Black Hole Blues

Back at the Academy, the one in Nowhere, Kentucky where they send all the losers and the troublemakers, Ms. Maddison taught us about black holes. She was a real piece of work, we used to say, with a stretched-out pencil neck and a love of slapping our desks with her favorite yardstick. But she meant well. And personally, I don’t blame her.

We were a hornet’s nest of a cohort, with thieves and vandals and perverts in our ranks. When we were in her classroom for Intro to Physics, she was the only source of order we had. Sgt. Miller and his taser were only there on Tuesdays and Thursdays due to budget cuts, and no one really cared about us anyway. We were trash, the fuckups, the work-release parolees who couldn’t make it on the outside. If that meant that Ms. Maddison had to literally smack the fear of God into us, well, so be it. She was just as trapped as we were—a broke teacher who, because of AI-powered teacher bots, couldn’t get a job anywhere else.

She had this little yelper of a voice, Ms. Maddison, like one of those toy dog breeds rich white women carry around in their handbags. No one took her seriously enough. At least once a class she’d lose it and bark, bark, bark at us. Goddamn it, she’d squeak. I’m trying to save your life! And every single time, Wyatt up in the front row would go on the offensive. Even though the ring of his left eye would be black and blue and his lip busted, and his teeth chipped from some fight in the mess hall that afternoon, he’d bark back at her. What lives? There ain’t shit here worth savin’.

We were always surprised he could say anything, given the hamburger state of his face, but we couldn’t argue with him. Despite Ms. Maddison’s best efforts, we knew what we were. Whenever the Theys and the Thems needed something done that nobody else wanted to do, the Theys and the Thems did the same thing that the Theys and the Thems always done: throw the lessers at it for as long as they needed to.

* * *

Our ship, a rusted-out intergalactic tow truck the Academy called The Last Stop, exploded in the vacuum of space like a roll of instant biscuits. The flash was so violently quick it looked like God taking a picture with His heavenly smartphone, the brightness cranked up to maximum. I don’t know what happened—Ramirez, I think, flipped on the oxygen cycling too early, or maybe Wyatt lit up in the bathroom, ignoring the warnings—but what did it matter?

Our first job out of the Academy and look what happens. Some company had contracted out some other company that had contracted out the Academy, and before we knew it, all twenty-eight of us were aboard The Last Stop and headed toward a supermassive black hole named Charybdis IX. A freighter hauling who-knows-what had found itself caught in its deadly orbit, and we lucky few had been tasked with pulling it out.

I was out on a spacewalk I’d started only moments before, my spacesuit as duct-taped together as our ship. When tugging freighters as massive as the two hundred kilotonner we’d been hired to tow, someone on your crew has to get out there in the vacuum and hook everything up with a giant-ass screw gun. Guess who drew the short straw. No sooner had I clamped the first rope did I see the flash of our ship bursting into two, its bow and stern splitting apart in the sort of catastrophic failure we had only read about.

There would be hearings on what I saw.

The Theys would name laws after us. Commission new best practices. Hell, by the time our families hear about this, the Academy’d have our names. The Phillip-Wyatt-Ramirez & Whoever Else Academy for Pickpockets, Con Men, & Panty Thieves. Too bad I won’t be around to see it. By then, I’ll be absorbed into Charybdis IX’s singularity, the infinitely-dense, one-dimensional pinpoint at the heart of every black hole. I’ll be ripped apart. A star-stuff smoothie in a cosmic blender. As the gravity at my feet becomes orders of magnitude stronger than the gravity at my head, the tidal forces of Charybdis IX will tear me limb from limb. And then, once that’s done, it’ll rip whatever’s left of me down atom by atom until I become a stream of particles one atom wide, no longer recognizable as anything other than a steady march of quantum ants flowing into their only possible future.

Or at least, that’s what Ms. Maddison told us would happen.

No one knows for sure.

* * *

My first day at the Academy, I had the same look on my face everyone else did: my eyes heavy with disappointment like Wyatt’s, my mouth scrunched up tight to keep from crying like Ramirez’s. They put us in cryo for sixteen months, shipping us back to Earth from the penal colony on Ceres, and when folks go through that, you don’t have time to process what’s happened to you, how badly you’ve fucked up your life. The judge gavels out your sentence in a courtroom the same blue-gray color of despair, and then you’re herded onto the ship that’s gonna put you on ice until you reenter Earth’s atmosphere. There’s no time to acclimate.

You’re judged. You’re frozen.

And then you wake up.

We landed in Kentucky with our shackles still on, the heavy steel laced with frost. The guards then popped our cryotubes and helped us up, half-assisting, half-dragging our asses onto the rich Kentucky soil. I’d forgotten how humid Earth could be, how even the air was thick with life. You spend enough time in the colonies, penal or not, and you forget things like this, with all that stale, HEPA-filtered air pumping through the HVAC systems. You forget that air can be something other than dead, that it can have a heartbeat, just like you.

Sgt. Miller and his taser met us at the entrance, a short, escorted walk from the landing pad. From here, the Academy looked like a tax office, with blank cinderblock walls coated in white, industrial paint. The inside wasn’t much different, except for the security checkpoints and the barred windows that looked like teeth.

“Welcome to the Rest of Your Life,” Sgt. Miller told us, the other guards lining us up and taking our names. “We’re gonna process you, get you uniforms, and then after the nurses check your holes, you’re heading to Ms. Maddison’s class, room 103. Is that clear?”

Ramirez started crying, but no one said a word.

“Good.”

Later that evening, getting dinner in the chow hall, I met Wyatt for the first time. He and a few other guys from our cohort were talking about what they’d done to get here, and came to sit at my table. Wyatt had been busted for a crypto scam in Vegas, while the others had done everything from selling AI-generated porn of politicians to soliciting minors. When they got to me, I told them the truth, although they didn’t believe it. I told them, “I flew a little too fast.”

Wyatt slapped me on the back with a laugh. “Speeding tickets?” The others hollered with him. “Damn, fellas. They’ll send anybody to the Academy, won’t they?”

* * *

About a week into our sentence, Ms. Maddison taught us that the only thing anyone could see inside a black hole was darkness. But when I asked her how anyone knew that for sure, she admitted that no one did. All she knew—all the textbooks said—was that the gravity of a black hole is so immense that not even light can escape. This is why black holes are black to us, why Charybdis IX was black to the freighter and black to The Last Stop. This is why we can only see the matter, the stuff, that sometimes spins around a black hole, and not the black hole itself. They’re black because their gravity eats everything, absolutely everything, even light.

I have no idea how long I’ve been falling into the supermassive maw of Charybdis IX, but I know that I must’ve passed the event horizon by now, the ultimate point of no return, and I also know that Ms. Maddison was wrong. There is light down here. It’s faint and feathery and stretched into the warm, lightbulb light of burning tungsten, but it’s here.

I can’t see the singularity yet, but when I hold out my glove it catches the wispy light of my headlamp exactly as it would anywhere else. And when I look above me, I see the world I’ve left behind: the freighter, the wreckage of The Last Stop, its thousands of tons of twisted steel blown apart, the only evidence that I ever existed at all. They’re receding into a single, spherical point. A black hole in reverse. The whole universe is turning red, its light stretching further and further into infrared as it loses energy trying to reach my eyes and back out again. And if there were any survivors out there, they’d see the same. A single, Phillip-filled spacesuit frozen in place at the event horizon, redshifting into oxblood, and then lost to the darkness forever.

A man out of time.

That’s when I see another headlamp to my left, a pinprick of light floating softly like a firefly in the bottomless darkness. I wave to them, and they wave to me. Goddamn it, Wyatt. Goddamn it, Ramirez. Which one of you is it? How did either of you assholes get your suit on in time?

I crank up my suit’s emergency radio to maximum power, but their call comes in first. The quality is dogshit, their transmission crackling with noise and static, but soon enough they come through.

“Hard to believe this is how we go, right, Phillip?”

The voice sounded instantly familiar, familiar in the way that your own heartbeat is familiar, or in the way that you can pick out your own face in a lineup of millions. It wasn’t Wyatt or Ramirez. In fact, it wasn’t anybody from the Academy at all. Not technically.

It was me.

* * *

In our last class before graduation, Ms. Maddison gave us a lecture on cause and effect. She told us that it’s best to think of it like a chain, with each link in that chain an event that must always come before the next.

“But in black holes,” she said, “the textbook tells us that things are not so simple. Cause and effect can lead to different outcomes. If you were to fall in, you might be able to see different paths your life could’ve taken. The price is that regardless of those differences, your future would always be the same: annihilation.”

When you end up in a place like this, you can’t help but wonder how you got here. How you, specifically, ended up in Charybdis IX. How you ended up at the Academy, how you ended up as the sum of every mistake you’ve ever made, and how those mistakes came to happen in the first place. You start looking for the links. The chain. You want to uncover the moment where everything went wrong, and you try to wish that moment into never happening. You want to unspill the milk, so to speak. Unbreak the glass. But you can’t. Because the world does not, and cannot, work that way.

Before heading back to our dormitory, I stayed to ask Ms. Maddison a question. A question I knew she wouldn’t be able to answer. But I asked her anyway.

“If everything that falls into a black hole has an inevitable future, how do we know that the rest of the universe doesn’t act the same way?”

She took off her glasses, the Coke-bottle frames that made her big brown eyes even bigger. Planet-sized. “You mean destiny?” she asked. “Phillip, this isn’t a religion class.”

I wanted to protest, but Sgt. Miller came to drag me back to my bunk. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I suppose I was asking about destiny. My destiny, I mean. If everything that falls into a black whole has an absolute, pre-destined future, does that mean I was always destined to end up where I am right now? Had I, in some very real sense, always been in orbit around Charybdis IX?

When I t-boned that car going forty over the speed limit, the one with that young mother and her little girl, were they always going to be in my path? Was I always going to run that red light on that lonely two-lane road, intercepting that mother and her daughter like one asteroid meeting another in the belt between Earth and Ceres? How far back did the chain go?

Thinking I could make it before it turned red, my foot heavy on the pedal, the city worker who timed the lights, the manufacturer who installed the engine, the dinosaurs who turned to crude and that we then turned to gasoline—how far back was the fatal mistake?

What kind of universe is this, the one that we live in?

* * *

In time, the other Phillips only grew in number. At first, I could only see Phillipe F. Murray, the copy to my left. But soon enough, more and more of me fell into Charybdis IX and came into focus. We were a constellation of Phillip Murrays, our headlamps the stars, our number in the thousands, the tens of thousands, if not more. Black holes, as it turns out, are more than collapsed stars. They’re places of collapsed possibility. Places where you can see the other die rolls of God and what those other die rolls would have meant for you and only you.

Phillipe F. Murray told me about the bike stunt I had avoided when I was ten, the one that split his jaw in two and meant he had to eat through a straw from ages nine to ten. Phillipa Murry-Stanton, the copy to my immediate right, told me about the time she got caught cheating on a Texas history exam her senior year of high school, a test I never took in a place I never lived. Phil “Big Shot” McMurray, the copy three copies to my right, told me about the size of the ships he used to haul in himself, the five, ten, and fifteen megatonners that dwarfed the two hundred kilotonner I’d been hired to tow, all the while lamenting the successful career in towing I would never, ever have.

Some of my copies are as close to me as a brother or sister, as a twin would be, with our only differences our middle names or the colors of our eyes or the length of our hair. Others are completely alien, people who no more resemble me than I resemble Ms. Maddison. Men, women, and non-binary people who barely share my name, my language, or the color of my skin. Out of all my copies, these are the farthest from me, the most distant in possibility to who I am.

“And that night,” I said into my radio. “That night in my car, when I hit that woman and her daughter. Did that happen to anyone else, or was that only me?”

For a long time, none of us said a word. And then Phillipe F. Murray spoke into his radio. The quality had improved considerably—we were growing closer, gravity shrinking the gaps between us. His voice was quiet, reassuring, the way a consoling father’s might be, and yet I could hear him clear as day. He said, “I’m sorry, Phillip. But I think that was only you.”

* * *

My Mom left when I was eight. My Dad left when he died. I’m forty-two years old, and I’ve never had a steady job nor a place to call my own. When I went driving that night, I was sitting in my living room, my bedroom behind me and my den to my right. I don’t know why I did it, why I said fuck it and ran that red light. Why does anyone do anything?

For a break, maybe? Relief?

I had an eighth of a tank left and only thirty bucks to my name. My savings were a half-eaten pack of spearmint and a stack of gas station loyalty cards. I wanted to feel like I could fly, okay? Like I could fly away from there, from the life that had somehow become mine.

Over the next few minutes—or the next few days, or the next few seconds, or the next few eons—my copies and I grow close enough to touch, close enough for me to see the sweat beading on Phillipe F. Murray’s brow and to see the auburn hair spilling out from beneath the skull cap of Phillipa Murry-Stanton’s space suit. We touch our helmets glass to glass and we stare into each other’s eyes, our own eyes from other worlds.

“I’m scared,” I say, and Phillipa grabs my hand.

“Me too,” says Phillipe, and I grab his.

I’m sorry, Ms. Maddison, but you were wrong about this one, too. I don’t see a point, infinitely small, beneath our feet. Instead, as we circle the drain of this cosmic hole punched clean through time and space, we see a disk. A perfectly flat, perfectly thin, phantasmal disk spinning at the speed of light. It’s glowing a shade of purple so deep that it’s endless, so deep that the disk is not really a disk at all, but a doorway. A doorway to another time, another place. Black lightning crackles around its circumference in silence, the final lip between our world and the next, and the hair on the back of my neck stands on end. Oh, God.

My future, my past—Ms. Maddison, it’s all the same. Hurtling forward. Racing into. Maybe, in this next universe, I’ll be someone who matters.