The Black Hole Bargain

When aliens finally introduced themselves, they came bearing gifts — solutions to every problem humanity had ever managed to create for itself. War, disease, poverty, where all the missing solitary socks go. Gifts from strangers aren’t usually catch free, human or otherwise. What they demanded in return was the death of half the population, chosen at random.

Humanity didn’t buy into this right away. Committees were had, revolutions were fought. One alien famously ended the last uprising by explaining that you can’t walk into a car dealership and drive off without giving up cash — and cash is just hours of your life converted. Humanity was simply buying their paradise the same way. With lives spent. No one on planet Earth could really argue car dealership logic of that caliber. So a lottery was held to see who would die and who would live.

The visitors didn’t demand immediate death — instead a prolonged ride into a black hole. Those selected were loaded onto thousands of ships, provided regretfully, their controls locked, their course plotted. The aliens assured everyone they weren’t without compassion — every comfort would be available, including every human movie ever made, porn and shitty Hallmark movies included, a self esteem machine for those who had none, and heated pools. The middle aged and elderly cheered — they would be long dead before having to deal with the consequences of the contract humanity had made. To them it was just a luxury cruise ship through the cosmos. The children and teenagers felt it was a pretty crappy trade off for having their incompressibles compressed.

Regardless, the tedious journey into the rest of their lives began. How do humans shut away impending doom? By feeling. Love, hate, lust, jealousy, depression — the full spectrum called up like your strongest friends, put to work boxing up the inevitable and shoving it into the back of the garage where no one has to face it.

The stars, however, have no such friends and watched their travels, untouched, as lives blossomed and withered en route to the great big suck.

Of course not everyone was built to shut the knowledge of their destination away in the back of a garage within their mind. One man spent the whole trip staring out one of the side view ports screaming, all day, every day — stopping only to eat, sleep, and use the facilities, always calmly, never causing much trouble. Then he would walk back to the viewport and continue his scream. No one on his ship complained about it much. They just lived their lives around his screaming, seeing him as truly the wisest of them all.

After seventy five years had passed, the day — if you can call it a day when you are in space — came when all thousands upon thousands of consoles on their ships burped out the same message. They had finally arrived at the unholy celestial vacuum that was sucking down the light in this part of the universe, and with it their moods.

All leaders of faith wrapped their people in whatever peace they could find, doing their best to hold back the panic. Over the years the most stubborn of the exiled attempted to alter the trajectory of their ships, but failed every single time — their resolve crumbling off piece by piece like a cookie that kept getting dipped. In the wake of imminent destruction altering the controls was reconsidered, but found futile. There was no more cookie left in even the most stubborn of them. There they were, countless lives watching, waiting, finally giving into the despairing thought that this was it. Their souls sinking into a heaviness that reflected the black maw where their bodies would be shortly.

However, before they were close enough to begin their descent into the void, simultaneously across every monitor and speaker in all the ships a chipper alien voice spoke. “Hello doomed half of the population of Earth, your ships will be turning around shortly and making the trip back to your home planet. Regretfully this ruse was necessary in order to test how fully committed your species was to its betterment, and you have held up your end of the contract beautifully. Your sacrifice has allowed members of your species, with our help, to straighten up the issues of Earth. We thank you and have a safe return flight.”

The ships began to turn around automatically and everyone on board was celebrating by hugging and crying, except for one couple. In the minute just before the announcement was made a wife had confessed that she had been cheating on her husband for the past two years with another woman. In the finality of death he had chosen to forgive this transgression, but now that they were going to live he had the luxury of feeling angry at her.

There was one other person who wasn’t celebrating — the screaming man. He had stopped screaming and had somehow figured out how to get access to the cooling systems of his ship’s engines. He stuck his head into the main compensator for the coolant and started screaming, his head of the perfect density and his scream at the perfect pitch to create a chain reaction that led to the engines exploding in a neon blue blast, taking several other ships in the vicinity with them. The shipgoers who saw this from afar all agreed amongst themselves that whoever made the call to blow the original ship was the wisest of them all.