Chapter 2: Spaghettification

You can’t see a black hole. Even the first so-called photographs of Pōwehi taken by a network of eight coordinated telescopes back in 2017, an image that looked roughly like a reddish-orange doughnut made of white-hot radiation, didn’t really allow us to see the black hole. What we see is the behavior of visible spectral matter around the black hole and especially, the results of things being sucked across the black hole’s event horizon. Luminous gasses sucked away from nearby stars form the ring of a black hole. The data I’d been reading on Pōwehi actually marked its position because of the motion of other stars, planets, and matter being influenced by the gravitational suck of the black hole. The new data showed virgin space, nothing different from the space around it, as if Pōwehi had never been.

I sat down hard in a rolling chair next to Dr. Kinsy’s and blurted, “Where did it go? Where the bloody hell did it go?”

Keck’s alarms, a staccato buzz followed by a piercing mega-amplified tone, sounded, and the phone lines began to light up in clusters. Email pings on all the workstations blipped with such consistency as to sound like an odd, warbling kind of music. My phone vibrated to life in my pocket.

Dr. Kinsy, already pale in complexion, turned to alabaster. She picked up the hotline from the University of Hawaii and said, “Keck, Maunakea.” She listened for about two full minutes, replied with only, “I understand,” and put down the phone.

“Dr. Kinsy?” I prompted gently. She had a faraway look in her dark eyes. She sat very still. “Dr. Kinsy? What’s… what’s wrong?”

Her bottom lip began to tremble, something so utterly pathetic that I felt my heart fracturing. I never, ever used her first name, but rank, age, position? It felt foreign and artificial in this moment. “Meredith?”

“Dr. Kimura says every one of the EHTs have been retasked remotely. Every single one.”

EHT stands for Event Horizon Telescope, a network of powerful telescopes around the world linked together to make a single, dynamic, phased-array telescope. They were responsible for the only photos of actual black holes, including Pōwehi.

“Some overriding entity is turning all the world’s telescopes to look at something,” she said. “Something beyond the bounds of science… and reason. Go and look, Rick, would you? I… I don’t think I can manage it in my present state.”

I left the desk chair spinning behind me and sprinted from the lab into the access hall. I felt like I was running through cold water up to my knees, and time slowed. My senses still noted the motion of the great dome above me, the strange hissing noises of the constantly readjusting telescope mirrors—each one 300 tons and 10 meters in diameter. The Keck 2 control room isn’t what you’d expect. There’s no telescope eye piece to bend over, squint through, and announce, “Ah, ha! I see Uranus.” Sorry, stress-induced astronomer joke. Like a Dad joke, only geekier. No, everything the Keck 1 and Keck 2 telescopes detect is transmitted digitally to a bank of monitors in the control room.

I fell into a chair in front of a split screen series of monitors and tried to make sense of what the telescope was watching and where it was looking. Referencing the data with a database, I recognized that our telescopes and apparently all of the earth’s most powerful telescopes, had been tracking something leaving Proxima Centauri, a star about four light years away. The data had been coming in furiously, showing positioning coordinates every few minutes. I felt my throat constrict, and my mouth went dry. Subsequent scans, taken minutes apart, showed this something traveling fast. No, the word fast is exponentially wrong. This something was traveling approximately a trillion miles an hour, and it was accelerating.

Scan after scan, I noted positions and used the onscreen tools to calculate trajectory and speed. I recoiled, my breath caught in my chest. Whatever this thing was, it was making a beeline for earth, and it would be here in hours, by dawn if my calculations were correct. But what was the object? An asteroid? Visions of Independence Day flung themselves into my mind. No, we are not being invaded by aliens, I told myself. Still, something was coming, and I realized with a full-body chill that the only way all of the telescopes were being retasked was if governing agencies declared a global emergency.

“What is it?” I yelled, my voice pinched and high. Third monitor over was rendering but it was too vague. “Come on, come on!” I urged it, but the AI was taxed to its limit with a multitude of tasks.

Numbers began to spill down the next monitor over like a Matrix cascade. “What the… ?” The references were all over the place. As this whatever-it-was traveled, it disturbed everything around its path—solar systems, asteroid fields, gas nebulae—out to ranges I couldn’t fathom. Imagine using a 16 pound bowling ball on a lane filled with three inches of water. When you chuck the heavy ball, it displaces the water, first pushing it aside and then leaving a turbulent wake as it streaks toward the pins. The analogy breaks down because the water would cause enough resistance to slow or even divert the bowling ball. The thing heading toward earth was not slowing down or diverting.

“Dr. Tagler?” Dr. Kinsy called, her voice like a thin echo. “Rick?”

The monitor next to me chirped. I turned. The resolution was still blurry, adaptive optics doing their best to smooth the image. “Dear God in Heaven!” I gasped and tore out of the control room like I’d been ejected.

My brain told me what I’d seen, but I couldn’t believe it. And couldn’t deny it. My theory about black holes moving had just been proven to the world. What I’d seen, what the data corroborated, had left its eternal home in Messier 87 and now hurtled hell bound for earth. In less than six hours, the supermassive black hole Pōwehi would end the world.

[Insert Hiatus Marks]

“Tell me, Rick,” Dr. Kinsy said as I trembled in the lab doorway. “Tell me it isn’t true.”

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

I guess my face was enough of a reply because the thrice awarded matriarch of astronomy began to weep, tears mingling with mascara to streak down her cheeks.

“I… I’ve got to go,” I said. “There’s no time.”

“How much time?”

“Maybe until dawn,” I said, but I knew that the breadth and crushing strength of a supermassive black hole might mean no dawn would ever come.

“Oh, no,” Dr. Kinsy muttered. Looking more frail than I’d ever noticed before, she stood and began to pace. “Oh, no. Henry isn’t coming until 7:00 a.m.” She yanked out her smart phone and began to dial.

Huh, I thought absently, the alarms have stopped. Keck Observatory had gone so quiet that I could hear Dr. Kinsy’s phone dialing. It rang. And rang. What was the span of time for a phone’s ring tone? A second? A second and a half? The weight of each ring felt like a church bell.

“Henry won’t pick up the phone!” She shrieked. “He won’t answer. Of course, he won’t. He sleeps like the dead, snoring drowns everything else.” She looked up at me, pleading in her eyes. “Will you take me, Rick?”

I heard her. She was right. Doctor Kinsy needed her husband. I got that. I needed… what did I need? There was no one waiting for me. Just a room full of regrets and a cute little aquatic turtle.

“I know what I’m asking,” she said, her wide eyes a mess of smeared mascara. “I’m on the other side of the island from you, aren’t I? But I have no other way.”

I did the math, instantly ashamed that I’d hesitated. “Come on,” I said. I went to her, took hold of her arm, and together we fled the observatory.

[Insert Hiatus Marks]

We said nothing until Onizuka Center. I swerved into the gravel lot, the SUV tires kicking up all kinds of debris. The lot was empty. The night watch had gone home. Did they know? Did the whole world know?

“It’s thirty minutes here,” Dr. Kinsy muttered, wringing her hands.

“I know,” I said, thinking that I might chance the pressure sickness. I’m in good shape. Well, good enough. But Dr. Kinsy? Someone her age could… what? Die?

“Punch it!” she commanded.

I complied, the V8 roaring in response. We tore down Mauna Kea in record time and found the town well lit but as quiet as ever. I’d expected instant gridlock as everyone on the island panicked and hit the road to go… somewhere.

At the light on Hilo and Kohala, I looked at Dr. Kinsy. I’d never been to her home. “It’s a left,” she whispered. When the light turned green, I made the turn.

“What do you think it will be like?” she asked between intermittent directions to her house.

The question hit me like a thunderbolt. I swallowed. “You mean… to die?”

And just like that the frail, terror-stricken Dr. Kinsy vanished, and the steely boss I’d come to know and love turned her glare up three notches. “No, not dying. I mean… going across.”

She meant the event horizon, falling into Pōwehi.

“I wonder if we’ll all spaghetti out.”

I knew the phrase and knew what she meant, but the hilarity of hearing it made me bark so hard with laughter that I nearly drove off the road. Spaghettification, first described by physicist Stephen Hawking, was the effect of the exponentially increasing gravitational pull, stretching everything, unraveling us into strings of base matter as we’re drawn into black hole.

“It is funny,” she said, “in a perverse, morbid kind of way.”

Wiping a tear back, I said, “I’m picturing myself getting stretchy like Reed Richards.”

“Who?”

“Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four.” When I saw her blank expression, I said, “He’s a brilliant scientist who got hit with cosmic radiation and mutated, developing the ability to stretch and mold his entire body at will.”

She was quiet a moment. Speaking of brilliant scientists, Dr. Meredith Kinsy had always awed me. Her pencil-thin eyebrows lowered, her dark eyes glistened, and her jaw worked—I’d seen that look a hundred times, usually before she proclaimed some kind of brilliance a dozen floors higher than my elevator ever rose.

The hint of an impish grin forming in the corner of her mouth, she asked, “Did you say his entire body could stretch?”

“Dr. Kinsy!” I exclaimed with a snort. “What would Henry say?”

She emitted a positively girlish giggle and, for a moment, I could see the stunning young woman that she must have once been.

“You don’t want to know what my husband would say.” She grinned, but it was a short-lived moment.

I woke my phone to check the time. Four hours. And we weren’t even to Dr. Kinsy’s home yet. I wondered if I’d even get back to my apartment before the whole world came apart. Unbelievable. What was it Shakespeare said about life? It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. “I have terminal cancer,” I said, hearing the words from my mouth and wondering who’d said them.

Dr. Kinsy stared at me, her eyes filling again with tears. “Tagl—Rick, I’m so sorry,” she said, her lower lip’s quiver, giving each word a sad, nervous punctuation. “When… when did you find out?”

“Just before my flight to Hawaii. Glioblastoma, pretty far along. I almost didn’t come, y’know?”

Her expression hardened a bit. “You’ve known for your entire time at Keck, and you didn’t tell anyone? I thought we treated you well. Didn’t I—”

“It’s not that,” I interrupted, following her hand signal to turn right, entering a residential neighborhood. “Keck’s been great. You’ve been great. I guess I didn’t want any pity interfering with the work. I didn’t want that feeling of everyone looking at me differently. Besides, it’s not something that you just blurt out in the cafeteria or over coffee in the control room. Except now, of course, when… ”

“When we are all about to die?”

“Yeah, that.” I snorted, and she giggled again. “Thing is, it got really tiring hiding that secret. Feels kind of good to tell someone.”

Dr. Kinsy put her hand lightly on my forearm. She kept it there until we pulled into her driveway fifteen minutes later.

Dr. Kinsy looked a little unsteady when she got out of the SUV, wobbling a moment after shutting the door. When the front door of her bungalow opened, and a heavyset older man appeared, she turned back to me briefly. There was no trace of feeling haunted in her eyes. Only resolute kindness. “Thank you, Rick,” she said. “You’re one of the good ones.”

In an embrace, she and Henry vanished behind the closing door. She was home. I put the SUV in reverse, feeling much more content than I had any right to feel. Dr. Kinsy… Meredith Kinsy had given me a little bit of home to take with me.