Simon’s Final Solution

Simon winced as his ship groaned from the stresses of the nearby gravity well. Jessica would never know what had happened when he didn't return. This close to the black-hole there was no chance of him getting away and returning home. He cursed his fate again.

Working as an independent contractor meant things were rough , and that last contract was risky enough to make him reconsider, but the payout was too good, then the pirates attacked. Hastily hyperjumping to escape landed him here; now he wasn't going anywhere ever again.

Frantically he reviewed all his options, discarding each one as infeasible as quickly as he came up with it. It wouldn't be so bad if he hadn't just proposed to Jessica the month before. He wasn't afraid of death, or even of dying, but the thought of hurting the angel of his dreams was too much to bear.

Even a flash message would be trapped in the void. Wait! Homing pods, he could bounce one out under the hyper-limit. But the pods needed special shielded message cards and he had none. How could he let any-body know anything? If only it was as simple as penning a note.

Simon paused, could that work ? Paper? Ink ? Simon smiled, a grim, bleak kind of smile. Packaging would work for the medium, and taking a knife, he let his own blood into a dish. With a spike for a stylus Simon laid out his last words ever, to his love, in his own blood.

Locking the message in, Simon sealed the bay and triggered the Homing pods drives. Watching as his last hopes blinked out of sight, he mouthed a last prayer before his ship slipped over the event horizon becoming nothingness in the cold cruel black of eternity.

(C) Daniel Casey 2017