One in a Million
Author: Majoki
You’d think I’d be happy about beating the odds on my very first try, of hitting a hole-in-one, winning the lottery, finding a needle in a haystack.
Not so much.
Not when you beat the astronomical odds of folding space-time to the exact system that is likely to spaghettify you in the next few days. I thought it would take lifetimes to find this place. So did most of the exo-specialists who were running the program. That’s what they told me and the dozens of other field team members who’d signed up.
They said it was a one-in-a-million chance one of us would actually fold into the problematic system they were searching for during our tenure. Lucky me. I hit the apocalyptic jackpot on the very first pull. Three lemons as bright as the collapsing megastar that was inexorably drawing my foldship into its hungry maw.
Foldships were great for scrunching space-time between two given points to make the vastness of interstellar space crossable. But foldships were not built to resist the pull of a caving giant that was likely to destabilize this sector of the galaxy for millennia.
I mean, this kind of enormous black-hole-in-the-making was exactly what we’d been sent to find. It was just highly unlikely that one of us pilots would stumble into such a system on the first go. Bingo!
I suppose I could be happy for the program. Rah, rah for science and all that. The exo-specialists were ecstatic. They now had a collapsing system to study at a fraction of the time and expense they thought it would take to locate such an event.
But, it was coming at my time and expense. As in, my time was up, and I was expendable. Yup. I knew the score. I knew what was coming, though no one had been in my current position before. The instrumentation on my foldship had been designed to record and relay the very moments of spaghettification as I was sucked beyond the event horizon.
No one knew for sure what would happen as I disassembled, but it was a pretty sure thing that I would literally become one in a million…pieces.
Lucky, lucky me.
The Past
365tomorrows launched August 1st, 2005 with the lofty goal of providing a new story every day for a year. We’ve been on the wire ever since. Our stories are a mix of those lovingly hand crafted by a talented pool of staff writers, and select stories received by submission.
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