to see that there were so many things I hadn’t imagined possible before. Ways that life could be better for every individual person. Ways we might be forced to treat each other with more care, now that we knew we all had our fingers on the button.

I called my mom, disregarding the exorbitant fees for international calls. Her voice was a little fuzzy over the line, occasionally overlaid with record-scratch static.

“Please stay safe,” Mom said, as though that were within my control. “I don’t like that you’re so far away while all of this is happening.”

“Minju and I talked it over. We’re going to stay through the end of our honeymoon, like we originally planned.”

“But what if something happens?”

“It’s not like it’ll get me in Mexico faster than it would get me at home.”

“Ai ya, don’t even talk like that. Bad luck.”

“Do you want to talk to Minju?” I asked.

Minju shook her head, fiercely.

“Never mind,” I said. “She’s on her way out. I’ll tell her you said hi.”

Minju said nothing, just picked up the cocktail on the table and drained it in one long gulp.

I hung up the phone. “Is everything okay?”

Maybe it had been insensitive of me to call my family in front of her, even though they normally got along well. She didn’t talk to her parents anymore, both of whom were conservative Christians. Most of her church had stopped talking to her when they found out about our engagement. It was a tangle so common it bordered on cliche, her feelings about her Koreanness and her piety and her sexuality and her independence. She’d left her family before they could disown her, too.

She grabbed her purse, started strapping on her sandals. “I just need some space.”

“What’s wrong?” I said, standing up. “Can we talk about it?”

“Later,” she said. She looked me in the eye, a furious glint in her eyes. “Don’t follow me.”

She would do this, sometimes. Light herself incandescent. It seemed best to let her burn the rage out on her own.

Alone in bed that night, I dreamed about Minju. In the dream, time had folded in on itself. She was all the ages I’d ever known her, and all the ages I hoped to know her someday.

I’d never thought I’d see Minju again after middle school ended and we went off to separate high schools. We reunited by accident, years later and several states away, at a college party. She was supposed to be on her way back to her own school by then, but she’d missed her train.

At that party, I recognized her clear across the room. She was still the shortest person there, even with heels on. She was already drunk, her skin flushed: face, neck, all the way down to her cleavage. “Hi, loser,” she said, in a very different tone from how she’d ever said it before.

Ten minutes later we were making out. She was so small, I could feel the shape of each individual rib under her skin. It was intoxicating, the way the top of her head fit perfectly under my chin, the way it felt like something inevitable unfolding, something I already wanted to hold on to forever.

When I woke up, Minju still hadn’t come back.

It was dark out. I could hear nothing but the sound of the ocean crashing against the sand. We’d accidentally left out the rest of the chocolate we’d made, and it had melted, sticky against the foil wrapping paper.

I had a terrible feeling in my gut. Terrible enough to make me log on to our banking system and check the most recent purchases on our joint credit card.

She’d made multiple transactions since she’d left the house. One from a local drugstore. One from another store with a name I didn’t understand. I didn’t know any Spanish; I’d been relying on her to get around. I couldn’t tell if what she was buying was what I thought she was buying. For the first time, even her mind felt like it was operating in a language I didn’t know.

I found her outside, standing on the beach by the empty tiki bar, wearing her white sundress. In her arms, cradled like a baby, were the paper bags full of the things she’d bought.

She didn’t turn her head to look at me when she heard my footsteps coming. Her shoulders were trembling. I couldn’t tell if she was crying or just cold, the night wind brutal compared to the sun we’d gotten used to.

“Minju,” I said. It didn’t sound like my voice, like someone talking to her wife. It sounded more like a mother talking to a child, or maybe a priest talking to a confessor.

“I’m scared,” she said. Small and shivering. “Can’t you understand that? I’m just scared.”

I took the shopping bags from her arms, and she let go of them without resisting.

Maybe Minju was right. Maybe now that Pandora’s Formula had been publicized, its deployment was just a matter of time. Less a matter of if and more a matter of when.

After twenty thousand years of human history, maybe we’d finally reached the last chapter in humanity’s story. The yawn before our big sleep. And so we would live on a knife’s edge now, for as long as the world continued to exist. Each time we woke up in the morning, we’d never know for sure if that day would be our collective last.

I could see that knowledge eating her from the inside. I could see her closing herself off. But I was only beginning to open.

“I love you,” I said. “You know that, right?”

She hesitated before answering.

The sun was beginning to pierce through the fog on the horizon. It lit up Minju’s face, tracing the gloss on her lips, the curve of her lashes. In that moment, she was so beautiful: my wife, my bully, my fellow small god.

Editor: Aigner Loren Wilson

First Reader: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors