First published: April 25, 2025

The first warning wasn't the siren – it was the sudden, gut-wrenching silence. The background hum of the Discovery X's engines vanished, replaced an instant later by blaring emergency alarms and the blinding pulse of red hazard lights.

Lieutenant Mike Rizzo jolted awake in his bunk, the disorientation warring with ingrained emergency protocols. "Bridge!" he yelled, stumbling out and fumbling with his flight suit zipper as he sprinted down the corridor, his bare feet thumping on the cold tiles. "Status report!"

His voice echoed unanswered in the metallic confines. Red light bathed everything in a hellish glow. He burst onto the bridge just as the backup systems flickered on, illuminating the central display. Words flashed there that turned his blood cold:

EVENT HORIZON CROSSED.

"No," Mike whispered, sinking into the command chair. "No, no, no." His hands flew over the console, fingers punching in sequences for retro-thrusters, for anything to reverse their course, even though he knew all too well that it was impossible to get back out. A glance through the forward viewport stole his breath. The Milky Way wasn't a serene band anymore; it was a swirling, incandescent vortex. Stars flared and died like fireworks. Distant galactic clusters smeared across his vision like paint on a wet canvas, dragged along invisible cosmic threads. The cosmic microwave background was blueshifted enough to be visible to the naked eye. The sheer wrongness of it made nausea surge.

"Mike? Mike, what's happening?" Professor James's voice crackled over the intercom, tight with concern. Before Mike could form words, the habitat door hissed open. Professor James stood there, flanked by the rest of the crew – Eva Rostova, the mission's engineer and Dr. Sarah Chen, medic. Their faces, stark in the pulsing red light, mirrored his own shock.

"Mike?" James started, then stopped, his eyes fixing on the main display. He read the message, his voice barely a whisper. "Event horizon crossed."

A choked gasp came from Eva. "Shit! How? The proximity safeties..." She rushed to a side console, her fingers flying across the interface. "Log check... There was a cascade failure in the primary nav module. High-energy cosmic ray interaction... overwhelmed the quantum error correction. Emergency reboot initiated... but..." Her voice trailed off.

"But it took too long," Mike finished grimly, gesturing uselessly at the controls. "We were hovering just above the boundary. System went down, we drifted in."

Eva stumbled back against the bulkhead, sliding down into a sitting position, head in his hands. "So that's it? We just... fall?"

Sarah stared at the swirling vista outside. "Look at that time dilation... The universe is fast-forwarding out there."

Professor James straightened, a strange calm settling over his features – the detached focus of a scientist facing the ultimate unknown. "Correct, Sarah. From our reference frame, time outside is accelerating infinitely as we approach the singularity. We are watching cosmic history unfold at an impossible rate." He moved to the main console, deftly keying in commands. A familiar, diamond-shaped Penrose diagram materialized on the screen.

"This represents spacetime around the black hole," he explained, his voice steadier now, cutting through the lingering panic. He pointed to a line angling inexorably upwards. "This was our trajectory. Here," he tapped a point just inside the diagonal line representing the horizon, "is where we crossed over. Without intervention, this path terminates..." He indicated the jagged horizontal line at the top. "...at the singularity."

A heavy silence fell, broken only by Sarah's shaky breathing.

"So, we're crushed into nothingness, and outside, eons pass in instants," Eva murmured, tracing the fatal line on the screen with a trembling finger. "That's the end."

"Perhaps not the absolute end," James countered, a thoughtful frown creasing his brow. He glanced again at the impossible view outside, then back at the diagram. "This standard Penrose diagram assumes a stable, eternal black hole."

"But they're not eternal, are they?" Sarah looked up, a flicker of understanding in her eyes. "Hawking radiation."

"Precisely," James nodded, turning back to the console. "Black holes evaporate, albeit incredibly slowly." His fingers danced across the keyboard again. "Factoring in Hawking radiation for a black hole of Sagittarius A*'s mass... adjusting the boundary conditions for the observed large-scale structure..."

They watched, barely daring to breathe, as the diagram reformed. The menacing line representing the singularity retreated, becoming finite. Their own projected trajectory, previously doomed, now branched, showing multiple potential paths after the black hole's eventual demise. One faint line curved back outwards, away from the center.

"It's... possible?" Eva breathed, stepping closer. "An escape route?"

"Mike," James instructed, pointing to the hopeful trajectory, "lock onto that path. Maintain our orientation relative to it, whatever it takes."

Mike's hands, suddenly steady, moved over the controls. "Course locked, Professor. Estimated exit... 10 standard hours, ship time."

Eva shook her head slowly, her gaze distant. "... and in external reference time?"

Professor James met their questioning looks. "According to these calculations... accounting for the evaporation time... approximately 10^100 years in the future, relative to an observer outside."

The number hung in the air, incomprehensible, crushing.

"Ten to the power of one hundred years," Eva murmured, looking around at her crewmates. "By then... the stars will be long dead. Every civilization no matter how advanced will have disappeared. Protons might have decayed! We'll be... effectively the only baryonic matter left."

A strange thought sparked in Sarah's eyes. "Hang on... that assumes we were the only ones. Ever. In the entire history and future of the galaxy, are we seriously the only ship unlucky enough to slip into Sagittarius A*?"

They looked at each other, the implication dawning.

"She's right," Eva whispered. "Statistically..."

"Indeed," Professor James mused, a slow, strange smile spreading across his face. "Furthermore, cosmological models suggest that long before the 10^100 year mark, all supermassive black holes are likely to merge. Gravity will eventually pull everything together into one final, colossal black hole containing the mass of the observable universe." He looked out at the swirling cosmos again. "A single, unified endpoint, existing for a finite time before its own evaporation."

"So," Mike said slowly, turning from the viewport, his expression a mixture of awe and disbelief. "Anyone else who ever fell into any black hole... from any time, any galaxy... if they realize they can survive the fall just like us..."

"...They'll emerge at roughly the same point in spacetime," James finished. "At the final evaporation event. An unplanned gathering at the end of everything."

The sirens still wailed, the red lights still pulsed, but the immediate terror had receded, replaced by something else. A profound, almost chilling sense of destiny. They weren't just falling; they were en route to the most exclusive rendezvous in cosmic history, watching the universe itself race towards its thermodynamic death through their tiny windows.