After Forever by Peter A. Philleo

The console in front of me was brighter than any star in the void around me.

Bored, I scanned the images from my camera logs. Small scout crafts, large cruisers, war vessels, all leaving the event horizon. All destroyed. I flipped through the images like a man might flip through an old magazine.

My mission had extended nearly seven years now, and I had destroyed no less than 600 vessels. Productive by any measure. Some of them had been manned, but they hadn’t responded in any language my translator systems knew. Others had fired upon me first, but my shields took the worst of that. A few hadn’t responded at all. Ghost ships sailing an endless dark sea.

My scanner pinged, and I glanced at it. Another enemy ship. Still at a distance and well outside my ability to see them visually, but just leaving the event horizon. Entering my space.

“Defense 102-A to approaching vessel,” I said. “Do you receive? I will fire if you do not respond.”

I allowed them a minute, then another, then sighed. My finger was already on the button, the safety cover flipped back. My patience was getting shorter each time around.

But this ship was different. My friend-or-enemy alert buzzed with an unfamiliar tone. Friend.

What ship was this?

“Defense 102-A to approaching vessel. Do you copy?”

Silence.

I throttled up, feeling the hum in the ships engines, and I approached the craft. I knew the safe limits before the black hole might take me, and stayed well away.

My sensors and screens showed the unknown ship balanced at the edge of the event horizon as if unable to entirely escape its clutches. The black hole behind it was a shapeless void, and my eyes slid over it.

Despite my caution, something went wrong. My ship shuddered, lurched, and was pulled as if the other ship had reached out and grabbed me so we might share the same fate. But no, it was the black hole itself, as if my presence beyond its reach for so long had taunted it into lunging at the sudden opportunity.

Everything changed. The stars streaked and my ship blurred around me, even as I remained sharp and well-defined to my own eyes. There was a subtle pop, and I emerged into a space of utter darkness. The ship’s viewscreens showed only a single pinpoint of light in the distance.

My ship was silent, broken only by the staccato vibrations of the ship’s metal bulwark shifting and releasing pressure under new and alien strains. Vibrations. But there were no sounds. I tapped my finger on the console, then stamped my booted foot. Dead silence. I resisted the urge to scream.

Was I dead, then?

My heartbeat filled my ears. Some small evidence that I was still alive. A mild comfort. I stared out at the wide landscape of blackness in front of my solar shields, and the tiny dot of light in the far distance beyond it.

I couldn’t tear my eyes from it.

It called to me. A faceless, silent cry, and I yearned to approach it.

I dropped heavily into my captain’s chair, the vinyl long since made flat by my buttocks over the years of my service. Had it ever been comfortable? I shifted uneasily, then looked across the expanse of control panels in front of me.

Everything looked normal. Lights blinked. Meters offered relative gauges and bars testifying to the health of the ship. The ever-present quiet beep of the life support system was gone, and it’s absence caused my heart to skip a beat when I realized it, but when I spun my head to glance at the O2 environment system on the wall it showed that all systems were operating normally.

Taking a deep breath, I grasped the thruster and pushed it forward. I calmed at the ship’s familiar shudder as it accelerated. Towards the light.

The journey took forever.

Days passed. Weeks, perhaps, or months. Time was meaningless when nothing changes.

Should I be sleeping? Eating? I didn’t know.

The blackness around me was unending and shapeless. My scanners picked up no solid objects, and the single dot of light in the distance grew no closer. My fuel level didn’t change. The hum in my backside from the ship’s engines grew very important to me, as if I might pretend there was something else alive in this ship besides me.

The distance was interminable. Unending. My mind frayed. The dot of light burned into my retinas. I tried not to blink. If I might, even once, at the wrong time, I would surely lose the dot and never regain it. I would be forever lost in blackness.

Years later, I sought to kill myself.

My mind had disintegrated into a whirlwind of madness, and the lone, remaining sane fragment of my consciousness huddled in a corner like an abused child, watching and hoping not to be noticed. There were no coherent thoughts left in my brain, just wild tatters that snapped and cracked against a silent wind.

The child watched. Of its own accord, it stood up and walked to the life support panel on the wall. There was a small red button under a clear plastic hinge. The child couldn’t read, but he knew the letters spelled out something like stop or off.

The child glanced back over my shoulder as if to say goodbye to myself. And to the light. I pushed the button.

I slid to the floor, cursing the white dot in the viewscreen. I imagined the beeping of the sensors as the air turned sour, then deadly. My vision narrowed, and my body convulsed.

The dot of light was suddenly huge in the windscreen of my ship, and I hurtled towards it.

“Defense 102-A to approaching vessel,” burst over the comms, stabbing through the eternal dead silence of my ship. A familiar voice. My voice. “Do you receive? I will fire if you do not respond.”

—

Peter Philleo is a web site developer and cryptography and blockchain software developer by trade. He is an avid reader of fantasy and sci-fi, in both hardcopy and audiobook form. A long time writer for over two decades, he only recently has been driven to submit work for publication after joining a professional writing group. He alternates between living in Florida and Wisconsin depending on the season, with his wife, Erin, and two cats, and inactively maintains his own unfinished website at peterphilleo.com.

Image by Blake Patterson