Eternal Darkness

A guest post by Simon Farnell

We had just left the wormhole that brought us here for a brief time we were in normal space. There it was before us. Our destiny, a circle of blackness, darkness like I had never seen before. Even the glowing gasses that shone brightly as it was being annihilated couldn’t light it up. This black hole named Goliath for our mission sucked matter, light, time, energy into its immensity and destroyed it was a sight that I could see but not even start to comprehend. They say when you look into the abyss the abyss looks into you but here there was nothing looking back. The darkness before us was something that I could never imagine in my worst nightmares.

Our mission was to find the other end of eternity, we were going to sit in orbit of this black hole, just outside its event horizon and wait for it to come. There was no obvious way of going back, it was humanity’s last chance to make its stamp in time, and we had volunteered for it.

I felt the maneuvering engines guiding our vessel, the Chronos towards Goliath. The blackness filled the viewer gradually until nothing else could be seen.Despite the immensity of what we were witnessing, no one spoke. The first and perhaps the last humans to ever see a black hole.

The operations manager looked around and announced “We’re in orbit around Goliath” His tone was a mix of dark certainty and achievement “The gravity shield is in place and working perfectly. We should be able to maintain this orbit for as long as wee need to.”

“How far are we from the event horizon?” I asked.

“One million, four hundred thousand kilometres. As close as we dare.” He replied.

I was in command of the mission to discover the end of the universe and of time. This is my story.

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Simon Farnell is an engineer and thinker with a vivid imagination that runs away with him. A self-proclaimed geek, his weird sense of humour often runs away with him. He has started putting his ideas and imagination into stories and blog posts, hoping that this will take him somewhere boldly he’s not been to before. (And we totally love the Star Trek reference).

If you enjoyed this little teaser, check out his other stories on his blog, Planet Simon. You can also connect with him on twitter: @Planet_Simon.

 

Photo Credit: By Ute Kraus, Physics education group Kraus, Universität Hildesheim, Space Time Travel, (background image of the milky way: Axel Mellinger) – Gallery of Space Time Travel, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=370240