Prologue

Rachel Dar fell into a black hole.

And that is where my memory of her ends. Nothing can escape the crushing gravity of its event horizon, and so she passed into silence, into a place where physics itself unravels. No information or signal can reach us from where she has gone, no proof of her existence can be verified beyond one final moment of slow evanescence.

From our outside observation, she never even crossed beyond the horizon. She only grew smaller and dimmer until her body, frozen at the edge of blackness, red-shifted to nothingness. From our vantage, she did not vanish all at once—just as those we lose never truly disappear. They recede, retreating deeper into the horizons of our minds until memory itself stretches thin and slips away.

Yet one day, even memory will fail… As the stars already have.

The universe has already begun its long descent into silence. We are its final voices. This space station in orbit around that supermassive black hole is the last refuge of existence, but it will not last forever. Ultimately, it too will tumble into the dark, swallowed as Rachel was—until nothing remains. Not just of us, but of everything we have ever been. Our art, our history, our crimes, our grief, our love, and our hope will fall away piece by piece, leaving nothing for the universe to remember us by. Just darkness. This fate waits below us—a maw in the fabric of existence that will consume every echo of humanity.

Rachel Dar fell into a black hole.

What became of her past that border, beyond the reach of any cry or light particle? We cannot say. All we have is theory, and theory tells us that beyond that shadowed veil, she would see nothing… At first.

But as she drifted deeper, her eyes adjusting to the blackest dark they had ever known, she might begin to discern faint wisps of blue light flickering at the edges of perception—radiation, the last remnants of all that had ever fallen before her. Ghosts of lost travelers, lingering like spirits in the depths of gravity’s well. Then, she’d fall even deeper where time and space fold and stretch. There, she might find something even stranger—a shifting, fractured mirage of everything the singularity had ever devoured.

Perhaps she would see the past unfurl before her in scattered reflections, as twisted light from ancient matter played tricks upon her vision. She might even glimpse those she had lost, flickering in impossible forms, their shapes bending and shuddering under gravity’s ruthless hand. Or, as time collapsed upon itself, she might meet versions of herself that she had never become—infinite iterations shaped by different choices, different fears, different pathways taken or left behind—all falling alongside her.

Would she dare look back in those final moments as she awaited her fate?

If so, it would appear as if time itself were unraveling. The great rings of our Station would spin madly, like a whirling trinket of old accelerating beyond sense. Gravity dilates time, and from her perspective, everything would blur into a frenzied streak of light and speed—the Station turning a desperate pirouette against inevitability. And then, as her time slowed to a near-infinite crawl, she would witness the Station’s true end—its slow, aching unraveling, metal groaning and decaying as it surrendered to the void, its remains following her same inescapable fate.

Then, she might even watch the universe itself die.

So, in one sense, Rachel Dar may outlive us all.

But not forever. Eventually, time’s arrow would draw her to the heart of the singularity. What may await her there? Some unseen bridge between worlds? A descent into new dimensions of time and space? Or does she simply come undone, pulled apart atom by atom until nothing remains? We cannot know. And she cannot tell us.

Death and black holes guard their secrets well, and what lies beyond the horizon of either is known only to those who pass through them.

Rachel Dar fell into a black hole. That is the end of the story.

But the end is often the least important part…