The Deep Black Explorer

The Deep Black Explorer approached the black hole Sigma Alpha 159. The pilot was doing the final system checks. Life support was on full, scanners were at optimal, anti-gravity was at full power, radiation shielding was at full power, energy shields were at full power, thrusters checked operational, and no errors were found on the computer. All systems were go. 

The Explorer was five seconds from the point of no return. The pilot meditated to calm themself. They knew this was likely a suicide mission and even if they survives they could emerge from the black hole centuries in the future. They had come to terms with it when they volunteered, but little fears and doubts remained. The Explorer creaked as the tidal forces stretched the ship. The anti-gravity system struggled to fight the increasing gravity. The Pilot contemplated all the potential outcomes, they considered abandoning the mission. The ship was a hundred eighty thousand kilometers from the point of no return and was still accelerating. The Pilot looked at the abort button, this was the last chance. The computer chimed, indicating the approaching point of no return. The Pilot looked at the forward feed. The chime accelerated until it almost became a constant tone. The chime stopped, the computer announced “Past PNE.” Whatever the outcome there was no way back

The computer counted down, “Five seconds until the event horizon.” The Deep Black explorer creaked and moaned, the tidal forces stretching the ship despite the antigravity field. “Four seconds.” The Explorer’s speed was exceeding eighty percent of the speed of light, time was slowing. “Two seconds.” Years were passing in those last two seconds. “One second.” The forward feed was all black, the Pilot could see the Deep Black Explorer in the side feeds, the light orbiting around the black hole returning to the Explorer.

Light trapped at the event horizon struck the ship. The outer layer was designed to withstand gigatons of energy, the Deep Black Explorer’s inside survived. The Pilot pressed a button, the severely damaged outer shell split into four, floated away from the main vessel. The Pilot could now look out the view parts, seeing the inside of the black hole with their own eyes. Darkness in front of the ship, behind the ship a disk of light, billions of years of star light all at once. The disk shrunk as the Explorer fell deeper into the hyper dimensional tunnel of the black hole. The monitors displayed the results of physical and dimensional scans.

The disk dimmed and began to grow, the whole ship shook. Scans indicated the hyper dimensions were shrinking. A bright light flashed from all sides.

The radiation shield shimmered from impacts, scanners detected an expanding gas and radiation cloud around the Explorer. No stars were visible or detectable. The spatial distortions of the black hole were gone, the four dimensions were back to three. The Pilot knew when they were, this was one of the many possibilities, countless trillions of years away from when they started. The Pilot had hoped the exotic physics inside the black hole could allow escape, but time had passed too fast. The instruments barely got any information about the internal geometries and physics of the black hole. The stars were all dead, all planets were consumed by their stars or flung into deep space, all civilizations were dead, all life was dead.

The Pilot experienced a profound sense of existential loneliness. Even if there was

an afterlife, the souls of the dead would have likely faded from existence long ago. The Pilot was in all likelihood the last soul in existence.

The feelings were only momentary. The Explorer shook from massive gravity waves. The scanners detected huge distortions in all the universal interactions. Space was twisting and collapsing, the universe was deflating. The Pilot watched as the universe compressed into a big crunch. 

Image from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman, cmglee, found at Wiki Commons