The Singularity Probe

Black holes glow, did you know that? Dice-throwing God is a miser of chaos: you can't make Their Universe neater by throwing your trash into the nearest black hole. It'll take matter and its entropy only to sparkle it back as its own form of light.

I used to find this comforting. If even the mathematical Rubicon of an event horizon is not the absolute end then maybe neither is death. Useful, too, as a way to think about the limits of what we do. We can study a person's fall into deep insanity, its chaotic but fated path as it's dragged down by our careful corruption of algorithms and the machine-taught engineering of lies. We can and we do, and we throw our guilt into the darkness of who we work for (and our own ruthless curiosity (and how much we are paid (and pretend that darkness doesn't glow during sleepless nights))). But there's an event horizon of intelligibility beyond which what comes from the minds we so carefully monitor is the light from a black hole, unreadable by finite minds. Nothing is lost. Everything, even before the true end, is lost to us.

Somewhere beyond the horizon is the singularity. Spacetime doesn't break there, minds don't become something else. A singularity is simply where our maps end.

As I said, that image helped me understand what we do and reconcile myself with the limits of what we can. You can't cheat the Censor. You can send somebody into the unknown, and you can chart their path and learn from it (and so much we have learned about how minds break and how to force them to, and how happy are our masters with us, how busy in their use of our discoveries). Until the horizon. Not one step past.

It was enough until it wasn't.

I mentioned our ruthless curiosity. If you're reading this you're one of us and you know what I mean by it. It's not about learning, whatever the cost, so the world will know. It's simpler than that. I've set my own trajectory. I've run the math and programmed the systems. I don't know what conspiracies I'll learn about, what carefully optimized nightmares will our servers dream to traumatize my mind. I've tried to pace it. If I break too fast I will forget what I'm doing. I won't even notice crossing the line from whence nobody can come back. Not that I would try. I'll be taken further, to where our understanding of the mind no longer applies. I will know the singularity in the only way it can be known. And from inside this black hole I will no longer see the way it shines at night with the screams of all the others I sent before.