text: He couldn’t believe his own eyes. Impenetrable darkness bordered by a red glare. So close. All his life was leading up to this moment. All those calculations, those experiments, those test flights. Those years spent in libraries and laboratories. But it was all worth it. He was fascinated with space ever since he was a child. With all its secrets that were light years away. All those stars and nebulas, those planets and asteroids. All those places where noone has ever been. He always wanted to be like the Voyager and venture into the unkown with nothing but the golden disc on his chest. When he looked up at the night sky and saw the stars shining through the vastness of cosmos all the way to earth, he was amazed. Before that light finally got to reach his eyes, Galileo, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and many more lived and died while exploring the mysteries of the universe. He knew he would join them once. And now he was so close. The red glare dissapeared. Nothing left but the impenetrable darkness. And he was falling into it. Faster and faster. When he started to study the universe, he fell in love with black holes. Mass so heavy nothing escapes its gravity, not even light, but still: Nothing can ever enter it. Mass so heavy it doesn’t obey by the rules of the universe described by some of the greatest minds of our civlization, but still: It remains alone, sole exeption, so the rules remain unbroken. “Nothing can ‘fall into’ a black hole. The closer an object gets to the core, the faster it accelerates. The faster it accelerates, the heavier it gets and the more it bends the spacetime. Thats how theory of relativity works. Before the object can get to the centre, it ends up bending the spacetime so much, it quite literally gets ‘frozen’ in time. Nothing can ever reach the core.” “You’re wrong. I will.” He knew he would reach it. He had to. He lived a long and happy live. Now comes the climax. Impenetrable darkness moments away. He was almost there. “Probe 1, this is the last message from the mothership Apollo 22. In a few moments, you won’t be able to recieve or send any more messages. See you on the other side, doc. God bless you.” From the point of view of the observer, an object falling into the black hole will stop in time before reaching the core. But the time is relative and it remains unchanged for that very object. Nothing will ever fall into a black hole, except all the things that are falling into it. It sounds strange, but it is true. His ship started to pick up speed. It was almost moving at the speed of light. He knew the ship would last. When he told his friends about his plan, they laughed at him at first. Some even tried to talk him out of it. But to no avail. In the end they all agreed to help him and they created the perfect indestructible vessel, capsule, Noah’s Ark, that would withstand all storms and land safely in the new world with its precious cargo. Impenetrable darkness at his fingertips. Farewell to the crew of Apollo 22, farewell to all the colleagues, farewell to his family. They are all probably dead by now. 1... 2... 3... He counted and imagined all the civilizations that already rose and fell again, all the stars that were born and died again, all the universes that existed... But he was in his capsule, inside of the black hole. Untouched by the flow of time. It was just him, at the core of his black hole. It was just him, in the center of his universe.