And so, like in a peaceful, strange dream, a translucent sphere glided across open space. For a second, it was visible in the sky on Earth. A child saw it and pointed it out to her mother.
Mommy! she yelled excitedly. “Look- look! It’s a space-ship, Mommy. It must be going into outer-space. What’s it doing, Mommy? Why’s it there?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Maddy,” the mother sighed. “It’s just a satellite.”
“Wait a minute- it’s GONE!” The child gazed fixedly into the night, determined to see what was no longer discernible. Her mother ignored her, shepherding the girl into their SUV.
Back in the sphere, Eliott could not get his eyes off of his heavenly surroundings. He had never seen anything like… like this. The stars… he could see them at home, from his window. They were shiny pinpricks in a sea of black. White. Distanced. Not altogether impressive.
But this! No words could describe… nothing could…
The stars were alive.
That was it. They were alive. Alive and shining in fiery balls of blazing light. They were gaseous masses afire, burning until they had no more to burn. When a star was born, it began to die. That was what Eliott had been taught in class. He could name the planets, knew how old his planet was, and could identify comets, meteors and meteorites, along with lots of other space paraphernalia. Yet seeing the real things made mankind’s knowledge and description of them seem highly inadequate. A star’s reign was for millions, billions of years. Basically a heartbeat in the lifetime of a universe. And yet, while they blazed on, they were so…
“Beautiful,” Roselise said, sighing. Her eyes were softened, differing dramatically with her usual hardened expression.
“Wow,” Jason agreed. He leaned against his cousin and grinned happily. He seemed almost… almost peaceful. Something about him could never make that entirely true. Eliott still wasn’t positive what this was.
Eliott was caught up in the rhythm of the stars. It pulsated and vibrated with the essence of the universe, and Eliott swayed to this irresistible cadence. “Oh my… God,” he murmured, over and over again. It was all he could say. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”
“I wasn’t aware you owned God,” Roselise said after a few minutes, smirking. Jason sighed in playful annoyance. The spell broken, Eliott shuddered and looked over to the pair of them.
“No fair; it’s pretty much guaranteed that you come up with the perfect comebacks,” he groaned.
“Not exactly,” Roselise corrected. “But I do know if my comebacks will have the desired effect. Same with school. I don’t know the answers to the test questions, but I immediately know if I’ve answered them right or not. I do need to possess some thinking prowess.”
“Ah,” Eliott nodded. “Just curious… with a power like that, what are you going to do for a living?”
“Win the lottery and invest it in the stock market.”
Realizing the implications of this, Eliott whistled. “What about you, Jason?” he inquired. “What are you going to do?”
“If I survive, I’ll be a historian, I expect,” Jason said serenely. He didn’t seem entirely happy with his choice. Eliott wondered why.
“What about you, Prophet?” Roselise questioned him. Eliott jolted, then bashfully pulled out a piece of notebook paper.
“Well, I’ve always sorta liked… drawing,” he said quickly, becoming increasingly upset at having revealed his art.
“It’s a bear, right?” Jason guessed correctly. Eliott nodded. “Guarding a cave?” He nodded again.
“Very good,” Roselise murmured vaguely. Eliott put away the paper.
“Can we not talk right now?” Jason asked urgently, abruptly. “Let’s just look at the stars.
And so they did. As the sphere rushed by at the speed of… who knows what, three pairs of eyes looked into the depths of eternity. That is, if they could save all this from crazy people. That is, if they could figure out how to.
After a very long time, Eliott spoke again. “Is… this real?” he demanded simply. He looked desperately at his two companions.
“That would depend on your definition of reality,” Roselise answered him.
“Oh,” Eliott said.
There was silence for an equally long time.
Slowly, Eliott began to realize that the sphere was no longer moving completely on its own.
He began to realize that it was being pulled.
“How much longer until the black hole?” he asked Jason.
“Not long,” the child answered cheerfully.
In a matter of minutes, the sphere stopped. It simply ceased moving, and Eliott saw for the first time that what he had thought were motionless stars were actually balls of light hurling themselves at top speed towards…
A dark pit of nothingness. For that was what a black hole was. It was a hole darker than dark, as if the darkness itself was being eradicated, sent to another world. It was a tiny speck in the distance, swallowing clusters of stars, asteroids, comets, planets. Its belly was infinite, hungry, and never satisfied.
What more symbolizes man’s thirst for knowledge and fascination with the unknown than a black hole. It’s so completely bizarre that nobody has even tried to explain it… what it is, why it’s here, even what it exactly does. There are plenty of obscure theories, but none will likely be proven. Some things are not meant to be commonly known.
Only one thing about black holes is put into standard textbooks. Black holes… suck things up. That, human beings have figured out. The tricky part is explaining exactly where the sucked-up matter ends up, if anywhere.
“The sphere is actually fighting against the black hole, if you haven’t noticed,” Roselise said. “Now we just have to get out, and… zoom!”
“Zoom…?” Eliott gulped. Wait a minute, so we have to get out of this thing and…”
“Yeah,” Jason smiled. “Terrifying, huh?”
“A bit…” Eliott paused, then turned to Roselise. “Have you seen…”
“We’ll be fine,” Roselise said. “At least, we’ll live. I’m not sure where exactly we’re going to end up yet… but I can confidently state that in the first few moments after landing, we won’t die.”
That was helpful.
It was time to disembark, and, like any reasonable human being told that he was about to be absorbed into a pit of infinite darkness, Eliott panicked. Rolling her eyes, Roselise told him to hold her hand. Confused, Eliott balked.
“I don’t bite, for God’s sake,” she glared. “Well, if you’d rather be on your own fighting whatever it is we have to fight on the planet we’re headed to…”
He immediately latched on to her hand as if his life depended on it. And maybe it did.
“Here we go…” Jason breathed.
As one, they stepped out of their ship.
Eliott was blasted forwards at a speed so intense that his skin almost ripped free from his body. His legs flailed helplessly as he plunged into nothingness. He tried to scream, but his voice was torn from his throat as fast as he tried to make a noise. So wordlessly he plummeted, not knowing which way was up, not knowing what universe he was in, or if he had left his own yet. He clutched the hand he was holding, terrified that he would break loose from it, and then he would be alone.
It was the epic rollercoaster ride, yet there were no twists and turns in this ride, no loops, no dives.
There was simply relentless speed, speed faster than light, and no seatbelts.
Before this, Eliott had had no idea what fear was. And now he did. He was being subjected to such intensity that he wondered if he was going to die from heart failure.
The speed was faster and faster and faster and faster…
And then Eliott hit something solid quite gently, but continued to feel the effects of the drop, like when a person gets off of a treadmill.
Slowly the world blacked out, but he was alive.
