27/11/2022 - Yo-Yo
Reading time: 3 min
Photo by Aldebaran S on Unsplash
Kathryn had a bad feeling about the mission, but she’d always been a worrier, so nobody thought much of it.
She was the main data analyst for the Yo-Yo, the most advanced spaceship for the study of black holes, and she’d pushed to be part of the crew for years, but then, when the day came, she got cold feet.
Marcus was the second (and only other) member of the crew, and being her husband, he knew exactly that his role was to calm her down.
“It’s going to be alright,” he said grabbing her gloved hand as the control station run the routine checks. “Nerves are quite normal, my love. We are going to be closer to a black hole than any human being in history. When we come back, we’ll be seventy years older than our peers today. Anybody would be nervous.”
“It’s not that,” Kathryn said, her voice distorted by the speaker connecting the two spacesuits. “It’s the data. They’re strange.”
“You have been here from the beginning, my love. You’ve seen the Yo-Yo going through the simulations a dozen times.”
“It’s not the Yo-Yo that worries me. It’s the new high-energy nebula.”
“We’ll think about it when we’re back. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Kathryn focused on what she knew to cool off. The technology surrounding her was absolutely mesmerising. An entire space station orbiting a massive black hole and kept in place by a hundred and twenty-three tractor beams was about to launch a rotating ship with no fuel. With a marvel of a mechanism in the ship’s core, half a million miles of a super-resistant string would unfold just at the right speed to simulate Earth’s gravity inside the ship, and then, once totally extended, would stay close to the black hole for two ship-relative days, corresponding to seventy station-relative years, before retracting the string back. Just like a Yo-Yo.
Finally, the rotary motion started, and the ship began unfolding towards the black hole, stretching Kathryn and Marcus’ sense of time out of the ordinary.
To them, the space station's internal movement looked quicker and quicker, while the speed at which they unfolded stayed constant. It was mind-bending.
Between the routine checks of such a complex journey, Kathryn would stare at the stars biting her nails, and when Marcus asked what was wrong, her answers always regarded the nebula.
One day, when they were only 25% of the way to the black hole, the nebula came alive. Like a bird with fiery wings, it thrust powerfully towards them, and as if a ray had been shot by an experienced sniper, it cut the string connecting the Yo-Yo to the station in two.
At that point, the nervousness that had devoured Kathryn in the previous weeks abandoned her body and nestled inside Marcus’ heart. He had tears in his eyes, and couldn’t speak, but his wife was calm, perfectly fine with their destiny, and when Marcus couldn’t put into words what he wanted to ask, she only said three words.
“I told you.”
About this story
Prompt: No prompt.
Notes on the challenge
Each and every story published here has been written, reviewed, polished and published in less than 90 minutes. Which means you’re going to find spelling mistakes, ugly sentences and weird structures. I still hope you’ll enjoy them!
