AUGUST 17 *** 2127 *** 0608 E-HOURS ***VIRGO SUPERCLUSTER VIRGO “A” 74.907
Devon, I hope to God you get this message. Please read this to the girls as well.
The Praetor’s hull has been breached and I don’t think we’re going to make it back. Damage begins from the forward fuselage, the whole fucking thing, to just below the crew cabin, and Ju-Mei is gone. She was at the bridge. The onboard computer fucked up something, we think the approach angle from Gaia was completely wrong, and we got too close to it, and we’re moving too fast and we can’t stop. We’re going into Ouranos 426. I’m so sorry.
I’ve never prayed for anything before but right now I’m praying that all the stories about black holes are true: that between the event horizon and the rupture there’ll be a tunnel to a new world, or at least a road, as stupid as that sounds, back to you. Kiss the girls for me and tell them I love them very much, and to always be kind to others, and to never be cross, especially with each other.
I love you. And I’ll see you at the end, babe.
• • •
AUGUST 17 *** 2127 *** 2336 E-HOURS ***VIRGO SUPERCLUSTER VIRGO “A” 74.906
Devon!
We’re alive!
Your reply brought me so much joy, and made me feel so loved, baby! I hope the girls weren’t too upset. I don’t know how these transmissions are getting to you, and I don’t know if or when I’ll stop receiving yours, but as the Universe is my witness, I’ll message as often as I can until we get out of this.
The Praetor is still burning from fuselage to cabin. You should see it, D! We’re in the accretion disk, and everything is just . . . light. I can’t explain it. It’s like we’re seeing only the most radiant colors in the spectrum. This is the most amazing thing, though: we’re all in the cargo hold on the aft deck—literally the backside of the ship—but the front is just this lasso of plasma unspooling like molten glass on a paddle. It’s being pulled apart, Devon. We’re sure that Ju-Mei’s death would have been instantaneous, she would have just . . . ceased to exist in all that plasma. My God. If I look out the porthole, I can see the ship curving, and the beast of the black hole, Ouranos 426, a wound in spacetime so dark it seems to glow. It looks like we are above it; then to its side; and then sometimes it’s dark, everywhere. We follow the glow of the ship. We look for the lip of accretion.
The disintegration doesn’t seem to have reached us yet. Nyasa and Fang are working on the calculations right now, and I’ll join them as soon as I finish typing this message. I’ve seen Nyasa like this in the simulation, you can almost see the numbers moving in patterns before her eyes, and luckily the consoles still work so the onboard computer can help us with the math—assuming its AI is not compromised. If we can keep the atmosphere breathable for a few hours longer and if we survive acceleration and if the engines work as usual and if the ship doesn’t pull apart from the jettisoning of our compartment and if we don’t smash into something else in the accretion disc, then maybe, maybe, we’ll make it home. I know what you’ll say: too many “ifs.” But have faith! I have this feeling, D. I’m telling you. I think we might just make it.
OK—Nyasa wants to write to her family and see if we can get a message to Mission Control.
More kisses to you and the girls. Tell them Daddy Two is coming home, he just got stuck for a bit.
Love you. More as soon as I can.
• • •
AUGUST 18 *** 2127 *** 1100 E-HOURS ***VIRGO SUPERCLUSTER VIRGO “A” 74.905
Devon!
Are you sure this is happening? A year? I can’t believe it. I missed the girls’ birthdays? I missed yours? What else have I missed? It’s only been twelve hours for me. I don’t know what to say. I have no frame of reference. I know time works differently around a black hole but it’s all theoretical, I never thought it was actually like this. Perhaps the computer is off again, perhaps the readings are incorrect?
A year. Jesus.
You asked again in your last message whether I was sure the comms would keep relaying, and the truth is: I don’t know. I do know that I will keep trying to communicate with you as long as the ship has power, and I won’t stop. Count on that.
Our messages to Mission Control have been rerouted by the onboard computer, and it’s trying to resolve the situation itself because of the “time-critical” nature of our predicament. Which I understand, but it’s just infuriating. There were the transmission glitches (you can see them on the monitor) when I messaged you, and I thought of that message “jumping” over the event horizon like a child over scatterdrones, using gravity as a whip to speed towards you. I had no idea how a message would return. I still don’t.
We were supposed to have mastered planetary travel; we were going to bring back so much data. The pictures the telescopes have taken, Devon! The samples! We really thought—we really thought we were going to bring back the first traces of nonhuman life in the universe.
Fuck it. We still will.
I won’t miss any more time with you.
We’ve managed to isolate the forward cabin and fuselage—at least until gravity takes it entirely—and we can trace our position in relation to the black hole from its melt. The problem is conserving power. We need more time. Oxygen is leaking out from somewhere, and we’ve turned off as many of the nonessential instruments as we can: the telescopes, the cosmic ray subsystems, spectroscopes, everything. It’s like we’re tethered by a coiling leash to a leviathan, black beneath us. No—“black” doesn’t even begin to cover it. This is nothingness, D. Absolute nothingness. We have our spacesuits, at least, as a last resort if oxygen fails completely. I’m taking everyone’s vitals every hour to keep on top of things, trying to keep everyone mentally together.
I’ll tell Nyasa and Fang about the temporal disjunction. Nyasa wrote to her grandparents last. Fang doesn’t have anyone except his two dogs, staying with a friend. We don’t have video or audio, Devon, so he couldn’t hear them or even speak to the animals. At least you have my words, and I have yours; how can a man relay his love to creatures that feel just as strongly as him, and yet cannot understand? It’s cruel. It’s so horribly cruel. Fang swears they will understand, though, and I believe him.
It’s getting hotter and everything is going hazy. No chance of any equipment freezing, at least, which is a positive, if you look at it askance. Nyasa thinks we’ll reach a velocity gradient in a few hours that will allow us to slingshot out of the accretion disk—if the computer’s calculations are correct this time.
Fang thinks it’s taking us too close again, but Nyasa is resolute, and we have to trust her. Then we can use that energy to jump and get back home—to you. If we don’t burn, or crash, or asphyxiate. A lot of “ifs,” again. But I have faith. Wish us luck! If (yes, another one!) we can just get out of the gravity well, maybe time will start working right for me again.
I hope you don’t have too long to wait for this transmission. I love you.
• • •
AUGUST 19 *** 2127 *** 0234 E-HOURS ***VIRGO SUPERCLUSTER VIRGO “A” 74.904
The onboard computer has advised “assisted termination for the remaining crewmembers.”
In other words, it’s telling us all to kill ourselves.
I begged Nyasa to shut it off, but it turns out it’s the one system that we can’t control; no overrides work, at least not from us. They can only be given via Mission Control. Which the computer won’t message.
The Praetor’s paradox.
Fang actually did what it suggested, D.
Nyasa and I were at the terminals and didn’t see him; he went and took himself off to the corner and swallowed a fatal dose of tranquilizer from the medevac, and just like that, there is a corpse with us. He didn’t cry out or vomit or wail, but, I don’t know how to explain it, I just knew the moment he died. Death really isn’t like sleeping, at all. It’s like you can see the body become smaller, somehow. Even in his suit. Didn’t some scientist once calculate the precise weight of the human soul? Fang Teng: cushioned amongst piping and empty storage crates as if it were the most comfortable place. There is a picture, an actual, physical photograph, of his dogs in his hand, and neither I nor Nyasa can bring ourselves to take it from him. They’re so pretty, D. The girls would love them. Rocky and Apollo. Two little pugs. Just beautiful.
Later, we’ll give him a proper burial. There’s work to do still. We’re getting tired though. The temperature is climbing, and the cooling systems for this part of the ship seem to have stopped working completely, now. I’m thinking about poor old Ju-Mei’s corpse out there, or cells, or whatever is left of her. Has she passed on? Has she reincarnated? Is that shining lasso a speedway direct to the afterlife? The darkness seems brighter, somehow, now. Sometimes when I stop typing and just listen I can hear a kind of singing outside. Maybe it’s Nyasa humming. Maybe it’s the blood in my head. Maybe it’s God, outside the porthole, languishing in the gravity well.
Has it really been two years for you? I can’t believe that.
It was nice to focus on the news of something other than the Praetor, even if I can’t quite believe that either. You have to understand how difficult this is for me to process. We’ve only been stuck for a couple of days, and, honestly, terrestrial politics seems so small from here. Why are they calling you a widower of a same-sex marriage? I’m not dead. They don’t think you can take care of the girls by yourself? We must still legally be married, they can’t change that. I’M NOT DEAD, OK? Show them this message, please. I know this is hard but you just have to wait for me a little bit longer.
What about the girls! They must be nearing puberty by now, right? Eleven? Tell me. Tell me everything. What are they into? Is Shelly still bullying her younger sister? Tell Sarah she needs to stand up for herself. Do they understand what’s going on? Has the Praetor been in the news? Do they remember that song we used to sing them when they weren’t feeling sleepy, that one from the musical? Our voices sounded so good together. I miss singing with you. I miss seeing their little eyes flutter and then close. I miss that peace.
Nyasa’s messaging her nieces, nephews, cousins now. Anyone who’s there. Many of the messages are coming back, or are failing to send, because I guess people’s contacts have changed or they’ve moved or they may be dead or who knows?
It feels like life is overtaking us. It feels like we’re already dead.
Sorry. I mustn’t think like that.
You’d better have gotten advice from Victoria, by the way! The girls need that perspective, love. I know you’d know that. Menstrual cycles and such. I have some fantastic resources in the medical library in my old office, and there are videos you can share with them about how to apply pads, how to use contraception. Don’t be afraid to give them pain meds if the cramps get too bad. Tell them it’s OK if they leak a little or if they get blood on their clothes. Victoria can help. Please reach out to her. Does Sarah still want to be a pilot? If you need to, just read her the happy bits of these messages, so she doesn’t get scared, and so that she knows the universe is still a good place, full of wonder.
Do they remember what I look like? Show them pictures, Devon, tell them what I do, and where I am: Daddy Two’s spaceship is stuck and he may go to sleep. Are you—do you still love me? Do you still remember me?
Please promise me you’ll remember.
OK—I have to go. Nyasa needs medical advice for something. Wish us luck. More soon.
• • •
AUGUST 20 *** 2127 *** 0400 E-HOURS ***VIRGO SUPERCLUSTER VIRGO “A” 74.904
Nyasa is dead.
She wanted to spacewalk to check the exterior hatches in the Praetor’s midsection, and the minute she exited the outer airlock, it happened. I don’t know why. One moment she was talking me through the operation, her voice calm in my earpieces, and then she just gave this small gasp. Then all the readings went red. What did she see? What the fuck did she see out there? She’s moving, still; I’m watching her now, her body flickering outside of the ship, and it’s outlined in the purest line of fire, bound together and etched onto the canvas of the void. An ember, glowing, forever. The lit end of a cigarette in human form, permanently inhaled (like us, when we used to share a joint after the girls had gone to sleep when they were newborns. Remember?). Nyasa Dabiri: stellar US air-force graduate, with reflexes that would rival any great cat; now a cigarette girl, tethered to the ship in spacetime breached by the gasp of a leviathan. What a beautiful way to die.
It’s just me, now.
I know all the things that can happen. Psychosis. Hypoxia, as the atmospheric gases puff out (I can see the numbers ticking down on the displays). A million treacherous ghosts leaving me. The funny thing is: I’m not hungry, and I’m not thirsty. It’s been a few days, I think, and I should be. But my vitals are fine. Physically, I’ve never been better.
I need to find and plug the new leaks in this chamber and try to find some water. I’m wearing a second skinsuit of my own sweat, it’s so hot, it’s so hot. I wish Nyasa would stop flickering like an old TV screen outside the porthole. I wish she would just burn away and die—but she’s going slowly, like the ship is. It’s going to take millennia for us to all turn to ash. Maybe Ju-Mei was the lucky one.
I didn’t get a reply to my last message. Did you receive it? Don’t worry if it’s been a while for you. I still want to hear from you. I still want to know. Are the girls grown? Tell me, tell me everything. Even the silliest or saddest thing. Are we still legally married? Does the world think I’m dead still?
I mustn’t think bad thoughts.
I’m going to try to jettison this compartment. The computer is completely unresponsive and won’t help me with anything besides showing me the volumes of the sedative to induce fatal cardiac arrest. As if I don’t fucking know that already! I just have to hope that the Praetor will hold together long enough to not incinerate me when the release thrusters activate.
Sing this to the girls: when you wish upon a star . . . you know the rest.
• • •
AUGUST 20 *** 2127 *** 1948 E-HOURS ***VIRGO SUPERCLUSTER VIRGO “A” 74.903
I messaged you sooner, D, I did, how can this be right? Check the metadata. It’s the same day. It’s the same fucking day for me. You’re telling me it’s been five years since this morning?
I understand if you don’t want to hear from me again but at least do this, for God’s sake: YOU HAVE TO GET THE GIRLS BACK. Fine, fine, tell them I’m dead, tell them you’re a widower. I don’t care WHAT legislation the Patriot Court ratified; you’re not a same-sex couple anymore, you’re a single parent, a single fucking father, and single people raise children all the time. It’s not illegal. Are you reading this? IT ISN’T ILLEGAL. I don’t blame you, I’m not angry, but you have to get them back. Do you have comms contacts for the girls, or for Victoria? Anyone? Where are they now? Are they together? You have to tell me. You have to tell me. They’re still technically minors; they have to be with someone!!!
FOR GOD’S SAKE, DEVON!!
I’m sorry I didn’t message more often. I was trying to stay alive. I was trying to be useful, trying to keep busy. I didn’t know. If I’d have known I would have glued my hands to this fucking console and typed and typed, every second, every minute, and they couldn’t pry me off if they tried.
Nyasa’s plan didn’t work in the end; the fission engines have gone completely cold, and the thrusters lose power almost instantly. I’m still in the crew compartment at the rear of the Praetor and I’m not moving. Everything is still bright, but the light is different; I feel I can see the spectrum splitting, like each color is a distinct soul, but Ouranos 426 has its light, too. I am in the center of a lattice. Wherever I move about this room: I am at the center of it. Poor Fang, I try not to look at him as I hustle and bustle and tinker at things and try to keep my mind. He seems alive in the light: his skin is only blue because blue chose to alight on him, and really he’s the color of a four-day-old corpse—except he feels alive, because something has happened to our bodies, here. They’ve stopped. The dogs are grinning from the photograph. They’re so happy! They’re all together, why wouldn’t they be happy.
I imagine you and the girls here.
Like we were that last day: the girls in your arms, waving from the viewing gallery. You looked so handsome. Can time reverse when I leave the black hole? Can the girls be young again, and with you again, un-persecuted, and can we be married again, and can I give up all this and choose to work in a hospital on Earth instead, somewhere nearby? Can Sarah go to military academy after college, can I watch her do her first flyby after pilot school, and can Shelly play the alto sax now that her fingers have grown long enough and can I watch her on stage at the Blue Note in New York bringing the goddamn house down? Think of all the good things I could do.
. . . . . . . . . . You should see outside, D. The things out there.
Oh. Oh yes. You told me not to message you again. I won’t. I hope you live a good life—wait, no, this isn’t—can’t be it. This is the stupidest way to end it and it isn’t happening. I’ll think of a new plan, computer be fucked! Get the girls back, D! I’m getting out. I’m getting out! I’m getting out I’m getting out I’m getting out I’m getting out!!!!!
• • •
AUGUST 21 *** 2127 *** 0000 E-HOURS ***VIRGO SUPERCLUSTER VIRGO “A” 74.902
The spectacle of the spectacle is the spectacle the string is the thing is the light of life is the line of me and him and her blue and black and glow, or the color fire is, and I wish there were no oxygen left in the entire universe so that nothing could ever burn. Four days. Two hundred thousand years, or three thousand, or a million. Who knows? Time has ended for me. Time has planted itself in one spot and taken a seat and stopped. What does a family mean after two hundred thousand years? What does a person mean? What did a person ever mean but water and chemicals and feeling? Write all the laws you want. Draw lines between this person or that person, call this or that unnatural and what does it matter. We’re all just cells.
(Why won’t Ouranos hurry? Why can’t I die? Question upon question upon question)
Me hunched over the controls of the backlit keypad forever typing away looking at my back
hunched over the controls of the backlit keypad shining on Fang in cells of movement, animated in slow-motion, because light has turned itself about in a great carousel now:
Fang at the medevac
Fang stooping over us to explain, arms like a scarecrow’s
Fang with head thrown back drinking the poison
Fang wilting, head nodding down
Fang on the ground
Fang snuggled in his pipey nest, staring at me through the visor of his helmet.
Rocky and Apollo snuffling in glossy oblong, because a photograph is magic, they said it captured souls back in the early days of cinema and it does, they were right. It really does. (Twenty-one grams, they say the soul weighs, twenty-one grams. Well I can tell you that it weighs heavier than that, because I think one is sitting on the ship above me, perhaps two of them—no, three! Fang and Nyasa and Ju-Mei’s spirits riding this blitzing ship like a voltcar into the abyss.) Maybe the dogs too, why not! No windows to stick their heads and lolling tongues out of but their mouths are open and drinking in stars all the same, drinking them all in.
Each frame of Fang’s physical form fills the room, through each frame of movement of me, too, front and back and every which way. Nyasa’s too. We are filling this Praetor. We are the Praetor. Nyasa is back inside again, and outside, and everywhere. Family is here in the lightness of the cosmos. Family is the cosmos; stardust parceled out to everyone and given form. Light’s just bubblegum stretched, it’s just plastic. So obvious! Why didn’t we see that before? Why did we pretend everything was fixed in place?
How are the girls? Where are the girls? I wish I could see them instead of all of us like this, doing everything wrong. Nyasa suiting up, hatch open, hatch closed, bustling around in that protective gear. Not-dead-yet. Then dead. All at once.
It’s funny watching yourself from the outside. It’s getting so hot that I think the suit has melted onto me, I really do, and if I think too hard I want to scream and never stop screaming. (It’s not my flesh cooking. It’s something else.)
I’ve seen some really horrible things in my career, like that one dead girl, no, not girl, cadaver I dissected in med school, and her breasts were so hard and so full with cancer and I wondered if there was a God, and I didn’t believe it then but now I can see that there is one, and morality exists for it at some level we can’t even reach.
The blackness is moral. Very much so.
It has intention. Imagine the black of a pupil made the size of a planet. Wet and glistening, reflecting everything and stippled with stars. Striped with the glowing matter that is us, forever dissolving, forever being pulled apart and made conflagration of. More things outside, moving so fast they don’t seem to be moving at all. So hot they don’t seem to be burning at all. Some things:
Great trains setting radiant bars of track ahead of themselves, rolling over them at the very last minute, like a silly cosmic Western. Tracks of quantum matchsticks. To look at them too long (I can still turn my head and see out the porthole, did you know?) is to alter them, and they break, but the train never stops, and it’s like it never needed the tracks anyway. The tracks are one process. The black hole has its own process. Everything is light.
Wings: something is perched on top of the ship (not the souls anymore, but something different—yes, you thought I couldn’t hear your claws scrabbling, well I can! I can!) pecking at the Praetor’s spaghettified front fuselage, drinking it like nectar. There is enough for it and for Ouranos both. Everyone can have a drink of us.
Why am I still not thirsty?
Black brushstrokes of starlessness. Someone is painting space outside. Isn’t it God?
A man is singing again. (Fang is that you? Can you leave me alone for a moment? I’m trying to do something)
A Cigarette Gal is glowing outside the window and it’s nice to look at her, honestly. Sometimes it’s so nice that I forget what I was writing. Or what was writing. Or what writing is.
I’ve got to go—you. Whatever your name is.
I think I want to go outside. Praetor is stringing more now, and most of the ship is fire.
I think I’d like to be fire, too.
• • •
AUGUST 22 *** 2127 *** 2024 E-HOURS ***VIRGO SUPERCLUSTER VIRGO “A” 74.901
Oh babe
its sO nice babe
A gem!!!!
• • •
0000 *** 0000 *** 0000 E-HOURS ***00000
I want to explain that the girls are here, not just Cigarette Gal (I can’t see her anymore or rather I can but she looks different) and the minute the very minute I can stop hunching over this (where?) I can swap the light from the keys with the light of eaten stars and step outside but there are too many steps, because the girls are here, and the man is here, and the creatures big and small and all the tiniest things are here (wouldn’t it be nice to have dogs? Bonded siblings are the best, they say), and the largest things I can’t even see the end of are here, and he’s up and about, too, circling the room in his marshmallow suit—no more pipes for him, no more sleep!—but it’s hard to coordinate when you can only see the back of your head and the backs of your hands and
I’m still not hungry
Why I am still not hungry
And it’s a wonder anyone ever moves, at all, because movement requires thought requires synapses nerve highways and all that so if the nerves can’t work and the messages don’t run then there are only my fingers, these things, and I don’t even know if I have a whole body because my back is so hot it might be gone entirely (I wish I could see that)
I don’t know why I’m writing
I don’t know how I’m writing
There is a black gullet star-eater world-remaker and the minute the very minute I get my strength back down the guzzle I go somewhere else to see what’s new. Come on, girls! Come on, Ciggy Lady! Come on, Fang! To the next life! Let’s all sing in glorious chorus, and then we can all go to sleep.
. . . oh. I can’t remember the words. Something about a prayer, to stars. Something about the rootlessness of physical location. A blue fairy. Ha! Why not. The Universe is just lawless, utterly utterly lawless. Deviant, even. It’s a carnival out there. Colors you couldn’t imagine. Not just blue, not just red. Everything in every formation possible. One last total riot before we fall into a god with the name of sky.
Just give me a minute!! And then off we’ll go. The very next minute I swear I’ll get up. The very next minute. But that lasso of light that binds us to the titan rend, that black star, is changing color, spattering with globules of something organic that is fired instantly, like lava, admixed with the pooling metal that was the cabin exowall and lining and I think it is or was the grey matter of my brain uncaged from my skull, I can see it, and it isn’t painful, but it is sad, and horrifying in a way only watching a living body break down is. Perhaps the part of my brain that remembers will remember that this form is borrowed and not real at all, or, rather, only one mask of reality. It’s all a shell.
By some miracle, I can still write. I have a new plan, my love!
If I can type faster, if I can just keep these fingers rattling over these keys, the damage will not be so great—I will survive this, as long as Ouranos is kinder with what it’s taking from me—and I can turn this ship around and come back to you. I can step outside and over that black lip and into that gulf that isn’t void but proliferation, changing and clamoring and candescent.
You are here and we are here and I am almost here. We made it despite everything.
Sing with me, ok? Ready Shelly, ready Sarah?
That’s our family, baby.
Kiss the girls for me one last time, will you? And tell them, after all these years, Daddy Two is finally coming home.
• • •