Dr. Ava Reyes was falling into a black hole when she fell in love.
This was not the sequence she would have chosen. She would have preferred a nice restaurant, perhaps a walk on a planet with breathable atmosphere and a functioning sun. But the universe, as her PhD advisor had once warned her, was not in the business of accommodating human preferences.
The research vessel Icarus had been studying the event horizon of Cygnus-X when the gravitational anomaly hit: a tidal spike that should have been impossible, that crumpled the ship’s port hull like paper, killed the engines, and sent the Icarus on a slow, spiraling descent toward the singularity. Time dilation was already taking effect. For every hour that passed aboard the ship, three days elapsed in the universe outside.
There were two survivors: Ava, an astrophysicist whose speciality was black hole mechanics, and Commander Rhys Callahan, a pilot whose speciality was not dying.
“Options?” Rhys asked, pulling himself from the wreckage of the command console. Blood from a gash above his eye was floating in the micro-gravity, forming perfect crimson spheres that drifted like slow-motion rain.
“The ship is beyond repair. We are inside the gravitational influence of a black hole. Time dilation means that even if a rescue ship launched immediately, they could not reach us before we cross the event horizon. Once we cross, we cannot come back.”
“So we’re dead.”
“We are falling. Whether we’re dead depends on what we do during the fall.”
What they did during the fall was, by any rational measure, extraordinary.
Ava calculated that they had approximately seventy-two hours of ship-time before the tidal forces became lethal. Seventy-two hours of subjective experience, while outside the gravity well, weeks passed and then months and then years.
They could have spent those hours in despair. Instead, they spent them collecting data.
Ava was an astrophysicist falling into the very phenomenon she had spent her career studying. She would be the first human to observe a black hole from the inside. Her instruments were damaged but not destroyed, and the readings they produced were, scientifically, priceless. She worked with the focused intensity of a woman who knew that the data she was collecting would never reach another human mind but who collected it anyway, because the act of knowing was its own justification.
Rhys helped. He had no training in astrophysics, but he could operate instruments, record readings, and — crucially — make Ava eat, sleep, and occasionally look up from her work to acknowledge that she was sharing the most extraordinary experience in human history with another person.
“You need to see this,” he said on the second day, pulling her away from a spectrographic analysis. He pointed at the viewport.
The view was impossible. Light, captured by the black hole’s gravity, curved in arcs and spirals that created a visual effect like looking through a lens made of the universe itself. Stars that were behind them appeared in front of them, distorted into rings and streaks of colour. The accretion disk blazed below, a furnace of superheated matter that radiated in colours the human eye had never evolved to see but which the Icarus’s sensors translated into visible spectrum: deep violets, searing golds, a blue so intense it seemed to vibrate.
“Oh,” Ava breathed. She pressed her hand against the viewport, and the universe pressed back, distorted and beautiful and utterly indifferent to the fact that two tiny humans were watching it from the throat of a gravity well.
“This is what you spent your career studying,” Rhys said, standing beside her. “And now you’re inside it.”
“Yes.”
“Was it worth it?”
She looked at him. In the light of the accretion disk, his face was painted in impossible colours, and his eyes — which were green, she had noted, in the way that you note certain things about a person when you realise there will be no more new people — reflected the warped starlight like small, private galaxies.
“Ask me tomorrow,” she said.
By the third day, time dilation had become noticeable in human terms. Their clocks ran measurably slower. Ava calculated that centuries were now passing in the outside universe for every hour they experienced. Everyone they had known was dead. Their civilization had aged beyond recognition. They were, in every meaningful sense, the last two people in their world — not because the world had ended but because time had made them unreachable.
The knowledge was both devastating and liberating.
“Nothing we do matters to anyone else anymore,” Rhys said, staring at the ceiling of the quarters they had retreated to as the tidal forces made the rest of the ship uninhabitable. “We are literally outside the timeline of everyone who has ever cared about us. Every obligation, every expectation, every relationship except this one has been erased by physics.”
“That is the most depressing and the most romantic thing I have ever heard,” Ava said.
“I was going for realistic, but I’ll take romantic.”
They looked at each other across the small cabin, with the universe curving around them and time dissolving beneath them, and something that had been building for three days — or perhaps for the entire duration of the mission, in the glances and the shared jokes and the professional respect that had been quietly evolving into something that professional respect could not contain — finally reached critical mass.
“Rhys,” Ava said. “I would like to spend whatever time we have left not pretending that I don’t feel what I feel.”
“What do you feel?”
“That you are the only person in the universe I would choose to fall into a black hole with. And that if I have to die, I would like to die having kissed someone who makes me feel like the laws of physics are not the only forces worth studying.”
He crossed the cabin in two strides. The kiss was urgent, honest, flavoured with adrenaline and grief and the impossible beauty of two people choosing each other at the end of everything. His hands found her waist, her hips, the curve of her back, and she pressed against him as if gravity were pulling them together — which, technically, it was — and the tidal forces that were tearing the ship apart seemed, for one perfect moment, to be singing.
They did not die.
This was not in the plan. The plan, such as it was, involved collecting data until the tidal forces killed them and hoping that the Icarus’s black box would somehow survive to transmit their findings.
Instead, as the ship crossed the event horizon — the point of no return, the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, could escape — something unexpected happened. The gravitational anomaly that had captured them in the first place reversed. A bubble of negative energy, consistent with Ava’s theoretical work on Hawking radiation but never before observed, erupted from the singularity and caught the Icarus like a wave catching a surfer.
The ship was thrown. Not back — back was impossible inside a black hole. Sideways. Through. Into a region of space-time that Ava’s instruments could not identify because it was not in any database, not in any star chart, not in any corner of the universe that humanity had ever explored.
They emerged into a sky full of stars that burned in colours they had no names for, orbiting a planet that pulsed with the deep violet light of a world rich in energy and atmosphere and, as subsequent scans would reveal, life.
“Where are we?” Rhys asked, staring at the viewport.
Ava checked the readings, ran the numbers three times, and looked up at him with an expression of stunned wonder.
“Everywhere,” she said. “According to these readings, we are on the other side of the universe. The black hole was a tunnel. A wormhole. And it just spit us out approximately fourteen billion light-years from where we started.”
“Is there a way back?”
She looked at the impossible sky, the alien planet, the battered ship that had carried them through a singularity and out the other side. Then she looked at Rhys, whose green eyes reflected the new stars, and who was, in this moment, the only human being within fourteen billion light-years.
“I don’t think I want to go back,” she said. “I think I want to see what’s here. With you.”
He took her hand. The stars of an unknown galaxy burned above them. And two people who had fallen into a black hole and come out the other side began the next chapter of their story, which was, by any measure, the greatest adventure either of them could have imagined.
But then, as Ava would note in her research journal that evening, the universe had never been in the business of accommodating human expectations. Sometimes it exceeded them.