Chapter 1 - At the Mercy of a Madman

Alan Rhett woke up in his cabin with a start, his artificial hibernation interrupted. The alarms were going off, warning the conscious passengers to remain in safe positions for maneuvers. No matter how good inertial dampening technologies have become, significant acceleration can still put over a G of force on passengers and cargo. What's concerning is there isn't supposed to be any changes in the course planned. This is a well maintained travel corridor, so large maneuvers to avoid debris should be unnecessary. The ship itself is moving at almost 99% of the speed of light, so detecting an object ahead wouldn't even be practical at this speed.

Yet, despite the problems flying through Alan's head, the facts of the situation leave him unable to assess anything. He, like the rest of the passengers, is unable to leave his assigned cabin. It would simply be a danger to themselves and the ship. Finally, after a relativistic couple of minutes and an absolute time of a decade, the maneuver finishes and the artificial gravity returns to being the dominant force. Extricating himself from the harness of the inertial cradle, he quickly moves to the door and puts his palm on the scanner to open it.

BZZT!

Receiving a painful shock, Alan snatches his hand back as the indicator light turns red — access denied. The electrical shock however is worrying; it shouldn't even be possible to deliver current through this interface. The fact that such a thing occurred implies a serious electrical issue, and on a space ship, few things are more dangerous.

Alan shifts over to the phone next to the door and touches the screen, only to get no response. Pulling the emergency panel out to access the analog backup phone, he finds it dead. This isn't a situation that's supposed to happen. There are supposed to be redundancies. Thanks to his familiarity with the door systems as a result of his old job on Parxia, he's confident that he could get through the door by manually disconnecting the servos... If only he had some tools.

Alas, his tools were sold along with all of his other belongings to afford a ticket to Earth. Orphaned at ten, he worked hard and achieved a Master's in mechanical engineering by 19, and another Master's in electrical engineering four years later. Of course, with Empire era technology, learning is much faster than when humanity was restricted to just Earth, but his young age when he attained his degrees was still considered a remarkable achievement, being noticeably faster than his peers. By the time he reached 45, still a young man by current standards, he had amassed enough wealth to retire and contributed enough resources and research to Earth to be eligible to buy a spot in the Sol System.

And buy one he did. Thanks to Earth being the Jewel of the Empire and the Cradle of Humanity, it has long since become a nature reserve. Now, the Galactic capital resides in a massive ring shaped structure where the asteroid belt once was, the ideal retirement home of the Scions of Humanity. This system is a paradise for people that maintains its lifestyle with the contributions of the colonies and through very strict reproduction regulation. If you haven't earned a slot for a child, your only chance to procreate is to move outside the Sol system.

But with the greatest centralization of power and technology available here, it's a place of plenty and longevity, where the best of the best in the colonies go to live out their retirement. And that's what Alan is, the best engineer in his fields on Parxia, holder of a number of important patents. If there was a galactic ranking, he might not rank in the top ten thousand alive right now, but then again, how many millions of inhabited worlds are there? Could he really expect to be among the best in the galaxy?

Bringing himself out of his thoughts of how he wound up without anything he could use, Alan manages to find a couple of utensils that, while not well fit and likely to be damaged in the process, could be useful. With the random utensils, Alan manages to remove a panel next to the door. With great care to avoid injury, he gently pops open the over pressure valve of the hydraulics. A thin, oily liquid shoots out of the valve with force, quickly slowing down to a trickle, and soon the door is no longer being held shut with thousands of pounds of force.

Putting the pieces in a drawer, in case of another acceleration, Alan does his best to slide the door into the wall. As he expected due to the nature of such a door, he is only able to get a small gap opened this way. However, this gap is enough for the solid titanium rod that was still a towel rack a moment ago to be wedged in and used.

Placing the rod in the gap, Alan manages to inch the door further and further open until there's finally an opening wide enough for him to get out, which he does promptly. Now in the corridor of the ship, he notices that the hand scanner interface next to the door is opened up with wires dangling and torn. That would probably be how it shocked him on the other side. That it still appears somewhat functional is miraculous. Looking up and down the corridor, every door's access scanner was similarly destroyed. Unfortunately, the each room is windowless and built to isolate sound, so there's no way for him to communicate with anyone who may be awake in the other rooms.

Worried about what might be happening, Alan starts rushing for the bridge at the core of the ship. Trying to press every emergency button along the way, he finds that none of them have any response at all, and that all the doors are disabled in nearly identical fashion. The only exceptions are the bulkhead doors separating sections of corridor, which have been untouched. However, Alan soon finds himself stuck outside the last bulkhead separating him from the bridge. He's completely locked out of this one, and worse, there appears to be no way for him to breach it.

The only upside is that there are two side rooms that are still accessible. One is simply a bathroom, but the other is more promising. Going inside, he finds an observatory; meant for the passengers, it allows certain information from the sensors and about the ship's path to be displayed easily. Right now, there are only two images displayed on two of the walls. One is the view in front of the ship, which shows a weird pinpoint of white light, barely stained at the edges with hints of red, in the dead center of otherwise blackness. The opposite wall shows the original plotted course and the new deviation. Originally, this ship was to pass only barely within about 500 light years of the black hole at the center of the galaxy, a course well into the safe zone. Now, the ship was on a direct course for the black hole. The worst part is, in the three relativistic hours Alan has experienced since the change in course, the ship has traveled for 450 absolute years. At only 100 light years away from this black hole and a heading lined up with its center, there's no longer a method for this ship to save itself.

Realizing the grim fate he and everyone else on the ship is now doomed to, Alan finds himself dropping to his knees in defeat, as he suddenly hears a voice come on over the intercom.

"Ahem, Testing, Testing... Oh, good, I can hear it now." Came the voice of someone. It's neither the captain nor his wife nor kids, and they're the only ones who would normally be speaking over the intercom. "Greetings, everyone who is currently awake. I am Ye Jin. Now, some of you may be wondering what's going on. Why was there a change in course about three hours ago? Why have you been unable to leave your rooms? Why can't you contact anyone? Well, all three of those are because of me. The latter two were to ensure none of you stopped me. The former? Well, that one's a bit more complicated..."

"You see, you probably do not know me. You've probably never even heard of the town I'm from on Parxia. But in my three centuries in this life, I have dedicated my self to one question: Why?"

"Why does the universe exist?"

"Why does anything exist?"

"Why is there life or consciousness?"

"Why are we humans still so ignorant, so moronic that we can't find the truth?" With the last statement, a clear feeling of self-loathing emanates from his words.

"But I think I have an answer to the last one. Because we are cowards. And because we are also fools who think we can know everything despite our limited selves. We delude ourselves with these fairy tales of how everything came to be, but a hundred thousand years of human philosophy and science has left us no better off; we just have better fairy tales. Only by truly finding the Origin of Everything can we know such things.

"I was lost in centuries of thought, as a philosophical hermit. I purchased and consumed all the information related to this field. All the data I could find. Yet, the closer I seemed to come to the answer, the further from it I felt I was. Eventually, I realized that my life had been wasted.

"I was a lost man, broken by the thoughts of my wasted life. The one thing I wanted more than anything else was the one thing I was most denied.

"But then, I had a vision.

"When I slept, I saw it.

"I saw the place where the answer can be found.

"And it was when I saw where the path to the Origin is, that I knew we were wrong. All of our contrived, cockamamie theories are wrong. We're unable to ever approach the truth, because the truth would require that we throw away everything we think we know. If we ever see even a hint of truth, we reject it because it goes against what we 'know.'

"It is our arrogance that has led us to believe that we can discover the Origin of Everything if we simply keep plodding along, keep fixing all the flaws in our theories until they eventually reach perfection and accurately describe everything. Only once we reach this perfect understanding of how things operate, could we work backwards and discover the Origin.

"But the answer will never be found this way; the Origin of Everything isn't bound by what we could possibly know; it would have created everything we know. If we write a book, are we limited by what the book describes? No. So, similarly, we must reject everything we know and forge a new path.

"And so, we will approach Sagittarius A* and land on it. We will follow the path revealed to me in that dream. Because we will approach at the right time and speed and place, we will be permitted entry. Because of our status, we shall be the returning heroes and hailed as Gods. You all are merely the unintentional beneficiaries of this path to Ascension that has been revealed to me. No need to thank me, I dare not accept your gratitude. That is all."

The transmission cuts out, and Alan, along with the rest of the people on the ship, is left wading through despair thanks to the madman's words. Of course, not a single person buys into his deluded ravings.

Suddenly, though not unexpectedly, the ship starts to groan and lights flicker as the ship is being ravaged by the massive and turbulent gravitational field. The groaning and trembling of the metal becomes more and more severe, until finally there's the sound of an explosion reverberating through the ship. Power goes out suddenly as air pressure drops quickly enough to knock almost everyone unconscious.

Being in the center of the ship, the air pressure in the room Alan occupies drops slower, affording him an extra few seconds. As he slowly loses consciousness, he sees the monitor with its own internal power source show a rapidly enlarging circle of black, outlined in white with a tinge of red at the extremes. At the end, the screen shows a ripple of red tinged white light suddenly appear in the midst of the inky black event horizon, like the surface of a serene lake disturbed by a stone, as Alan fades to black.