I smile. This makes it better, somehow. The black hole is pure, unsullied by any outside matter. It consists of gravity and nothing else, as close to a pure mathematical abstraction as anything in the universe can ever be.
It is not too late to back away. If I were to choose to accelerate at a million gravities, I would reach relativistic velocities in about thirty seconds. No wormholes would be needed for me to run away; I would barely even need to slow down my brain to cruise at nearly the speed of light to anywhere in the colonized galaxy.
But I know I won’t. The psychologist knew it too, damn her, or she would never have approved me for the mission. Why? What is it about me?
As I worry about this with part of my attention, while the pilot persona flies the ship, I flash onto a realization, and at this reahzation another memory hits. It is the psychologist, and in the memory I’m attracted to her sexually, so much so that you are distracted from what she is saying.
I feel no sexual attraction now, of course. I can barely remember what it is. That part of the memory is odd, alien.
“We can’t copy the whole brain to the simulation, but we can copy enough that, to yourself, you will still feel like yourself,” she said. She is talking to the air, not to you. “You won’t notice any gaps.”
I’m brain-damaged. This is the explanation.
You frowned. “How could I not notice that some of my memories are missing?”
“The brain makes adjustments. Remember, at any given time, you never even use 1 percent of 1 percent of your memories. What we’ll be leaving out will be stuff that you will never have any reason to think about. The memory of the taste of strawberries, for example; the floor-plan of the house you lived in as a teenager. Your first kiss.”
This bothered you somewhat—you want to remain yourself. I concentrate, hard. What do strawberries taste like? I can’t remember. I’m not even certain what color they are. Round fruits, like apples, I think, only smaller. And the same color as apples, or something similar, I’m sure, except I don’t remember what color that is.
You decided that you can live with the editing, as long as it doesn’t change the essential you. You smiled. “Leave in the first kiss.”
So I can never possibly solve the riddle: what kind of a man is it that would deliberately allow himself to drop into a black hole. I cannot, because I don’t have the memories of you. In a real sense, I am not you at all.
But I do remember the kiss. The walk in the darkness, the grass wet with dew, the moon a silver sliver on the horizon, turning to her, and her face already turned up to meet my lips. The taste indescribable, more feeling than taste (not like strawberries at all), the small hardness of her teeth behind the lips—all there. Except the one critical detaiclass="underline" I don’t have any idea at all who she was.
What else am I missing? Do I even know what I don’t know?
I was a child, maybe nine, and there was no tree in the neighborhood that you could not climb. I was a careful, meticulous, methodical climber. On the tallest of the trees, when you reached toward the top, you were above the forest canopy (did I live in a forest?) and, out of the dimness of the forest floor, emerged into brilliant sunshine. Nobody else could climb hke you; nobody ever suspected how high I climbed. It was your private hiding place, so high that the world was nothing but a sea of green waves in the valley between the mountains.
It was my own stupidity, really. At the very limit of the altitude needed to emerge into sunlight, the branches were skinny, narrow as your little finger. They bent alarmingly with your weight, but I knew exactly how much they would take. The bending was a thrill, but I was cautious, and knew exactly what I was doing.
It was further down, where the branches were thick and safe, that I got careless. Three points of support, that was the rule of safety, but I was reaching for one branch, not paying attention, when one in my other hand broke, and I was off balance. I slipped. For a prolonged instant I was suspended in space, branches all about me, I reached out and grasped only leaves, and I fell and fell and fell, and all I could think as leaves and branches fell upward past me was, oh my, I made a miscalculation; I was really stupid.
The flash memory ends with no conclusion. I must have hit the ground, but I cannot remember it. Somebody must have found me, or else I wandered or crawled back, perhaps in a daze, and found somebody, but I cannot remember it.
Half a million kilometers from the hole. If my elliptical orbit were around the sun instead of a black hole, I would already have penetrated the surface. I now hold the record for the closest human approach. There is still nothing to see with unmagnified senses. It seems surreal that I’m in the grip of something so powerful that is utterly invisible. With my augmented eyes used as a telescope, I can detect the black hole by what isn’t there, a tiny place of blackness nearly indistinguishable from any other patch of darkness except for an odd motion of the stars near it.
My ship is sending a continuous stream of telemetry back to the station. I have an urge to add a verbal commentary—there is plenty of bandwidth—but I have nothing to say. There is only one person I have any interest in talking to, and you are cocooned at absolute zero, waiting for me to upload myself and become you.
My ellipse takes me inward, moving faster and faster. I am still in Newton’s grip, far from the sphere where Einstein takes hold.
A tenth of a solar radius. The blackness I orbit is now large enough to see without a telescope, as large as the sun seen from Earth, and swells as I watch with time-distorted senses. Due to its gravity, the blackness in front of the star pattern is a bit larger than the disk of the black hole itself. Square root of twenty-seven over two—about two and a half times larger, the physicist persona notes. I watch in fascination.
What I see is a bubble of purest blackness. The bubble pushes the distant stars away from it as it swells. My orbital motion makes the background stars appear to sweep across the sky, and I watch them approach the black hole and then, smoothly pushed by the gravity, move off to the side, a river of stars flowing past an invisible obstacle. It is a gravitational lensing effect, I know, but the view of flowing stars is so spectacular that I cannot help but watch it. The gravity pushes each star to one side or the other. If a star were to pass directly behind the hole, it would appear to split and for an instant become a perfect circle of light, an Einstein ring. But this precise alignment is too rare to see by accident.
Closer, I notice an even odder effect. The sweeping stars detour smoothly around the bubble of blackness, but very close to the bubble, there are other stars, stars that actually move in the opposite direction, a counterflowing river of stars. It takes me a long time (microseconds perhaps) before my physicist persona tells me that I am seeing the image of the stars in the Einstein mirror. The entire external universe is mirrored in a narrow ring outside the black hole, and the mirror image flows along with a mirror of my own motion.
In the center of the ring there is nothing at all.
Five thousand kilometers, and I am moving fast. The gravitational acceleration here is over ten million gees, and I am still fifty times the Schwarzschild radius from the black hole. Einstein’s correction is still tiny, though, and if I were to do nothing, my orbit would whip around the black hole and still escape into the outside world.