Author: Neil Weiner

By the time you read this, I’m no longer what I was.
My space pod is being dragged—no, devoured—by a black hole’s event horizon. The engines scream. Alarms flash in panicked red. But I feel nothing. Just the tug of acceleration pulling at my bones.
Did I miscalculate? Or did some hidden part of me want this?
I have minutes left to radio Earth. To say goodbye to my children, my colleagues. I should cry out for one last connection, but I don’t. I check my vitals like a surgeon reviewing labs. Oxygen stable. Heart rate calm.
The edge of the singularity glows in distorted rings. My pod tumbles toward it like a leaf into a drain.
And I remain calm. Detached.
My ex-wife used to say I was the most composed man she’d ever met. Later, she called me cold.
“You don’t react,” she said the night she left. “You observe.”
That’s why I was chosen. Emotionally sterile. The kind of man who could stare into infinity without blinking.
Now I stare and something stares back.
As I cross the threshold, time fractures. My son’s first steps. My daughter’s laughter. My wife’s face when I said nothing at all. These memories ripple across my mind.
I observe again: I am changing.
Not dying but transforming.
I am becoming something else.
________________________________________
Where am I?
I’m in pieces. Literally. Atom by atom, thought by thought. Yet I still am. My body is gone, but awareness lingers. I am scattered particles, shimmering like stardust.
And I see everything.
Every memory, every cell, every synapse. My first breath. The last time I hugged my daughter. Her hand trembled the night before launch.
I once read that dark matter might hold the universe’s memory. That nothing is lost.
Maybe that’s what I am now, qubits of memory adrift in gravitational chaos.
And for the first time… I feel.
I feel the heartbreak I dismissed. I feel the grief I ignored. I feel the silence I mistook for strength.
I see my ex sobbing in the dark, waiting for comfort I never gave. I feel my son’s quiet fury when I missed his game. My daughter’s small ache pinning on her graduation cap without her father there.
I thought detachment made me brave. I was wrong.
It made me absent.
I ran into the stars to escape connection, and the stars have broken me apart.
The pain is unbearable. But somewhere inside it, there is grace. Not a second chance to act, just to feel.
Maybe that’s what becoming dark matter means. Not death. Remembrance.
I don’t know what I’m becoming. But I finally understand what I was.
________________________________________
The signal arrived at 3:03 a.m. At first, no one noticed.
But Dr. Maren Alvarez did.
She is the daughter of Commander Elias Alvarez who was lost thirty years ago in deep space. Declared dead. A ghost she barely remembered.
When she saw the anomaly on her console, something stirred. Something… familiar.
“Run a pattern overlay,” she said.
What came through wasn’t a voice. Not exactly. Just a cascade of emotion, translated by quantum processors into human thought.
The signature matched his DNA.
And then: a fragmented message.
I’m in pieces. I see every thought I ever had. I feel everything now—your sadness, your loneliness, the moments I should have shown up and didn’t.
I thought silence was strength. I was wrong.
If this reaches you… I love you. I always did.
Maren blinked through tears. Something of him had made it back.
She whispered, “I forgive you.”