My drogue scout, busy collecting plasma from the accretion disc, suffered some sort of catastrophic failure. It was thrown from its stable orbit and began the fall towards the singularity of the black hole. The mother ship had plenty of time to punch me out and I was well on my way to a routine pick-up when the explosion happened.

My self-contained escape pod was thrown off course and tumbled entirely the wrong way. As time decelerated, the orientation of the port hole lined up for a moment with the blossoming flash of the mother ship’s fusion reactor. I knew then that any chance of my survival was gone. The remnants of the ship and my escape pod fell towards the event horizon, together.

I knew that, to the rest of the universe, the fusion explosion and my escape pod were seemingly frozen in time forever. But for me, with my eyes open and my back to the singularity, I was in audience to an accelerating universe about to end.

If only I had blinked.