A Descent into the Object Beta 101

If nobody believed me, then surely no one believed the man--the space traveler--the one who reached deeply into the stretched-out purple blackness of the object known as Beta 101--who only barely survived being thrown through its space-time barrel. My memory could not remember finely the story he told me in detail of his adventure in space from 3 years past, so I say that was why the listeners doubted; but why did they doubt me, and not him, as I did at first? The marvel of his story was such that a later-hand account itself was unthinkable, and so I have worried for my health in hearing it second-hand, and worried more for the astronaut’s health, who was a primary witness to the great cleaving in the universe which he called a wormhole.

I told the listeners on with detachment. I told them with fervor. No storytelling drive convinced anyone at all. When I told my mother, she believed me, or doubted, but only as a mother would. It was the special retelling I made to her the second or third time which convinced her on account of my madness. She thought the boy she had made to have been damaged by the story, which I do obsess about. This is how I told her.

I told her the man was frail, but previously had been strong, and she looked upon my frailness, and took it as a sign that I had been weakened myself. She thought I was talking about myself, and my story to be some fruitless idea born of my imagination. This was fine, as I thought that at the very least she was a catalyst, for resolving the difference between someone who is lying and someone who truly felt the darkness of the object, whether in their mind or not.

I told her the astronaut was like a father, or a brother, and she began listening. I told her the man had built his spaceship as was common for the older generation who weren't around for the cheaply produced ones of mine, and even allowed her some fancy that I was speaking of an image of my own father, who represented myself, by saying that he had used his scholarship money (which was something I had won myself) to build the drives and decks of the ship. Then I said the entire hulk of the ship had been taken into a wormhole itself, without the  razer-edge singularity of a blackhole, and into another universe--and back--taken darkly itself into the wormhole and spat out again, through an act of God, and returned to the coordinates A1, 75; EC4, 199.9, its last recorded position.

I told her, in my kitchen, eating my breakfast as I had planned, that the astronaut had been doing it for his mother, and she smiled warmly.

“Mother, it is something I would do for you, were the circumstances not so horrifying,” I said, and the smile weakened, and I added, “Or psycho-subverting, or brain-defying and wrong.” The smile was there, on her face which could barely hold it. After weeks of obsessing in my room on matters of physics, she had been disappointed to see I had been making no emotional progress, and in fact was getting worse.

It was all on account of a second-hand account. It might be a great cause to treat the man himself, known as Arthurian, who visited Beta 101 alone, with respect. He had no mother in truth, in his forties. A scholarship, I must say, could not afford a spaceship of his caliber, and so I lied to my Mom in order to impart the bile of my fear into the only vessel which could heal me.

I said, “He brought the ship to a standstill beside the object, and noted the stars were warped like a digital smearing in the image processor we all know, PhotoCrop, and he recorded himself the slow drag of the gravity of the object Beta 101, thought to be a black hole.

“He spoke of course to no one but a computer, but he said ‘Reverse propulsion and scan quickly for life, or space-time disturbances, or any fatal possibilities in the likelihood we approach the object.’ His fear was marked by a tremendous curiosity brought on by his status in the scientific community, which had never brought a ship this close to an object with such mass. He was nearly 50 thousand kilometers from the object, a distance he could close using the drive in moments if he chose. And he trembled at his closeness to death, and the possibility of reaching the object, and the possibility of fame or fortune upon returning. He did return, but no fame or fortune found him--merely an incredulous community which turned his corrupted data away, and asked of him his resignation.

“The stars were alight that floated behind the jets of the wormhole’s spigot, which shot out north-backward relative to the coordinate map he consulted, and made them purple at the edges, and ripply. He wanted to only sample from the jets, but should his drive bring him to the singularity, he would never return, as Hawking, from centuries past, had divined. Yet, he doubted this first thing. He thought of wormholes, with their phantasmic possibility to travel him to distant regions of the universe, and thought that he might, just might, survive if--by accident--he reached something different from a singularity.

“He sent a probe to the jets coming from the eye of Beta 101 to collect dust, and when they returned, he made his decision to leap, because they said to him one thing: the object was not in fact a black hole. It was something unrecorded; he guessed a wormhole, which his scientific group had sought after, and he finally knew it had no singularity. The effect on gravity of the wormhole was simply through the weight of the barrel which condensed in the third dimension onto a point. When he would pass into this point, instead of collapsing into the weight of the massive blackness of the center, he would actually travel through the fourth dimension to another place or time (most likely time) among the stars, and maintain the grace of his shipment and cargo which would be unharmed. It was the results of his tests, taking 3 minutes, that convinced him of nothing else, and he told the computer to more slowly approach the center of the object Beta 101 for a collision with the massive tunnel through the stars.

“He reached the center in 4 hours at a slow rate of travel. Two seconds after colliding with the object, which stretched for a nearly infinite stretch of time (more on that later), he returned to the exact spot where he began his approach; as if the mind of Beta 101 had known when his conviction to find his destiny inside it was set. It helpfully returned him to the coordinates where he made his mistake, forgiven, and never forgotten.

“He had traveled over 15 million light years which the ship recorded--yet the ship had done absolutely nothing. The reported elapsed time was 2 seconds inside the wormhole, as I had mentioned, but the astronaut reports himself a sense of a much greater amount of time.

“In fact, he had traveled to another dimension where time is not exactly perceived. He had had one million to the power of one million experiences, which were separated by an inescapable regret. He had felt regret a million times and a million times more that he had entered the portal.

“When he found himself returned by the governance of the object, he collapsed on the ground, and the computer recorded him say these words:

“‘By God I found utterly my own murderer, and was taken back to my birth upon  dying; and I have been reborn, and injured at the same time--I have been broken by the souls of my past lives, which I cannot remove or remember, but I know now: I know I am old now.’”