AUTUMN 2024, SHORT STORY, 1400 WORDS
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The long and thin of her stretches past the calculations. She ran the numbers ten times and she may not have a tape measure out here to drape across the space-curve bounding her legs—but eyeballing it, she spots at least four variables needing another century of physics to pin down.
Nothing hurts. Not the malformed formulae against her pride, not her body against… well.
She didn’t exactly plan on it coming to this, is the thing.
Obviously.
Before any of them had their heads thrown back against the shuttle seats rocketing out of atmo, the captain rewound the old speech in his throat. Lethal risk comes with space travel by way of having a body. The vacuum is relentless. It tears and rips, distorts, inverts, obliterates.
The captain continued, each sentence a rut that let his thoughts drift elsewhere, and she leaned farther forward on every word.
The black hole Samatar 961 boasted more anomaly citations than any other mapped astronomical landmark. It will tear and rip and distort and invert and obliterate beyond anything they could ever anticipate.
And she didn’t salivate learning this, but it would have been fitting.
The tips of her toes brush against her hair.
The diameter of Samatar 961 is estimated at 2.7 AUs, 404 million kilometers.
It feels—
It feels—
If she’s lined up this narrowly, atom by atom, then she can puzzle herself back together however she wants.
From the USS Recursion, she remembers the ring of light orbiting the black hole just outside the event horizon, a clear demarcation. The outside edges bled and leaked, distant stars stretched like sap. She held her hand against the porthole in her bunk, squinted, let her eyes blur the two together. Skin and nuclear fusion, fat cells melting to plasma.
The other physicists put their backs to the portholes in the mess hall during meals. Hard enough to stomach the food as it was, they said, but that thing lurking in the periphery, just out of focus—spooning the latest attempt at mashed potatoes into their mouths loomed over their consciences as a profound act of disrespect. Couldn’t they see that Samatar 961 was starving? The least they could do was turn away.
One of those colleagues once coauthored a paper on spaghettification.
She always did like spaghetti—and if the center of the Milky Way can taste like raspberries, surely some passing dust cloud in the infinite vacuum holds a hint of oregano.
Samatar 961 deserves a good meal.
She’s fed so much of herself to it already, years of a dissertation, more years of postdoc research, hours and hours of skipped sleep and meals and visits home. Lifebloods of friendships, left to shrivel and crack.
On her twenty-seventh straight hour in her closet of a doctoral student office, facing the wall of her calculations with three colors of chalk gripped between her fingers, she stared at the doodle of the black hole at the center. A crude scribble in pale yellow.
Will you be the death of me? She didn’t remember saying it out loud, but her advisor had been passing by and nudged the door open with his foot, pointedly asking after her last meal and the last time she slept. Neither of her answers got him to leave her be.
The senior physicist on the Recursion liked to hover. Not literally, though hir work had touched on related theory—ze could exist in the edge of a crowd while standing at its center and took up space like light in a room already well-lit.
Four times on the voyage to the border of Samatar 961’s safe zone, ze lurked behind her shoulder on the bridge, watching her watch the black hole.
Always the same sort of opener, an airy quip about the way her eyes swelled hazel as she studied it, as if it were so desperate to consume that it grabbed at the hollows of her pupils instead.
There’s no one to insist it to on this side of the event horizon, but she still senses the urge.
No matter what her advisor may have heard that day, she doesn’t have a death wish.
She’s curious, is all.
She’s curious how she can still have thoughts at this stage, this unraveled. Time distorts this close to the center, so maybe it takes that much longer for the synapses to connect, but without her sensing the difference. But then—she can still see, too, even while the gelatin of her eyes has spun into threads. She sends a signal to her spindly, distorted arm to point up toward the Recursion, the matte gray metal smeared against the distant starscape.
Her bones don’t break, but her arm curves and twists like it’s expecting the clean snap of marrow.
Something toward the core of Samatar 961 shudders with an abyssal sound, and she feels the line of atoms at her furthest point lean forward at a faster clip.
Yes, yes—pull her apart, draw her out into quarks and neutrinos. How else is she supposed to—
There should have been a better way.
She had that thought so often. A better way to study a black hole, a better way to have a body.
The first time she heard about black holes, she was nine years old and flipping through the battered encyclopedias at the back of her third-grade classroom. There was a project due on the horizon, something involving poster board and construction paper and copious amounts of glue all orbiting the astronomy unit.
Black holes consume everything that draws too close, her teacher said. We only call them black holes because we can’t see past a certain point. The physics won’t let us.
By the time she was twelve, she prayed every night to the stars to become a black hole. Not to be seen, only felt. And she didn’t know why. Couldn’t put words to it.
She told her mother what she wanted to be for Halloween that year and in return got only a question of whether she was perhaps too old now for all that.
But there had to be a better way. Prestigious astrophysics programs took her in, but still, surely, there had to be a better way. If she concentrated enough, maybe the dense point behind her ribs would collapse further, sink down into the plane of space-time and let her hide.
The doctorate helped; she could duck behind an honorific over email.
The position on the Recursion helped; a crew of two hundred eyes was better than Earth’s several billion.
Two hundred wasn’t zero. It could be zero. There was a way to make it zero, if she massaged the math in just the right way. That’s what science was for, after all.
In her bunk, her whole body fatigue-stung, she stared up from her pillow through the porthole—toward Samatar 961, the darkness warping the vacuum, that unknown place inside no one has ever seen.
The math was good enough by now. Her limbs hummed through the surface ache into a new thing entirely. Past pain, elsewhere. At her center, but also just outside of her. It wrenched her to her feet, to the closet of G suits by the service air lock. Kept her upright as the single thought spinning around the inside of her skull sloshed at her sense of balance.
I just want to be something else.
It’s started to shear her apart finally, thank the stars thank God thank the Big Bang gravity all the laws of physics all the unproven hypotheses all the dorm room what-ifs.
Again, Will you be the death of me, but it’s not a question of fate, no, it’s a request. Please, please. And it’s not death, because that’s too simple. That’s not the operant word. Me, that’s it. Make me something else. Will you be the death of me so that something else can finally live.
Molecules shred to atoms shred to particles. Words pop apart into letters into lines invisible in the void.
She’s not a she. She’s not anything language can touch.
It’s perfect.
On the bridge of the Recursion, the captain motions for the air lock’s breach alarm to quiet.
Ahead, at Samatar 961’s event horizon, is a G-suited figure frozen in a wave goodbye.
Haden Cross is a science-fiction and horror writer based in Arlington, VA. Their writing has appeared in Eleven-ThirtyEight, Much Ado About Cinema, and Star Trek‘s official website. In the afterlife, they plan on haunting Herman Melville’s shelf at the local library, but in the meantime they can be found at hadencross.com or on Bluesky @yavin4.bsky.social.
