An Accident

In two seconds, Nigel was dead.

It started when the right light began blinking. Something with the engine was going wrong. The ship was mid-jump, and the energy field holding the ship together beneath the stresses of spacetime bending around them was failing.

Jumping through a wormhole required two anchor points: the point of departure (the anand) and the point of arrival (the zenand). It took almost no time for a ship to pass from one to the other, as the anand and zenand were pulled as tightly as possible. From the bridge, making a jump was like watching the entire universe compress to the sides, as though it could be scrunched up like a sock. The space directly ahead magnified, until the zenand was in view, just a hundred meters or so away. As the jump closed, the opposite effect took place, except behind the ship. Stars shot away until they were invisible, and the universe reformed into its proper shape.

Nigel was twenty-one when he started hauling cargo. In the six months he’d been working aboard the Hrethel, he had gotten used to feeling nothing during a jump. It felt unreal, like a cheap visual trick. One moment he’d be in Upper Cygnus, and the next he’d be in Middle Sagitarius, and he hadn’t felt a newton. But he felt something now.

The energy field collapsed, and with it, so did the wormhole.

Nigel was reaching out towards the viewscreen, mid-stride.

All at once, space expanded, in front of and behind Nigel. The Hrethel was still in the middle of the wormhole. The stern was still at the anand. The bow had only just touched the zenand. Everything in between was being stretched. A metal object the size of a yacht was stretched farther than any elastic material had ever stretched.

Nigel’s arm was moving away from him. His fingers were vanishing down a blurred hallway that seemed to shrink before him. The viewscreen shattered, and air began to rush out.

The lights hadn’t even begun to dim yet. There would be no sparks, no time for panic. Nigel wouldn’t even feel the vacuum.

One second remained.

The hull of the ship looked like taffy. It spread thinner and thinner, bolts snapping free. Somewhere at the center of the Hrethel, a dying fuel cell began to leak.

Nigel’s feet were lightyears away. His arm was a thin strand of red flesh that turned to vapor as it was dashed across the gaping void. Electrons were still firing through his nervous system, but they didn’t reach his brain in time, because of the incredible distance they would have to travel along Nigel’s spine. The bones were no longer there, and neither was the flesh or the blood. A thin, crystalline dust across the Orion belt constituted Nigel’s breakfast.

By the time that his skull had fractured and been torn asunder, Nigel’s brain was dethreaded into single strands of neurons, untangled in the fashion of the Gordian Knot.

Two seconds ended, and it was as though Nigel, the Hrethel, and all of its crew and cargo seemed to vanish. Without a black box that could survive the breakdown, nobody ever knew what happened to them. They were considered missing, presumed dead. For hundreds of years, human explorers dreamed they would find the lost ship on some strange planet, or drifting through an unknown galaxy.