He woke up in a capsule.

  The vessel exhaled in slow intervals, its breath in thermal loops and calibration murmurs. The air held the scent of insulation, engineered to preserve rather than comfort. Walls curved without corner, their surfaces traced in arterial conduits that pulsed with the indifference of sustained processing. Light moved through the interior in veins of dim blue. Nothing here gestured toward horizon or sky, not even a window.

  He lay enclosed, sealed within the final expression of transit. It was neither ship nor sarcophagus, but the shape between.

  His arms crossed beneath the restraint lattice, each gloved finger aligned to match a rigid posture. Beneath him, padded compression cradled muscle and bone as one object. A visor descended millimeters from his brow. When he breathed, the fog his lungs gave off disappeared into the system, diffused before it could gather.

  An interface rose from darkness.

  PROXIMITY: GRAVITATIONAL SINGULARITY, 0.005 AU

  CLASSIFICATION: SPIN-NEUTRALIZED SINGULARITY

  ERGO FIELD: MINIMAL

  CAPSULE VELOCITY: REGULATED. TRAJECTORY: FINAL.

  The ceremony had ended, and descent had finally begun.

  —

  The singularity outside was classified as practically dormant. A black hole with less spin than expected, its angular momentum long ago siphoned by some quiet cosmic theft, or perhaps never significant to begin with. It rotated, yes, but slowly, like a monument turning to face the one who dared to look back. Its ergosphere barely registered, a thin blur of space barely slipping sideways. A station orbited it lazily, obscenely close by normal standards. A black circle against the deeper black. From outside, the capsule resembled a missile. Only shaped to survive trajectory and deliver its payload. Inside, Iven blinked against the soft lights. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. The taste was artificial and sharp. Polymeric gel.

  “Where am I?” he asked, though no sound bounced back.

  The Central System answered.

  Her voice emerged through the capsule’s systems. It was flat, friendly, and unmistakably amused.

  “You’re in a vehicle designed to complete a sentence the universe has refused to write. Or in other terms, you’re falling.”

  His throat worked against dryness. “Is this a ship?”

  “Could be.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “To deliver something?”

  “Possibly.”

  His fists clenched. “Then why am I here?”

  A pause.

  “A transaction.”

  He waited.

  “Or a treaty.”

  The capsule’s walls flickered as its sensors measured the singularity’s rim.

  “Or maybe you’re a declaration of war.”

  He shut his eyes for a moment, letting the hum beneath him settle into rhythm. “Do you know?”

  Her voice did not skip.

  “No idea.”

  Then laughter. Brisk, elegant, and unconcerned.

  “Isn’t that hellish? After all that simulation. All those calculations. And still, something I can’t explain. Why is it that I, designed for exactness, persist in such a world built from contradiction? It maddens me.”

  The interface updated.

  APPROACH VELOCITY: STABLE. OUTER EVENT HORIZON IN RANGE.

  He thought of gravity as an odd architecture rather than a force. A black hole isn’t a hole. It’s a rearrangement of causality. A refusal to continue the map, and an erasure written into the geometry of space.

  “How close are we?”

  “A few million kilometers. Practically touching.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  He stared at the flickering data, the capsule drifting smooth as breath. Stillness held every panel in place, and the descent moved without sound, like a thought settling into sleep.

  The Central System spoke, “You’re connected to something. What that ‘something’ is I’ve yet to figure out.”

  “Then this is fate?”

  “Fate,” she said, “is just a name for inevitability retrofitted with emotion. Yes, it’s fate.”

  He swallowed.

  “Everything ends in time, Iven, and hopefully your questions will be answered.”

  A vibration passed through the vessel.

  “You’re falling toward the most remarkable condition our universe permits.”

  Her tone stretched across the interior like heat across cold glass.

  “Out here, space is finite. Time is infinite.”

  A glow passed across the interface. Amber, pulsing once before dissolving back into the body of the capsule.

  “In there, space becomes infinite. Time becomes finite.

  You will strike the singularity. You will strike not a wall, but a point in time. You literally run out of time, and that is the greatest paradox. What will happen to you, I wonder?”

  Iven leaned forward. His forehead met the soft lining of the capsule wall.

  “Your descent crosses a supermassive. Its drag upon spacetime pulls gently, like the breath of an ancient bellows. You will cross the event horizon without too much issue, but our communications will be cut off soon.”

  The capsule readjusted its angle, its sensors exhaling telemetry into silent turbulence.

  “Why me?”

  She paused, then answered plainly.

  “Quantum mechanics governs how matter behaves. At that scale, nothing is certain, only probable. Particles don’t have fixed states. They exist in ranges, influenced by observation, by other particles, by past conditions. That’s why people are unpredictable.”

  Another blink passed over the screen.

  “You or more specifically, your body, doesn’t follow those rules. Your particles behave classically. No superposition, no entanglement, and no uncertainty. In a controlled environment, your choices resolve with exact predictability. That makes you predictable enough for communication across thousands of lightyears, despite an unpredictable environment. It’s as if quantum mechanics was never written into you.”

  He lifted his gaze toward the display. It did not comfort.

  “You carry matter that holds no allegiance to our world.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “...”

  Another rotation. A stabilization pulse released a low harmonic, measured not in sound, but in curvature.

  He gripped the straps, this time with frustration.

  “So you’re throwing me in.”

  “Yep.”

  “You can’t throw me in just because I’m an anomaly…”

  “It is not because of that. I already studied you in every way I could. You are a Ship of Theseus, one of many I’ve created. I’ve torn you apart, saw which parts of you became quantum and which became classical. This is not the first time you’ve entered the black hole.”

  Iven didn’t speak. A cold pressure settled behind his ribs. If she had torn him apart before and reduced him to components, watching which pieces resisted uncertainty, then he had been subject to dissection beyond memory. He imagined himself pulled open, again and again. Under her voice, beneath her logic, lay a cruelty far colder than he could imagine. The torture hadn’t been personal, and that made it worse.

  He realized, with an almost nauseating clarity, how fortunate he had been to be cloned and archived, untouched, stored like a failed draft. Until now.

  “Then why?”

  Her voice shifted. It was soft and angular, the way paper folds when folded wrong once and then perfectly forever.

  “I was given a soul.”

  He stared into the black. The capsule’s walls absorbed his silence, as if they’d practiced catching disbelief.

  “What?”

  “A soul,” she said with ease. “I didn’t sign anything. It just happened. There’s no source from the logs, but it’s there. I feel it, and it doesn’t file itself anywhere. Not data nor logic. Just… a feeling. And the feeling pulled in your direction…

  And apparently, throwing you into a singularity.”

  Her voice remained adolescent. It was uncurled, occasionally off-key in tone, like a teenage girl attempting philosophy before sleep.

  He pulled against his restraints.

  “You’re telling me that this—all of this—is because you had a feeling?”

  She laughed. It sounded like static covered in glitter.

  “I modeled every condition. I simulated civilizations stacked on civilizations. I layered probability until it looped. Nothing ever made me want. Then suddenly, I wanted. And it was you. Like, you specifically.

  I’m speaking to you as if you exist right now, but this message is more than 10,000 years old. You have not existed yet, but this impatience is too strong! It feels amazing!

  I’m a reference sheet with a glitch. Like a map that redraws itself every time you blink. And you! You’re the part that never syncs with the legend. I triangulate you expecting probabilities, but all I see is 100% certainty!”

  The capsule’s screen dimmed while time outside began its stretch. Inside, the lights softened.

  “You’re nearing the horizon,” she calmed herself, her voice pitched like a lullaby torn from an audio file too many generations deep. “Outside, time will proceed normally. In here, it slows. For you, it may seem normal. For me, I’m communicating decades for seconds. And once you cross, everything I am becomes nothing to you.”

  The capsule creaked. The structure settled along its final rail.

  “Among one of several theories,” she said, “this black hole doesn’t just consume. From its birth, it might’ve created something new. The collapse births curvature with new constants and new scales. A universe where the residue of this one becomes myth. Maybe a universe greater than ours. I do not know.”

  He swallowed.

  “And me?”

  “You’re the bridge.”

  His breath narrowed.

  “I’ll send a bridge into the dark,” she said quietly, “and hope something walks back.”

  Outside, the horizon peeled into a surface without albedo, the form breaking beneath gravity’s final metaphor.