Author: Brian Ball

She wouldn’t look him in the eye. He rattled off questions, but she ignored his ridiculous whimpering. She punctured the vitamin drip, tightened the chest straps and locked his neck in place. Too bad she couldn’t be bothered. She was the last person he’d ever see.

A call came in. She ignored it. A mercy he didn’t deserve. Probably another impact statement. The judge allowed these. Each victim’s family had the chance to confront him via video before he entered the disk. When they finished uploading, the videos would play in perpetuity for the eons that remained to him.

She sealed the hatch without a word as he cried goodbye. Her perfume lingered and he hoped it would remain. The transport cruiser dropped him just outside the event horizon and moved off with haste. He was no longer the primary mission. A healthy fear of the gravity well was. He watched the cruiser shrink and finally disappear.

He floated in the void alone, the pod a dimple in the fabric of spacetime. His view: the inky black of claustrophobic nothing, a taunting, boundless liberty. Behind him was the largest black hole in the Universe, Ton-618. Its hyper-bright quasar would soon take his eyes.

He was drawn in. The pod shifted and the singularity appeared off his bow. Enormous, defining. The accretion disk stretched along a Schwarzschild radius .58 light years long to a black hole larger than a galaxy. He didn’t feel the acceleration, now 40% light speed.

Time slipped. He turned as much as he could and saw this pod entering the disk. Every few minutes he checked and saw it again and again, a repletion within this, tilted mirrors reflecting himself, an infinite ripple along an axis of yesterdays.

He used the eye tracker to check the video messages and there were 47. A lot of people needed to tell him he deserved this. They were right, except he didn’t remember the killing or the reason. He remembered the meds were making him sleepy and fat, so he stopped taking them. He had a history of poor decision-making and a criminal past to prove it.

In a manic episode, everything is a bookended walk in and out of awareness with no memory of the middle. He gasped awake that morning, authorities at his door. His flat was near the massacre, and the trial lasted an afternoon. His lawyer did a word puzzle while they waited.

The accretion disk was liquid fire. Planets and dead suns ripping apart. Vast lightning bolts crab-walked across the swirl. His eyes were stabbing pains now. The proportion of movement to the shape of everything became elastic and unreal. Action and occasion were bent and relative. The quasar was a piercing beacon.

After five minutes in dilation, every person he knew was gone. After five more, his generation was a paragraph in a history book. By this time tomorrow, 38,140 years will have passed at home. Ton-618 was never late.

Sitting in his own filth, hovering over starvation, blind but alive, he would remain. After a few decades the disc would be the heartbeat of ocean birth and star death. The Universe expanding to its limit, each second faster. The pod was built for this endurance and he would remain.

He tried to free his hands. He needed to grab something, to break anything, desperate for a sharpness to end this.

With his eyesight failing, he checked one final message.

It was his lawyer. There’d been a mistake. The real murderer had been caught. He was innocent.