Stranger Times

The Heart of Ajs An'hlj

Author's Note: This story is dedicated to leahcanscience, an author who helped remind me that science fiction is, at its best, the first step in the journey into impossible things. Minus the author's note, the story sits in tribute to a troubling year, at exactly 2017 words.

She awoke on the accretion disk of immensity, and her sight was swallowed by the heart of Ajs An'hlj.

The stars were gone. This close to the black hole in the centre of the maelstrom of pulverized stars known as the Ajs An'hlj cluster, it's gravity pulled light out of its endless path and bent it towards itself, capturing what it could and permanently twisting what it couldn't clutch. All the light that she could see came from the immense disc of light.

The swirling disc of shredded gasses whirled beneath her like a river of light,
She noticed, surprised, that on her left, the disc was blue. But on her right, red.

"Tigana Osir, are you awake?" a voice asked.

Tigana looked down, to see a small computer floating just a foot away from her. Slowly, she reached out and grabbed the machine.

Its holographic interfaces bloomed to life, surrounding her in a sea of small text notes and command scrolls for observing the data they would receive once they were inside.
Only as her eyes focused to start reading did the stomach pain catch up with her. She doubled over, as dry heaves tried to throw-up food that wasn't there.

Which was fortunate. The small pod she rode in had no gravity of its own, and if she even could open the isolation pod now, the ship would be ripped into subatomic mush by the gravity outside.

"JIM, how are we doing?" Tigana asked aloud.

JIM was short for Journey Interface Machine, the designation of the machine in her hands.

Her only companion, for hundreds of light years.

"We're on course, and should penetrate the event horizon in under an hour," JIM replied. "The gravity repulsing field is working exactly as expected. Which is good, because otherwise we would spend the next trillion years feeling our own atoms being pulled from our bodies."

Tigana could hear the smirk in JIM's artificial voice. "Well, one of us would feel it."

"A trillion years?" Tigana asked.

"At the event horizon, gravity is so strong that our perception of time is warped," JIM explained. "To the folks back home, you would spend the next trillion years falling into the black hole. To you, every star in the galaxy would burn out before what was left of you fell inside. That's how slow light moves, the closer we go."

"So we're moving faster than light right now?" Tigana asked.

"Yes and no. Since we're repelling gravity waves, we're moving faster than the light outside of the isolation pod. But the light inside the pod moves faster than we do, so we're not breaking physics. Mostly."

"I think I get it," Tigana said. She looked down at her feet again, and watched with a smile as the light receded.

"We're getting close," Tigana said. She looked up from her feet, and finally let herself look at the perfect darkness of Asj An'hlj immense heart.

There was nothing.

Black emptiness enveloped everything, a perfect darkness that couldn't be fooled no matter how many filter distortions JIM flipped through. No light shone from that monstrous thing. No radiation, no radio, no heat. Not one of Tigana's senses were attuned to perceive the only thing Ajs An'hlj dark heart radiated.