To me, it was just another rock, one of the countless celestial bodies drifting aimlessly through space. Yet, the way he gazed at it through our ship's front window intrigued me, as if he anticipated something extraordinary.
"Did you see that?" he asked out of nothing.
I hadn't noticed a thing. "See what?"
"It moved."
"What do you mean?" I began to ask when suddenly I saw it too. The rock, spinning through the void and rotating at twice Venus' speed, was doing something unexpected. It was dancing.
"It's like… it’s like dancing," he uttered weakly, his voice tinged with astonishment.
As we adjusted our orbit, our navigation system started to adapt. Suddenly, our entire ship began to move, swaying in harmony with the rock.
The way the rock and our ship moved together seemed to follow a rhythm, reminding me of a human song. However, throughout all the space monitoring operations we've conducted, nothing like this has ever been reported. There was no existing protocol for such a situation.
"Is it safe, buddy? Shouldn't we keep our distance?" I asked, as a vague sense of potential danger crept into my thoughts.
"Honestly, who knows?" he replied. "This isn't supposed to be happening. It's not a known phenomenon. I can't detect any external gravitational force causing this, and if there was one, it would have to be massive enough for us to detect it. Unless..." he trailed off, getting lost in his own thoughts.
Then he continued, speaking slowly and softly, almost in a whisper: "Unless it's a black hole, and we —along with this planet— are spinning at the edge of its event horizon without realizing it."
Suddenly, fear gripped me. I vividly recalled Lieutenant Golosi's warnings to pilots about the subtle forces emitted by black holes, how they defy our ship's sensors, and how effortlessly they consume anything caught in their gravitational pull.
I glanced at the console, hoping for a comforting sign, but instead, I saw numbers descending into chaos. Our speed was increasing, though I felt no acceleration, no tug, no jolt. Just a continuous, smooth motion, like gliding on an invisible current.
"Can we escape?" I asked, already knowing the answer before I spoke.
He didn't answer immediately, his eyes fixed on the rock, now spiraling gracefully like a performer at the peak of a routine.
"If it's a black hole, escape isn't an option," he finally said. "The moment we started moving with this, it was over."
The thought should have terrified me, but instead, I felt something different. Wonder. The ship had stopped resisting. The rock no longer spun erratically. We were perfectly in sync, a duet in the fabric of space-time.
The darkness outside was shifting and stretching. Stars ahead began to distort, their light twisting into iridescent ribbons. The event horizon was near, yet it didn't appear as the menacing void I had imagined. It was a shimmering veil, inviting us.
"This is beautiful," he whispered.
And it truly was. The ship now glided effortlessly, no longer under our control. We were weightless in every sense, surrendering to the inevitable. The light around us folded into infinity, spiraling in harmony with the waltz we had unknowingly joined.
I closed my eyes, and for the first time, felt completely untethered.
Then, the dry plastic snap of a lever. The stars twisted one last time, the great spiral tightening around us toward the darkness below. The waltz collapsed inward with a deafening rush, flushing everything into the roaring vortex, faster and faster, down the narrowing throat beneath.
