Captain Ahab

I wrote this in my creative writing class. 

Captain Ahab Versus the White Hole

By Nathan Mitchell

Start up thought recorder program.

THOUGHT RECORDER BOOTED. WOULD YOU LIKE TO CREATE A NEW THOUGHT FILE? YES OR NO.

Yes.

NEW FILE CREATED. WOULD YOU LIKE TO TRASMIT THOUGHT FILE TO HOME WHEN NEXT AVAILABLE TRANSMIT BEACON IS WITHIN RANGE? YES OR NO.

Yes if possible.

ANSWER RECEIVED. START WHEN READY.

**

What follows is the final captain's log of the United States Starship Captain Ahab. This is Captain Henry Wilson communicating the last messages this vessel will never transmit. It's not possible anymore. Speech isn't even possible anymore. I'm using the Thought Recorder for Christ's sake.

Now, where to begin?

It was long ago theorized that there was a black hole just beyond the edges of our solar system and that this explained the curious revolutionary path of Pluto. The argument against this, of course, is that if there were a black hole that close to our universe it would have swallowed Pluto ages ago and possibly the rest of our planets and Sun with it. As of about three years ago this has been proven wrong. There are three things those scientists weren't considering: One, they forgot is that black holes are, well, black. This makes them completely camouflage against the darkness of space and so it's always been a bit of a guessing game to where exactly they are, so anyone could have easily missed this particular one. Two, they failed to consider that the bigger the black hole is the less gravitational pull it has. Three, they didn't know that rotating black holes have a wider area of singularity that's more spread out than stationary black holes and therefore they don't pull in as much as they do move things around them. We actually have what's known as a supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy (as there is one in the center of every galaxy) which is both a very large and rotating black hole, this causes the galaxy to stay a galaxy by holding all the millions of solar systems in it together.

The black hole we discovered (which was named Hawking after the late great black hole theorist and mathematician Stephen Hawking from the 21^st century) is not a supermassive one, however it is very large and rotating, which indicates that it is probably the formation of two or more black holes that have collided and been absorbed by one another in order to be created.

Why am I explaining so much? I know that everything that is recorded in this final entry will never be read or heard by another soul. What I'm really worried about is my wife, Carol, and our two kids Brian and Wendy. Brian just turned 10 two weeks ago. I got to talk to them one last time one week after Brian's birthday over a highly delayed video conference call. The last words I said to them was that I loved them all and I missed them terribly. I'm grateful for that. I hope they get on well without me. I hope my wife forgives me for making this voyage. But I had to, you know that, it was my baby from the start.

...

It seems pointless to continue, but I will anyway. If only for my benefit.

Three years ago, after discovering Hawking we began planning to make the voyage to study it. We've never had a black hole this close. Well, actually we've always had a black hole this close we just never knew about it before. I was put in charge of designing a ship that could get us there and back in a minimal amount of time while also allowing us to get as close as possible to Hawking without compromising the crew. While others, including scientist Diana Fillion, began work on equipment that would give us accurate readings from so close and also allow us to collect samples of what could be actual dark matter.

There was one other thing: a secret mission (so of course we all knew about it). One that would put us into the pages of the history books if it succeeded. We had a device, nicknamed William Clark, it was simply a module made to send back information, similar to the Voyager satellites sent out in the latter half of the 20^th century, except what we had to try to accomplish was to make a capsule that could survive the journey into the black hole and hopefully out of it as well. This was all based on the theory that if black holes exist, which suck up all matter around them, then white holes too must exist which would blow all that same matter out of them. This would indicate that black holes operate very similarly to worm holes. Even though the White Hole Theory is attributed more to science fiction than fact the people in charge of the operation wanted to test the theory just the same.

Two and a half years after we started our mission we were ready to launch. My ship is run on a design of my own creation, which operates very similarly to that of cold fusion. It's all very top secret so I can't tell you anything more but with this technology we could travel the distance past Pluto and make it to Hawking in just under 6 months.

It was only three of us, myself as both acting captain and pilot in this mission. Dr. Fillion to be our scientist and operate all the sensitive research equipment, and a government agent who introduced himself as “John Smith” (fake name I'm sure) who handled the technology involved in our top secret mission, namely, operating William Clark.

Once we arrived at the black hole we engaged in multiple thrusters located at different locations around the ship in order to keep us in a constant state of equilibrium just outside of Hawking's event horizon. An event horizon is a term used for an invisible line around a black hole which if you cross it you will get sucked in, if you go past this line than there is no longer an escape.

But using my own design we were kept stationary and safe as Dr. Fillion did her job and collected the information needed to complete our mission, and according to her we had some pretty interesting findings. Not that she ever got to explain any of them to me, whatever she found will forever remain a mystery.

Everything went wrong as soon as Mr. Smith started his part of the mission. Once Diana had completed her information gathering he was to launch William Clark and manually control it until it reached the correct point of singularity and was pulled into Hawking. Diana and I both knew that this was his orders, what nobody ever mentioned to us was that in order to control William for this long they would need to keep it attached to the ship by way of a long electrical tether which was directly connected to not only the nose of the Captain Ahab, but directly to it's computer mainframe as well, and I guess nobody told John Smith that being on just the other side of an event horizon meant anything going past it would mean immediately reaching that point of singularity and be pulled in.

This created the disaster, I've replayed the event in my head over and over again. Dr. Fillion had just announced that she was done with her part, and John started to do his job without telling anyone else that he was starting. Meaning that I wasn't prepared for the sudden pull forward and in that one instant we were suddenly drawn across the event horizon and doomed.

Einstein has said that anything approaching the center of a black hole will experience a slow down in time, I can honestly say this is absolutely true. It has also been proven long before I got here that anything being sucked into a black hole will go through a process known as spaghettification, which is exactly what it sounds like. Things, including the USSS Captain Ahab and all the people in it, are currently being stretched beyond our limits into seemingly infinitely long pieces of string. The pull is so strong that it will literally tare you apart molecule by molecule.

This is my current situation as of this report: Due to the excessive slowdown in time, I am experiencing a single millisecond that's lasting for years on end, because of spaghettification I am stretched out, head to toe, beyond my breaking point (I can literally feel my atoms being torn apart), and the only thing I can think of is how much I miss my family. I know that I'll never see them again, and I know this isn't going to end with my crew and my ship coming out of this one in one piece. But I can't help but think of something that Roger Tallman, a scientist friend of mine, told me once.

He told me that as long as the universe was infinite that anything was possible. Think of something unbelievable, and no matter how low the probability of it, somewhere out there, in the deepest reaches of space, it was happening. It was probably happening right this very moment in different lands, times and dimensions. That no matter how much you doubted that one thing it was happening right now in a billion different universes, it has happened before in a billion other universes and it would happen again in a billion more than that. It was statistically impossible for it not to be happening if the universe is infinitie.

So if the universe is infinite, and everything is true then there's nothing keeping me from going into Hawking and coming out the other side, coming out of the White Hole, and finding my family waiting for me once I get there. If it's statistically impossible for every circumstance not to be a reality, then this has to be happening right now in some universe somewhere. Why not right here? Why not this universe?

...

Here's hoping for infinity.

END OF THOUGHT FILE