Never look down. Same rule as mountain climbing, high wire acts, or trapeze artistry. Once you lock eyes with the gravitational monster beneath you, it’s all-but-impossible to look away. You’ll see particles flowing down into the abyss that is the black hole—and whole suns unspinning themselves as their plasma and raw essence is sucked away into nothingness. And then you’ll be lost in the inevitability of your falling down into the abyss, too—no matter that the ship’s locked in a stable orbit that’s lasted ten thousand years on the outside.

It will last for a million more, if projections are accurate. As eternal as anything can be, in this universe.

Time is relative. Never more so than here. You know that ten thousand years have passed back home. The whole of human recorded history, when you left for this cage, this prison, could rattle around in that time-span and have room to spare. Neolithic farmers could have discovered grain and converted to agriculture; knapped stone weapons and tools could have given way to bronze, then bronze given way to iron; and cities could rise and fall like the tide—and you’d still not have passed more than ten relative years in this penitential cell.

Penitential hell.

Don’t think about the past. Don’t think about how everyone you’ve ever known, ever loved, has turned to literal dust in the time you’ve been here. Don’t think about the future. Don’t think about how you volunteered for this—an alternative, they said, to waiting for your own slow demise back on Earth. This way, they said, you could give something back—

Stop thinking about it. Just think about now. Be present in it, in the gray hallways of the ship that look no different from top to bottom, than bottom to top.

You chose this.

Live in it.

There are no cells in hell. The accommodations are actually pretty nice. They want us to survive the long wait. Lots of books, music, theatrical presentations, mostly about correct moral choices. Don’t think about what got you here. About how you’re a seed in the universe, part of a grand experiment and time capsule in one. A “break glass in case humanity goes extinct” effort of last resort.

The AI drones the same repetitive spiel every meal about how, once you’re released, there’s a strong chance that you’ll have to re-establish the human race, given the destructive tendencies of most human societies. How you’ll have to establish a new civilization, this one founded on people who’ve been given that rarest of things, a second chance. On the foundation of hope, of which you currently have none.

Don’t consider what will happen if humanity has actually spread out through the galaxy and created a lasting set of societies across hundreds of planets. Don’t contemplate how little use they’ll have for you, ten thousand years and more out of step with their time, their science, their values . . .

Try not to give in to despair. Ferdinand in the set of rooms over? He didn’t follow the rules. He looked down into the abyss. He thought about the things he shouldn’t think about. And they found him hanging from his torn-up bedsheets, looped over the ventilation shaft, just last week. Which was what, ten years ago in real time?

No, don’t think.

Breathe.

Be.

There is no time but time.

There is no now but now.

Breathe. Be. It won’t last forever.

Nothing does.

Not even eternity.