Bob: I Became a Black Hole chapter 1.

Another draft to keep you company before I upload Jon Kent/Times Up Joker.

-0-

Chapter 1: Bob The Black Hole.

-Bob-

A scientist once said, what we know of the universe is less than 0.0001% of what we DON'T know.

Or something like that, I was never really good at school- I could be making it up.

But that time is long past. I doubt any learning institutions remain on Earth after the Exodus.

And how do I know that? Easy, because we abandoned It. It's been what? A bit over 6000 years now?

I've been keeping time by counting the rotations of a planet in a Star System closeby, but it's hard to say when accounting for the Time Dilation around me.

Basically we fucked up. At the turn of the 22nd millennium, Humanity had effectively destroyed the Eco-system and turned the Cradle of our species into a barren toxic wasteland.

What was left of the population migrated to other parts of the Solar system, namely, Moon and Mars.

Unfortunately these places had yet to be fully Terraformed and experts determined that in a few hundred years, they would not be able to sustain life.

The plan proposed was- Oh sorry, let's pause for a sec, it's lunch time and they're serving space rocks today.

Joke aside, there's this Asteroid that's been floating about on my Event Horizon for a few hundred years. What a tease...

It's reached the edge of my exterior...and...

Gulp...crushed to smithereens. Tasty.

[Mass increased by 0.00000017 Kilograms]

Oh look at that, I feel a little fuller. Thanks, mysterious floating box that appeared one day without explanation.

I call it Zoey, after my dead dog.

Now where was I? Oh yeah, so the plan to avoid extinction became to migrate. Again.

By sending out scouting spaceships with groups of people to distant planets, in hopes of landing on an Exo-planet with the same stats as Earth. An environment that could support life.

The passengers would be put in deep hibernation, set to awaken when the spaceships arrived at the potential destinations.

I was on one of those ships- picked for my phd in linguistics(something I believed to be a waste of time, after graduating and realizing that no one was going to hire a language expert when AI was more cost-effective)

That said...artificial intelligence xenophobia was still a thing, and I skated by on a technicality.

Also, the possibility of encountering Alien life made having linguists necessary. Computers were damn good at learning but terrible at intuiting.

But unlike the other 5 scouter ships, ours hit a snag.

The on board AI prematurely woke the 20 of us from cryo-sleep with alarming news.

We had passed too close to an undetected singularity- basically a Black Hole- and before we could do anything- we got sucked in.

Yeah.

That was...not fun.

Ever watched Interstellar? Now imagine the scene where the characters fall in a similar black hole and somehow survive. They even escape! Like...wut?

Here's the thing, once you're in, you ain't getting out buddy.

Our fate was sealed.

The whole crew panicked at first. But once we realized the thrusters couldn't pull us out and there was nothing we could do, a helpless silence settled over us.

Hope gave way to despair as we failed to escape the gravitational attraction of the grain sized blue sphere of energy, floating in the darkness of space.

An Astro-physicist beside me called it a Naked Singularity. In his words, 'An impossibility, where a black hole's event horizon is destroyed leaving the core exposed.'

According to him, It's mere existence defied all laws of the universe. Contrary to popular belief, a Black Hole's Singularity is not at It's center, but instead in It's future.'

(Personally...I think the prospect of dying scared him silly. Because I am 100% sure I have a Singularity in the present. It's positioned past all the voidness and immense gravity and sits right in the middle of my Mass. But I'm getting ahead of myself)

The Spaceship nosedived into the Naked Singularity and the rest became history.

All I recall from that time is a force squeezing and stretching out my body. It actually felt nice for a second or two.

Then my mind shattered as I tried to comprehend the chaos born when physics broke down and space-time followed.

At one point, I could see into Myself as 'Me' through 'I' while swimming through my neural pathways.

The deeper we fell, the greater the gravity became.

Our physical forms unraveled into energy to become a soup of positrons and electrons that normally would annihalate each other but with no laws of physics around- negative and positive charges bonded.

The result was my crew mates, the spaceship and I were compressed and merged to become One conscious Entity.

IT tried to escape and even briefly resisted the never ending fall to doom, but ultimately failed.

It's dying screams- My dying screams, were the ONLY thing to escape the Infinitude of Gravity.

And then IT too was kneaded into a single noodle of thought -[SURVIVE]- which hopelessly crumbled into trillions of streams containing every memory IT had ever experienced...

After and through all that insanity...I somehow regained my consciousness. Even as I experienced death and rebirth of self at the same time for what felt like Eons.

Then it just stopped.

The pressure of Gravity, the horrifying cycle of losing sanity and regaining it...

It all ended.

But now, I was all that was left of Everything.

A single Will of a being known as Robert Higgs. An average mortal man from an inconsequential planet in the universe that had reached where nothing had.

I had arrived at the bottom of the Singularity. A zone of nothingness and everythingness, intertwined.

If I had to describe it, I'd call it the forge where reality met unreality.

Where creation bordered non-existence.

Here, matter and energy had collapsed into a [GLITCH] no mind was meant to ever witness. It was beautifully un-understandable.

My soul, spirit or whatever I was, floated forward, reaching out in a trance.

At the center of the [GLITCH], was something...almost familiar...yet foreign.

With disembodied fingers, I made contact. And a word appeared in my mind.

[SPARK]

And then I woke up as a Black-Hole, the most dangerous thing in the universe.

So let's go over a few things. First, you can't escape a singularity-It's impossible, take it from me- but apparently, you can become One.

Secondly, my merger with my crewmates and the Spaceship- which includes the AI- possibly expanded my consciousness and might be the reason I was unnaturally reborn into this Form and State.

Thirdly, anything that falls into me is devoured and added to my mass. Meaning, I now had all the memories of my crewmates and their knowledge. Some of them leading experts in fields of science like Astrophysicists, Biologists, Space Navigators, Geologists, Engineers, and even Military Operators.

Fourth, Zoey- the System Interface that manifests as a blue box in my awareness, is likely a splinter program of our Spaceship's Artificial Intelligence that latched onto my soul for survival.

I was yet to understand her though. The only thing she'd done these few thousand years was notify me whenever I fed on something. Like the Asteroid from earlier.

I wish she had more for me than that. The mass gain notifications were redundant. I could tell when I gained weight by myself, you know?

If only she was a proper game system where you can basically see a Status Shee-

Whoa...!

I hadn't completed that thought when a new panel suddenly cropped up before me.

-Status Sheet-

[Nature: Black Hole]

[Rank: Minor Black Hole]

[Mass: 1.01 × 10^{25}kg]

[Radius: 1.5cm]

[Unique Feature:- Manipulation]

'Zoey, why the hell would you keep this from me for thousands of years??! I mean, I'll live to see trillions, maybe a Quadrillion years, so a thousand is nothing, but that doesn't change the fact, you been holding out on your boy! I'm mad! I'm so friggin mad! Well, explain yourself young lady!'

As usual, I received no answer.

And the anger fizzled out without a way to punish the misbehavior, so my attention was pulled back to the Status Screen.

'Ooh, a comet heading straight for my center. Lucky me.'

Gulp.

[Mass increased by 0.000012 kilograms]

Itadiki-mass baby!

Speaking of mass, comparing it to my radius of 1.5cm, the scientific knowledge in my head informed me I was about the size of a grain of corn. With a density of 17 Earths to boot!

Goddamn, I was heavy.

My bottom half quite literally deformed Space, due to the immense Gravity I exerted. And as Gravity affects space-time- was the reason why Black Holes had a time dilation effect.

Anything pulled into my event horizon would experience time moving slower than something on the outside.



You're welcome for the brief lesson.

I wasn't impressed with my ranking though. Minor Black Hole meant I was the smallest fish in the universal pond. But no worries, I just need more mass to level up. Cry now, laugh later sort of thing.

Finally, my focus landed on the 'Unique Feature' part of the screen.

'Oooh boy, that sounds like a Special Skill to meee!!'

'Zoey, baby, honeybun, could you please explain to me what Manipulation entails?'

A tense, impatient instant later, she thankfully responded.

[Unique Features are rare specialized attributes gained through Unknown methods]

I see. Well, my situation was indeed out of the norm. First man to become a natural phenomenon, ladies and gentlemen, applause on your discretion.

[Manipulation: Affords control of form, granting the capability to move, reshape, resize and change aspects of yourself. The only prerequisite is LEARNING how to do so.]

Holy...

Is this...

If I was a lightbulb, I'd be lit and sustained on excitement alone. If I had a dick, it'd be harder than adamantium. If I was...

You get the point, right?

Manipulation was broken on so many levels it was insane! The ability to reshape my form?! Even Resize?!

But the one thing I was really stoked about was the possibility I could move...

Locomotion baby.

Ever since I was reborn this way...I've been stuck on one position for thousands of years. Do you have any idea how frustrating that is?

With a density of 17 earths, and an event horizon with a radius of 1.5 kilometers of essentially danger territory, I sat alone in an empty pocket of space.

Despite having no sight, I was aware of the universe. Of star clusters shining around in a wash of bright colors, radiant nebula clouds hanging around systems filled with various planets. Of the comets, streaking around heavenly bodies like the blue sun a few light years behind me.

I was aware of it all...but not a part of it.

Locked in an inescapable prison of my own fashioning. I hadn't dared to dream that I could one day leave and see for myself the wonders of the Universe.

Until now.

With Manipulation, everything changed. And the first step to that goal, was learning how to Manipulate my own Gravitational Spin.

Thank [SPARK] for the geeky knowledge. It almost made up for the hell that was the Naked Singularity.

Almost.