Variables

‘Do you believe in aliens?’ Lix asked.

‘What are you talking about? Of course I do! We’re aliens!’ Phaz shot back.

‘How do you figure?’

‘If we’re on a different planet, then we are the aliens.’ Lix ponders this, rubbing his three-fingered hands together for a moment before responding.

‘I’m not sure that’s how it works. We’re not even on a planet. Besides, I think you need to have, like, tentacles or something.’

‘You’ve been watching too many human movies.’

‘Are humans aliens?’

‘To us, I suppose they are.’

‘But they don’t have tentacles. Unless you count, you know…’

‘I’m done talking to you.’ Phaz snaps. He mutes the communications channel. They stare at each other for a while – after all, there isn’t much else to do when you’re floating through uncharted space. Lix starts pulling faces, but Phaz isn’t impressed. He unmutes the comms channel. ‘Stop that.’ He mutes it again. The invention of the mute button is perhaps the greatest achievement of the Human Galactic Empire. Phaz didn’t love them at first, but now he wakes up every day grateful for their arrival. But what is a day anymore? He doesn’t understand the physics behind it, yet Phaz still knows that you get close enough to a black hole and time starts to work differently.

Phaz got to thinking about the past. He was born on the smallest of two moons orbiting the planet Yura, a member of the first generation of his species to be born off-planet. By the time he could conceptualise the size of his solar system, the spacefaring organisation he would later work (and soon die) for had found a way to leave it. Fast forward a few years and he’s in the local library, picking up a book about theoretical xenobiology for his engineering thesis: “Blast Shielding and its Potential Applications in Space Exploration”. He reads the book and begins to ponder what life on other planets might look like. A week later the humans arrive. They are not what he was expecting. Things change very quickly; the humans bring with them vast databases full of knowledge, making Phaz’s research redundant. He gives up on his dreams of inventing adaptive shielding. The humans brought it with them. He never felt smaller. Until right now.

He looks to his right and is reminded of a species of arachnid that lives in the jungles near his hometown. They explode when they die, pelting everything in a ten foot radius with poisonous spines. He was always terrified of those things, but their unique defence mechanism doesn’t compare in the slightest with the death throes of a collapsed star. He looks back over at Lix, who is also staring in awe at what awaits them, tears welling in compound eyes. Unmute.

‘Lix.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Do you remember when the humans first arrived?’

‘The Arrival of the Squishy Ones? Of course.’

‘Where were you when it happened?’

‘Oh, jeez, probably the hangar in the capital. I think I was still fixing engines back then. It was definitely before I got my pilots license. I tell you, the amount of extra training I had to do to work on those fancy human cruisers? Nightmare.’

‘You have a pilot’s license? Could’ve fooled me!’ He can’t resist taking another swipe at Lix before it all ends.

‘Oh haha! You’re one to talk, what kind of engineer forgets to check on the blast shielding? We all know that was your job.’

‘Hey, that wasn’t me, that was Clep, I swear!’

‘Oh, sure, blame her when she’s not here to defend herself.’

‘Hey, she’s probably around here somewhere.’ Phaz points to the left, where the wreckage of their cruiser is being pulled in their direction by the same malicious gravity carrying them to their doom. ‘Got anything to say Clep?’ He yells at the wreckage. ‘No? You sure? Alright, no hard feelings, we all make mistakes!’ Knowing full well their suits only have five more minutes of oxygen, the two of them laugh.

‘You’re all right, you know that Phaz?’ Lix says. It makes Phaz feel warm inside, against all odds. ‘Whoa, can you feel that?’ Phaz could feel it. The black hole is starting to stretch them across space. They are becoming unstuck from everything else. Phaz wonders if the event horizon has a smell. He imagines the scent being similar to metal, like the way blood tastes.

‘Don’t worry, that’s normal.’

‘Normal? Your arm is a mile long.’

‘Okay, not normal, but as black hole physics go this is pretty standard… I think.’

‘I didn’t realise you were an expert. So what’s going to happen next?’

‘Well… there are two schools of thought. The first is that we’ll be stretched out so violently by the immense gravity that we’ll immediately be torn apart and reduced to ash by radiation. The second proposes that we’ll just continue stretching, still conscious, still aware, until we’re nothing but atoms. With the dilation of time, this could feel like an eternity.’

‘Hm. Well I don’t feel like I’ve been torn apart and reduced to ash, so… the second one, right?’

‘Not necessarily. Nobody’s fallen into a black hole before. In theory we could already be dead. This conversation could be taking place in a quantum state or something.’

‘You know we should send a message back home. I’m sure the eggheads would lose their minds for our first-hand account. How long would that take to arrive? Two, three years?’

‘Let me see.’ Phaz taps a few buttons on a wrist mounted computer. The readout keeps changing so erratically as it calculates the timeframe that he can’t make out the number on the display, but he can tell it’s rising ridiculously fast. ‘Okay, so if we record it in the next two minutes it’ll only take a few million years to reach home, and we’ll also have a minute of oxygen left for a game of zip, zap, zop.’

‘Hm. I see a problem here.’

‘Oh yeah? Do share, professor Lix.’

‘You can’t play zip, zap, zop with only two people. It just wouldn’t work.’ Lix says with false sincerity.

‘Damn, you’re right. How about charades?’ They laugh again. They never laughed this much together on the ship. Phaz wondered why that was. Two men with a background in engineering and a shared fascination with exploring the furthest reaches of the universe. But they never got on. Phaz thought to ask Lix why he thinks that was but decided against it. Who wants to think about social politics when they’re being turned from a living being into several discrete variables in a physics equation? They’re getting closer now. The distortion effect intensifies, and the short distance between Lix and Phaz appears to widen rapidly.

‘Phaz… will you hold my hand?’

‘Yeah, sure.’ They try, but the gap is too wide. ‘I can’t-- I can’t reach.’

‘Try harder then.’

‘Shut up. You try harder.’

‘Great comeback. You know this is why nobody on the ship picked on you. It’s just too easy.’

‘Oh yeah? Well this is probably why your family were okay with you leaving home! Because they knew they wouldn’t have to listen to your whining.’ Silence. ‘Huh? How about that? Lix? Lix, did you mute the channel?’

‘No. That was just… too far.’ Lix says, his voice cracking on the final word. Phaz is devastated. He’s about to be erased from existence and his final act as an extant being is upsetting the only friend he has left.

‘Jeez, Lix, I’m… I’m so sorry.’ No response. A few seconds later, though, Phaz can hear stifled laughter over the comms. ‘Oh, you asshole.’ Lix erupts, roaring down his headset in bursts of cackling laughter. The spaghettified rays of light cascading from Phaz’s face like multicoloured sheets of rain turn an embarrassed shade of red.

‘See? Too easy. Oh man, that was good!’ Phaz realises why they never spent any time together on the ship, and decides to tell Lix exactly why that is, but before he can a bright red light flashes on his wrist. He can’t make out the words on the screen, but it doesn’t matter, he knows what it means. The air is getting thin in his helmet. No more oxygen. They both think to themselves that the laughter was worth it. At least they won’t die bored.

‘Hey, Lix?’

‘Yeah, Phaz?’

‘I’m real glad you’re here. I don’t want to be on my own. Thank you.’

‘Hey, Phaz?’

‘Yeah, Lix?’

‘Is it too much to hope that we’ll just reach the middle and come out the other side no worse for wear? Maybe on a beach planet or somewhere nice like that?’

‘I don’t think anything is too much to hope for right now.’

‘Do you think there are aliens on the other side?’ Phaz chuckles weakly. He can hear the fear in Lix’s voice.

‘You know something Lix? I’m not so sure I believe in aliens anymore.’