Echoes

The event horizon is the most terrifying and mesmerizing location in the universe. The one belonging to Navier-11, located just a few months' trip from the nearest outpost, was to be avoided at all costs under normal circumstances. The supermassive blackhole had a consumption rate comparable to the next three largest combined. There were always murmurs of it being linked to the beginning, a forever echo of the unzipping of the universe, slowly making its way towards zipping all matter back up. There was even a religion tied to it, the Singularity. It’s really no wonder it took so long to recruit enough people to participate in the mission that brought them right on the precipice of Navier-11’s destructive force.

Captain Ava Ramirez had to admit that the crew of the Argo was a bit peculiar. It wasn’t surprising for a group of scientists and engineers willing to throw charged particles into the most powerful body in the universe and then try to catch any positrons thrown back with a giant net of energy. At least, that was the best she could make of the procedure, it really wasn’t her area of expertise. She could appreciate the complex beauty of the experiment, however. She watched with everyone else in wonderment the first time they fired materials and saw them travel and disappear into the swirling abyss, distorting and stretching into seemingly nothing surprisingly fast. It took only minutes for a probe to get a positive identification of collected positrons that netted a jovial response from the entire ship.

Ava floated beside Dr. Marcus Langley, the mission’s lead astrophysicist, as he called out the first readings. And then he stuck his hand out to shake hers.

“I didn’t do any of this,” She said but took it anyway.

“You got us here. Let me buy you a beer when we get back.” His smile transformed his usually gruff face into someone much younger. The exceptional symptom of an energetic hope that filled the craft now. 

The implications of their mission did not escape Ava, despite how lost she felt listening to the science team rattle off theories. If they could reliably collect energy off of Navier-11, they would have untapped an endless source of power. Something people still killed for in every reach of space humanity had populated. Something Ava herself had gone to war for in the name of survival.

It was a relief to think those days would be behind them now. That peace was waiting just ahead of them.

“You killed me.” 

Ava was startled awake by Lieutenant Chen, her navigation officer, who hovered over her sleeping compartment with wide eyes and a blood-drained face. “Lt. Chen, what are–”

“You killed me and then ejected my body.” The small woman said, looking as if she would vomit.

“You’re right here,” Ava unfastened herself and hoisted out of the compartment.

“No!” Chen pushed away, propelling herself into the far wall before grabbing to hold herself there, petrified.

“What is going on? Did you take something?”

That was when Ava noticed the scissors in her hand.

“What is going on here?” Marcus entered the dark area, flipping the lights on to the collective groans of several other crewmembers.

“She killed me!” Chen thrust the scissors in Ava’s direction, “She did it, she killed me! I saw it!”

“Hallucinations?” Marcus shot Ava a concerned look.

Before Ava could call for the physician, something swept from the corner of her vision, a shimmering transparent apparition of a man. Not just any man, however, but Marcus. It moved between them like a shadow, traveling straight through Marcus without disturbance.

“See?” Chen let loose of the scissors as they all watched the figure pass, heading towards the labs.

“What the hell was that?” One of the engineers demanded as everyone began to congregate in the area. The apparition stopped, shook, and then dissipated into nothing.

“What in the universe…” Ava forced herself to breathe again and looked to Marcus for a voice of reason. His face was deathly pale, his eyes locked still to the location his ghost had disappeared from.

Over the next few days, the phenomenon intensified. Crewmembers reported seeing apparitions of every member of the ship, some able to identify them as echoes of past events, others unfamiliar. None quite as concerning as Chen’s assertion that Captain Ramirez’s ghost had murdered her own, however. Marcus tried to assure her that it was probably a fluke, information added to Lt. Chen’s mind from the shock of seeing her own doppelganger.

“What do they want?” She asked Marcus one night as they discussed the ship’s location for the next probe. Another specter had manifested beside them, a whispered image of Lt. Chen, seemingly scanning the charting hub just as they were, working calmly.

“I don’t think they want anything, actually,” Marcus said, waving his arm through the phantom. His weathered hand swept through to no effect and the vision continued its work silently. “They don’t appear to notice us at all. I tried talking to myself-”

“More than usual?”

“Ha, don’t act like you aren’t holding full conversations with yourself late nights on the bridge. No, my ghost, I tried communicating, getting its attention. Nothing. It just did everything I would do on a normal day.”

“So, they’re just us? Like an alternate reality or projections of our minds?”

“Memories.”

“Memories?”

“Of the past and future, pieces of us throughout our existence here.” His eyes went to the viewport, locked on the glowing edge of the accretion disc. The Lt. Chen figure pressed a hand to her chest and looked up a moment before blinking back to nothing.

“How?” Was all Ava could think to ask.

“Our probes, maybe.” He shrugged and shook his head, looking back down to the screen in front of them. “We’ve shouted into the void. It doesn’t answer. Perhaps it only echoes.”

The work continued despite everything, but the stress of events was starting to wear them all down. Meals were dominated by talk of the apparitions, theories on their appearance, and, eventually, superstition. It was unusual, coming from this group of all people, but Ava supposed it was where even the greatest of minds could go when it couldn’t reason out the reality around it.

“It’s a warning, we’re not supposed to be here,” One young scientist told a small group as they huddled around their instruments.

Ava was visiting with Marcus in the lab to determine his timeline for the project. They were luckily on the same page of “the sooner, the better” at this point.

“They have been talking like that since yesterday,” Marcus said in a low voice, “I even heard one mention something about god.”

“This is concerning. What if they start worshiping it like those Singularity weirdos?” Ava said. 

Marcus shook his head, but the crease between his brows got deeper. “It won’t come to that. These aren’t scrappers and tunnel workers we’re talking about.”

“My family were scrappers, Marc. Most of my crew is from the colonies.”

“You know what I mean…”

Everyone went quiet again as several specters blinked into existence at each of the instruments, imposing themselves over and through all the solid bodies currently manning them. The doppelgangers worked in a panic, their hands flying over keys and buttons desperately, their eyes terrified and mouths open, yelling soundlessly.

“Shit, what are they on about?” Ava asked. 

“Something’s malfunctioning…”

The visions dissolved as quickly as they arrived, leaving the shocked faces of their solid versions in their place, one with his hands clasped together and head bowed.

Ava shivered at the cold dread prickling up her spine. 

Marcus placed a hand on her shoulder. “One more collection. Then we leave.”

“Agreed.”

The next day, Ava was on the bridge, leading the movements of the Argo as they collected all the probes and batteries to prepare for their departure. Each one took a considerable amount of time to dock and secure, with special consideration to the volatile nature of the capsules containing the energy collected. Ava took the opportunity to admire Navier-11 one last time.

There was a lot about this mission that Captain Ramirez did not understand. But Navier-11, she understood. She agonized over its effects on her ship for an entire year of prepping before this inevitable week of proximity to the blackhole.

To approach it was to approach a cosmic abyss—a realm where the laws of physics strained and distorted, and light itself bent to the will of unimaginable gravity. It was darkness—a voracious void swallowing light and warmth, only an eerie absence left in its wake.

The event horizon, that invisible boundary beyond which nothing can escape, was a sinister veil, shimmering with an ominous energy. Beyond it, the accretion disk, a swirling maelstrom of matter and energy spiraling inexorably toward its center. It glows with a hellish radiance, piercing even through the shielding filters, illuminated by the frictional forces tearing it apart.

And then the singularity—a point of infinite density and zero volume, where the laws of physics broke down. A cosmic crucible that saw matter and energy consumed without mercy, where the very fabric of space-time was warped and twisted beyond recognition.

Navier-11 was all of this on such a massive and incomprehensible scale. She was an inevitability, a reminder of their insignificance along the universal path toward entropy. A glimpse into an abyss that was all at once nothing and the heart of existence itself.

In a way, she knew she would miss this view, but staring at it from the Captain’s chair now, Ava could feel only unsettled.

“Uh, Captain, we have a problem,” Marcus’s voice buzzed over the intercom.

“What is it?” 

A siren blared and the red warning lights flashed, indicating a fire. 

Ava cursed and pulled up the layout on her console. “Status?”

“Something in the cargo bay,” Her security officer replied.

An apparition shimmered into existence, just beyond the instruments, staring out the viewport. It was Ava, her hands clasped behind her, her hair floating around her, loose from her usual bun, clothes tattered and burnt. Blood bubbled into the air from an arm wound.

“Glory to the Singularity!”

Before she could find who had shouted, another apparition swept through her quickly, like a shadow flowing through her vision. She whipped around to watch it as it ran a few more feet with a raised fist before slamming it down and disappearing. She stood just as another ran through again, repeating the action, but saw that it was Lt. Chen and she held something in her fist. Another came a beat later, and then another, falling into an accelerated succession.

She stepped away from her chair. Similar projections were crowded around the room, overlapping each other in a chaotic scene of palpable panic from hundreds of semi-transparent figures crowding the bridge. Lt. Chens came at her still, crowded over each other, rushing through her until they were nearly one until finally the real Lt. Chen was rushing at her, just on the tail of the last mirage. Raised in her fist was a pair of shears, her eyes shone with desperate fear.

Ava kicked off of her chair making distance as she floated backwards. Chen was atop her in a moment, however, and swung the makeshift blade directly for her chest. Ava grabbed a nearby console and pulled. The shears pierced into her upper arm as her body swung around. Chen slowed but kept floating until she made contact with the wall.

“Captain!” The security officer called, floating quickly towards her, but was promptly intercepted by a young engineer, who wrapped his limbs around him as they spun towards the large viewport. He held a sharp piece of metal to his neck.

“What mutiny is this?” Ava demanded, yelling over the insistent sirens.

“The Singularity,” Chen said, now facing her again, poised to push off in her direction. “We must join it. All must return to it. We must return everything.”

A paralyzing cold swept through Ava’s veins as the viewport went dark and she realized they were turning. Straight towards the heart of Navier-11. “You didn’t–” 

Chen flew towards her again.

So much for peace.  A switch flipped in her brain. The fight was fresh in her mind once more, the younger version of herself awakened for another war of survival.

 Gritting her teeth, Ava pulled the sheers from her arm, blood trailing behind it. She turned it in her hand just as Chen grabbed her around the neck, her actions echoed by innumerable visions. Ava swung the blade around and drove it into her navigation officer’s carotid. She kicked the woman away, the shears tight in her grasp. Chen’s scream echoed and then curdled as blood floated through the air.

“Captain, the containers are unstable,” Marcus yelled through the intercom. “We have to release them!”

She pushed off the console back to her chair and watched as the entire cargo bay began flashing red on the screen. “Marcus, are you alright?”

“They are going crazy, I can’t even tell–”

He cut off. “Marc?”

“Ava,” He said after a beat, his voice now shaking. “I’m sorry, I… I owe you a beer.”

“What are you talking about, old man?”

He only laughed. The screen in front of her beeped, indicating an imminent emergency ejection of the cargo bay.

“Captain, we’re approaching the event horizon! T-minus three minutes, 13 seconds.”

Was that enough time to right? She couldn’t calculate it now. She pushed off towards the navigation console, slamming into it, but promptly overrode Chen’s locks and entered the new commands. The ship turned, its force and trajectory still taking them danger close to the edge of the horizon.

“No!” The Singularity engineer was coming for her, the security officer floating lifelessly behind him. His echoes dove straight to the console, slashing the makeshift blade violently. Ava pushed herself to the floor before using it to launch herself straight for him. She twisted the blade out of his hand as his body collided with the roof and then drove the scissors through his neck until she hit something solid.

“We’re still going to skim the horizon unless we can push off more!”

“The cargo release should do it!”

“How long?” Ava demanded, already pushing off in the direction of the cargo bay.

“Forty-six seconds!”

She flew out of the bridge, crashing into everything in her path before pushing on with all her might through several compartments, traveling through echo after echo.

When she made it to the cargo bay, it was indeed aflame, the hellish glow of the destruction mirroring that of the accretion disc. Several crewmembers were floating in front of it, hands raised in apparent worship. 

“Captain,” Marcus called out to her near the cargo controls. He was bent over the console as if protecting it, though part of it had already sparked and caught fire as well. A large chunk of metal stuck from his back.

“Marc, we have to go,” She said as made it to him, testing the metal lodged into his flesh.

“I don’t think I can.”

“Bullshit.” She tore him away from the instruments to see the metal had pierced all the way through his chest. She cursed again but wrapped his arm around her shoulder and held him tight to her.

“Are we joining the Singularity?” The three members were now turned to her, looking almost identical to their shadows save for the framing of the flames behind them.

“Yes, just a few moments more.” She promised and shoved to the exit. The crewmembers cheered behind her.

“Soon we’ll be one again.”

A sickening gravity pulled them into the wall as she and Marcus reached the barrier point of the cargo bay. The engines of the ship rumbled audibly louder, fighting the pull of Navier-11. 

As the seal to the bay zipped closed, the Singularity crew inside was crying with joy. A moment later, the compartment broke away and through the window of the hatch, they watched as it fell towards the event horizon and then exploded in a great billowing cloud of energy and light. 

Silently, they made their way back through the ship as the pull disappeared. The echoes were sparse now, thinning to single occurrences per crew member left alive by the time they made it to the med bay.

Ava used the intercom from there to give a general announcement as Marcus was seen by the physician. “For any remaining who wish to join the Singularity, you are free to do so. Everything taken has been returned. You may leave through the airlock.”

Marcus was put under for a procedure and Ava sought to oversee the release of two additional living crew members out of the airlock. They thanked her, of all things, and shook her hand before following their echoes into the small space that preceded their demise. Ava personally placed Lt.Chen’s body beside the dead engineer inside.

She pressed the button from the bridge to jettison them away, bound for Singularity.

It was a melancholy relief, watching all that trouble fall away as she stood before the viewport. Navier-11 loomed beyond, ever powerful, ever inevitable.

“I don’t know whether or not you are God,” She spoke to her, “I do not know that I will live to see you unite or destroy all. I do know that before that time comes, we have to get on with it anyway, the best we can. Which means I’ll be back, after that old man buys my drink, and with better tools to take what my people need. As many times as is necessary to keep a fragile peace. As many times as it takes.”

“The void might echo for us, but humanity echoes too.”