The void within senses the absence, darkening my thoughts.
Leo has gone quiet. He watches me with a guarded expression, a sheen to his forehead, like he’s suddenly aware of the shift. “If you refuse counseling,” he says, voice strained now, “I’ll be forced to concede to the board.”
Tired of his games, I dip my head close. “I know the counseling isn’t mandatory,” I say, lowering my voice to a lethal decibel. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion of what Leo actually intends for me.
If he wants to push me out, he’ll have to try a hell of a lot harder.
His mouth falls open, but he’s smart enough to close it before another lie spills out.
“Don’t bother me with Dr. Holbrook again. I’m not interested in therapy or eye candy, Leo.” A sudden throb of pain assaults my skull, and I rub my gloved fingers along the side of my forehead. Pushing off the pillar, I tell him, “See you at the unveiling.”
When I reach the observatory, the air is thick with the hum of equipment and an undercurrent of tension. A number of gazes lift as I maneuver through the workstations, passing fluid chambers and arrays of quantum sensors. Some of what Leo is so concerned about.
My sonic black hole.
The cylinder filled with circulating water creates an acoustic horizon, simulating the behavior of a Kerr black hole. Observing how sound waves interact with a fluid vortex is useful to my research, and nearly expensive enough to satisfy investors. A front for what lies deeper.
Prescott’s eyes narrow on me as I pass, and I allow a slow smirk to twist my mouth. For the sake of the upcoming particle accelerator reveal, I’ve been advised to keep my distance. Not such an easy feat when he’s been trying to steal my research.
I climb the spiral staircase, feeling his eyes drill into my back until I reach the dome.
The chamber is lit by the console lights, the large shutter above sealed. I drop my helmet on the desk and strip off my leather jacket, quickly changing out of my damp clothes before I slide my glasses into place. Each action uncoiling a layer of tension.
I settle behind the desk and wake the monitors. My system is air-gapped from the main facility. In the hidden sub-level beneath the observatory, I’ve built my own quantum computing array. Superconducting qubits housed inside an industrial-cooled cryostat, protected behind layers of encryption and a biometric lock.
I’m the only one with access.
Even if someone managed to gain entry, they’d never make sense of the photonic resonance simulations, let alone the quantum gravity models. Up here in the dome, I’ve mirrored just enough of the system to verify celestial alignments and run theoretical particle interactions. A curated overview meant to satisfy any curious, prying eyes.
But the heart of my obsession reaches into far darker regions—ones where quantum theory and gravity collide.
Where existence meets its singularity.
The question that haunts me, whispering at that unseen boundary.
When consciousness collapses, its pattern doesn’t simply vanish. It’s imprinted into quantum entanglement; encoded signatures that linger like Hawking radiation, preserved at the very threshold of annihilation.
An imprint of existence.
An echo of identity.
Memory—captured at the event horizon, forever caught in the liminal space between oblivion and eternity.
It’s an impossible thing, when trying to explain something you can barely grasp yourself. And I know, the science feels heartless. Cold and sterile compared to its origin.
I glance at the telescope—my Hand of God—where I once gazed into nebulae and stellar nurseries, consumed with the beauty of the universe. Those memories being overwritten like code that can’t be copied or stored in quantum.
The moment this theory came to me, as I lay beneath a starry night, my body broken, my skull cracked, gazing up at the hunter in the sky—I realized in this shattered state that, if the fabric of spacetime could ripple, it could also rip.
A violent tear right through my life.
For everything beautiful in the universe, there exists a terrifying symmetry. What is luminous and breathtakingly full of wonder is mirrored by its opposite. Shadows that are desolate and horrifying, brimming with destruction and decay.
When a star dies, its core collapses under its own gravity. Once it burns through its nuclear fuel, the heart becomes so heavy, so dense, it’s crushed, unleashing a stellar explosion.
In its final beats, a star’s life is beautiful, brilliant. Immensely powerful. It’s also destructive, violently imploding as its energy is cut short before it darkens into a black hole.
It was once thought this ravenous void devoured everything irrevocably, leaving nothing behind. But through the dark regions of my research, I’ve glimpsed an impossible truth, where echoes of memory are never lost, preserved indefinitely at the darkest boundary.
