The job posting was looking for a particular brand of lonely madness to which I happened to have loyalty. Some company called IntInd--that is, Interstellar Individual®, LLC--wanted to be the first to send a human through a black hole. As you can guess, that's a one-way trip.
They say some time in the early 2000's, humanity stopped exploring the stars for the sake of science less than a century after they'd started, and turned the field of space travel over to eccentric billionaires. Apparently, the first step on the race to the bottom was an automobile being shot into orbit as a promotional stunt. And once capitalism grabs hold of something, it doesn't readily let go.
So why did IntInd want to send someone into a black hole? Their PR reps told the press it was for research purposes, which was... stretching the truth, at least. I came to understand that, aside from the attention and controversy, they meant to demonstrate that the new tech in their brand of personal spacecraft could keep people safe and comfortable in the most brutal, extreme conditions the universe had to offer, for a very, very long time.
As it turns out, "a very, very long time" gets exponentially easier to come by when you're near a black hole. According to the layman's terms they gave me, they just had to shoot me at a big enough black hole that had already eaten most of its surrounding dust, and the stuff they built this ship with would theoretically be tough enough to not crumple right away. The plan was, I would beam them status updates until the signals couldn't escape any more... and then I'd get to take the rest of the day off.
After the first five artificially-cheerful periodic updates I broadcast, the answers stopped coming back from IntInd, but at update number ten I heard back from an astronomy historian, who let me know that IntInd had been merged into a bigger corporation decades back and had most of its projects canned--including mine, naturally--but also that the ad campaign was a remarkable success for them before that. In my 11th update, I told her great-great-grandson that she appreciated his grandparents and parents keeping the radio in good condition for him.
That was the last message of mine that could physically escape the pull. It's been a short while (for me) since then, and remarkably enough, the craft is holding steady--though the sensors are reading more pressure than they know what to do with. I think Earth is long gone by now. What I'm writing now is certainly not going to be seen by anyone... but if I'm wrong, whoever you are, and however you found this: I've enclosed the image that appeared on my screen when the rest of the universe was gone.
📎 🖼️ EXTERNAL_CAM.IMG (click to preview)
