Spaghettification

The colossal cone-shaped jet housings on Red Dwarfs underbelly screamed and  whined in their losing battle against the irresistible drag of the Black Hole's gravitational pull. Suddenly, as one, they ceased their pointless protestations and puttered into silence.

All resistance gone, the massive mining vessel catapulted into the blackness towards the event horizon. Lazily, the jet housings started to rotate - 45 degrees. 90  degrees, 120 degrees, until finally they had described a full half-circle. The rotation motors wound down, and the stabilizing bolts cracked loudly into place. All the while, the ship howled faster, ever faster towards the lightless unknown.

The jets fired up again. Thousands of hydrogen explosions harnessed the raw energy of the universe and thrust the ship forward, to the brink of demi-lightspeed, and  beyond.

'Event horizon : two minutes and closing.' Kryten pulled the safety webbing over his shoulders and inflated his crash suit.

'Did I tell you about spaghettification?' said The Toaster

The Cat lurched upright from the couch bolted to the corner of the anti-grav chamber. 'What's spaghettification?' 

'I didn't mention it, then?' 'One minute fifty.' 

'No you didn't. What is it?' said Rimmer. 

'Well,' said the Toaster, 'when you enter a Black Hole, an effect takes place, called "spaghettification”. I thought I'd mentioned it, but obviously I didn't. Anyway, just so you know, it'll happen fairly shortly.' 

'One minute forty.' 

The Cat lay back on the couch and stared up at the ceiling. 'So what the hell is it?' 

'Spaghettification. Let me guess,' said Rimmer. 'I can see only two options : 

one - due to the bizarre effects of the intense gravitational pull, and because we're entering a region of time and space where the laws of physics no longer apply, we all of us inexplicably develop an irresistible urge to consume vast amounts of a certain wheat-based Italian noodle conventionally served with Parmesan cheese; or two - 

We, the crew, get turned into spaghetti. 

I have a feeling we can eliminate option one.' 

'You're absolutely correct,' said the Toaster. 'You all become sort of spaghettified.' 

'Forty seconds,' counted Kryten. 'Then what happens?' 'Well, then you become de-spaghettified,' said the Toaster, and added: 'hopefully. Holly was a bit vague about that part. Still, he didn't seem to think it was terribly important.' 'I get turned into spaghetti,' the Cat's eyebrows leapt to the top of his forehead, 'and that's not important?' Thirty seconds.' The Cat tried vainly to lift his head from the cranium support - he had a major collection of dirty looks he wanted to sling at the Toaster - but G-force pinned him, immobile, to the couch, so he slung them at the ceiling instead. 'Is it too late to change this plan? I have no idea what well-dressed spaghetti is wearing this year.' 

'Ten seconds.' 'Ten seconds?' Rimmer was equally immobile. 'What happened to twenty seconds?' 

'I forgot to say twenty seconds,' Kryten apologised. 'I was listening to the Cat.' His eyes flitted to the scanner scope again. 

'Oh, sorry - apologizing for not saying "twenty seconds” has now made me miss saying "five seconds”.' 

'So how long now?' yelled Rimmer. 

'Err ... no seconds,' said Kryten. And he was right. 

*** 

The combination of jet thrust and gravitational pull forced Red Dwarf through the lightspeed barrier the moment it hit the event horizon. 

To all intents and purposes, the ship no longer existed in the universe of its origin. It shrugged off Newton, Einstein, Oppenheimer and Chien Lau, and subscribed to a completely new set of physical laws. 

They were in the Black Hole, heading for its centre. Heading for the ring of light that swirled suicidally around the spinning singularity - the core of the dead star where all the matter sucked in by the Black Hole was compressed to infinity. 

And they were heading there at such a speed, they were overtaking light.

The Cat's body started to spill off the couch in every direction. Long, thin strands of what had formerly been him slithered across the floor and intertwined with the strands that had been Kryten and Rimmer and the Toaster. 

The anti-grav chamber became a sea of heaving, screaming, living linguini. Everyone became part of everyone else. They threaded together and formed a new whole. They weren't four, they were one. 

The particles that had once formed Rimmer's intelligence, in a blinding flash of empathetic insight, suddenly became aware of the desperate, monumental importance of toast. 

Instantaneously, the strands that had been the Toaster were conscious of the overriding necessity for dressing well and having a really terrific haircut. 

The vermicelli that was now the Cat tasted the feeling of being mechanical, and knew with unshakeable certainty that Silicon Heaven existed, and the best way to get there was through diligent hoovering. 

Simultaneously, the macaroni that was Kryten knew what it was like to be Rimmer. He understood what it was like to have had those parents, that childhood, that career, that life. It was impossible to scream, but that's what Kryten was trying to do. 

The ship was no longer a ship, it was a huge tachyon, a superlight particle, howling through a universe outside our own. It was a pool, then a wave, then a ball, then a dot, then it had no shape - it just was. 

The huge mound of spaghetti slithered across space/time and peered into the face of the spinning white disc. 

'Look,' said a part of the spaghetti that was mostly Rimmer. In the centre of the spinning light were six interlocking coils, like fibre optics, but of a size beyond size. The immense hollow cables twisted and undulated like the snakes on the Gorgons' heads. The tubes were of colours that had no meaning to the human eye. They spun and swirled in a timeless dance of beauty. 

Not for the first time, Rimmer cursed himself for not bringing his camcorder. 

'What is it?' he said, but before anyone could answer the ball of speed the ship had itself become slung around the singularity. It bounced off the sudden cushion of anti-gravity it met there, then, like a swimmer who has dived too deep, lunged desperately for the surface, for the event horizon, for the known universe. It struck upwards, fighting off the gravity that tried to suck it back to its core at the speed of light. 

Then the lightspeed drag of gravity cancelled out the light-speed momentum of the ship, and Red Dwarf regained its physical form. Suddenly it was travelling at a relative speed of less than two hundred thousand miles an hour towards the event horizon. The metal of the bulkheads buckled and groaned. Leering cracks ripped through the metalwork and zigzagged insanely down the port side. 

The ship started to slow. 

Plasti-domes splintered and shattered. Steel mining rigs were wrenched protesting from the ship's back and swirled helplessly down into the singularity to be crushed into infinity. Still the ship slowed. The jet housings started to creak, and then, all over the vessel's belly, one by one, pinion rods snarled and snapped, and the housings came away and tumbled into the infinite abyss. Still the ship slowed. Half the propulsion jets were lost. Hydrogen fuel pumped from the jet carcasses and flooded into the relentless void. 

Like a harpooned whale, the wounded craft pitched wildly for the surface, for light, for life.

Slower still. Another crop of housings moaned and warped and fell away. Still slower. And slower. And slo-o-o-o-o-o-ower. Relatively, the ship was moving at barely fifty miles an hour. Then thirty. Twenty. Ten. The Black Hole had just to claim one more jet housing to tip the balance, to drag the ship below lightspeed and trap it forever in its bleak embrace. It didn't. 

With the suddenness of an infant's birth scream, Red Dwarf exploded through the event horizon and into the known universe. Free of the worst of the cloying quicksand grip of the dead star's interior, the limping vessel peaked back up to lightspeed for an instant of an instant before the final remnants of gravitational drag slewed it to a halt on the very periphery of the Black Hole's influence. 

*** 

The de-spaghettified Cat looked down his body and checked it was all there. It seemed to be. He unbuckled himself from the couch and stood on uneasy legs. 

'Everyone OK?' Kryten nodded, still too nauseous to speak. 

'What was that?' said Rimmer. 

'In the middle of the spinning light. Those tubes.' 

'The Omni-zone,' said the Toaster. 'Holly predicted we'd find that. It confirms his theory.' 'What theory?'

'The theory that there are six other universes, and all their gateways converge at the centre of a singularity.' 

'There are six other universes?' said Rimmer. 

'So Holly reckoned,' said the Toaster. 'He also believed that our universe is the bad apple. It's the cock-up universe. Something went wrong with our Big Bang and made Time move in the wrong direction, that's why nothing makes sense.' 

'I'll tell you something that does make sense,' The Cat staggered over to the Toaster. 

'You made me eat seventy-three rounds of buttered toast. Check that: seven, three,' he slapped his rump. 'I feel like I'm carrying around a third buttock in my pants. And I just want you to know this - I want you to live with this for the rest of your life - you,' he jabbed the Toaster with his long-nailed forefinger, 'you make real lousy toast. It's cold, it's burnt, and it's soggy.' 

The Toaster twirled his browning knob defiantly. 'Hey -what d'you expect for $ £19.99 plus tax? Conversation, quantum theory and good toast?'