“Easy,” I told no one. Maybe myself. Maybe the kid. Maybe the city.
The Cryon didn’t answer. They carried me past the line and into the light.
Ed grimaced, probably remembering his own capture, which he had told me yesterday had been during a shootout with a gang. They took him from LA.
“They put me in the line, bound my hands behind my back, and marched me toward the shuttle. And the only thing I could think, the thing that’s still burned into my brain?” I smiled crookedly, bitter. “That I never checked out of my hotel. Some poor maid was going to open that door, see the untouched bed, and wonder where the hell I’d gone.”
Yeah, denial was a great weapon. But once it was gone…
The rest of the story wasn't any different from his or the others, or at least from what I had gleaned while listening to them before they evolved into the two shrieking groups we were now dealing with. The shuttlebrought me to a larger ship, where I was kept in something like a stall with several other prisoners I didn't know. I never learned how long I was on that ship. One day, Cryons came and randomly picked me out of the group to put me up for auction.
It was the most humiliating moment of my life. Standing on that stage, having all these… these… monsters staring at me. And they were monsters. All of them. They came in thousands of varieties, but deep down, they were all the same, or they wouldn't have allowed an atrocity like what had befallen us humans to happen.
At that point, I had pretty much resigned myself to being carved up and eaten or used as a sex toy, because isn't that what happens in sci-fi movies? Or maybe end up at a slave labor camp. Whatever my future held, I knew I would never return to Earth.
Nobody was more surprised than I when, once again, I was cleaned and brought aboard another ship. This time with ninety-nine other humans. We were all well-dressed, semi-well-fed, had our own quarters, and had no idea what would happen next.
"And then we landed here," I finished.
He agreed with a loud sigh, "And then we landed here."
Here, as on an alien planet. By the looks of it, anabandonedalien planet.
There was no explanation of where we were or why we were here. Aliens who looked like a mix between googly-eyed monsters of the blue lagoon and elves shooedus out of the ship and took off the moment we had disembarked.
In the middle of an abandoned city. Recently abandoned, I might add, because there was no dust—if there was something like that on this planet—no decay, nothing overgrown, like I was used to seeing in ruins. The entire place was just an oversized ghost town. We spent the first night inside the vast palace, where we discovered themicrowavesand were relieved to learn we weren't about to starve.
Wild hypotheses about why we were here surfaced. Some in our group believed we were brought here to repopulate the planet, which brought on a whole new discussion of what could have possibly happened. Disease was a main theory, and the mention made all of us uneasy, because if the people here had died, it might be possible that whatever had killed them was still in the air—until one man, a doctor, pointed out that we hadn't seen any traces of the dead.
One woman swore we were part of some twisted alien game show, and that any minute, cameras would slide out of the walls to film us fight for survival. Another man insisted we’d been brought here as livestock to be fattened up on microwave mystery meals until our captors returned to harvest us.
Ed had his own theory—that whoever bought us was testing us, like lab rats in a maze. If we lasted long enough in the city, maybe we’d be deemed worth keeping, forwhatever reason. If not, well… not every experiment ended well for the rats.
I didn’t voice my opinion out loud, but the archaeologist in me couldn’t stop cataloguing the possibilities. Disease. Repopulation. Sacrifice. Theories stacked like shards of broken pottery, each telling a different story of why one hundred humans had been abandoned in a palace made for ghosts. The longer I looked at the silent streets, the harder it was to shake the feeling that we weren’t just abandoned here. We wereoffered.
That theory was supported the next morning when we all looked up at the sky—or, to be exact, at the black hole in the sky. Heads tilted back, mouths open, we all stared at the wound in the heavens. It was bigger than anything I’d ever seen through a telescope or in a textbook—an ink-dark whirl that seemed to drink the stars themselves, a mouth in the sky that never closed.
"Chórnaya dyrá." Petra, a Russian astronomer, exclaimed. After a moment, she added, “Black hole, and it looks like it’s moving closer.”
That was when the panic really set in.
Some screamed, swearing we had been abandoned as an offering, a human tithe to keep the thing fed. Others argued that it wasn’t possible—that no one could survive near a singularity. One woman fell to her knees, praying.
I stood frozen, unable to look away. I’d spent my whole life studying the end of things. Dead cities. Collapsed empires. Civilizations turned to dust. But this was no ruin. This was erasure.
A civilization could leave behind pottery shards or crumbling walls. Even bones could tell a story. But this? A black hole left nothing. It didn’t destroy history; it devoured it.
The feeling I’d had since the Cryons had dragged me onto their ship, that I was very small and very temporary, intensified.
Things went downhill fast from there. Several people began engaging in sex, not even caring, and after a few days, it grew into outright orgies. Others turned spiritual and began praying, not even caring to which God. Finally, after all these years, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists were all united.
Of course, the two factions—religion and orgy just didn't match—were too different from each other to coexist. It didn't take long for fights to break out. Ed, I, and five others decided to make a run for it. After a week or so, it was just Ed and me left. Two of the others had joined the religious group, and three were unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the orgy group, who kept them as their slaves.
I still shuddered at the thought that there was nothing I could do for them.
Now it was just Ed and me. And the Black Hole.
"How long do you think now?" I asked him.
