Do black holes get lonely, I wonder, staring out into the distant abyss as my spacecraft drifts by, gliding towards our objective. There used to be others to distract me from such unsettling musings; Jonsey, the programmer, Alexandra, the mess chief, and Zart, the navigator, amongst the rest of the crew. But they’re all gone, gone for several months now since the last of them buckled and took their own life.
Space travel is not easy.
They say the Universe is full of wonders; stars and quasars, planets and nebulae, comets that burn with frozen fire. But I’ve been on this ship for almost two years, and I have seen spaces emptier and vaster than any desert, colder and more devoid of life than the most desolate ice cap; and I can only conclude that like our own atomic structures, the Universe really exists as mostly empty spaces in between flickers of life.
I don’t know why I’m the last. I don’t know why the solitude and silence has yet to drive me mad, though I wake everyday waiting to join my friends. I don’t know if black holes are lonely or not.
But I suspect that they are.
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