Author: Chris Krechowiecki-Shaw

The tricks we pull to dodge tax are ridiculous. It would make a lot more sense to pay up than to dive into a supermassive black hole’s crushing depths, but then again keeping proper accounts is not good for smugglers.
I should explain. I figured I’d earned a break, so I’m sipping my Earl Grey Tea, savouring the delicate dance of lemon and bergamot, watching the chaotic dance of binary systems. I’m on dark mode, slingshotting a tight course past galactic centre – a void cloaked in the smeared light of regurgitated star systems. A jolt whips my vertebrae, hammers my eardrums. Fingers scalded, tea everywhere. A sizzling crackle, the choking thick stench of burning plastic. Felt like plasma packets – GalacTax enforcers’ arms of choice. Check shields: 75%. I need drastic action. Fire impulse engine, skim event horizon, hope I can handle a hundred g’s. Pressure. Sinuses flood with the clingy purple taste of brain compressing, liquid fire sears my capillaries. Causality flickers electric blue. Then I’m out. Not clear – highly elliptic orbit.
Thump. My tongue coats in liquid tin. Shields 50%. Readout – ‘magnetic pulse 50 GigaTeslas’. Straight through a flare. Should shake them, but no – enforcers holding tight on my tail! I’m past the orbit’s apex, back towards the glowering vantablack pearl, that hole in the tightly-spilled stars. Ears – ringing a pulsar symphony. Stomach – scrambling for an ‘up’ to throw. A plasma packet flashes past, purple-green shadows on my retina.
Lucky – but not for long.
Crash. Shields 25%. Death inevitable, I choose insanity, swerve inwards. It’s a threecore spinning mass: not three former stars but three proto-galaxies, crushed down to a point. I might whipsaw between roiling singularities – one in a trillion chance. Light bleeds out. Acrid, spicy tang of gamma radiation. Skull filled with metallic rise – whummm – and fall of unfathomable magnetic fields. Elemental agony. Looming enormity distorts me – time peels, stretches into blistering kaleidoscope tunnels, whirling and boiling. Infinite density squeezing all I am into brutal white silence.
Then shapes. Shades. Texture. A pearlescent sphere resolves, silver on white.
Sniff. The burnt chocolate aroma of coffee tickles my nostrils. Questionable choice, but preferable to oblivion, I guess. Things might be looking up.
“Welcome to the transcendent dimension, mortal! Please wait while we conduct regularisation checks. We will begin with a tax audit!”
Tax audit? Damnit!