“Go back. There is nothing waiting at 61 Cygni. Go back.”
The voice from the black hole was my own. I sat there on the bridge for hours, listening to the repeating signal, unable to move. Later, as I described the encounter in the ship’s logs, I suggested that I’d imagined the whole thing, but the mainframe AI scrubbed the mission anyway, reading my psychometrics as “threatening to the well-being of self and craft, as well as primary and all secondary objectives”. It plotted a return course to Earth, and I lay down to sleep in the cool dark of the cryogenic crèche for the years-long journey home.
