Adrift. This is Norma Particula’s first thought as she wakes. She opens her eyes, gingerly moving her muscles, first wiggling her toes and fingers, then flexing her legs and arms. She is cold like she has never been before. She remembers vaguely from a life long ago that she once travelled to the bone-chilling cold of the Titan mining colony, but the near rigor mortis she is feeling now surpasses that—it is cold of prolonged cryogenic sleep. Her eyes ache, and the light stings them as if she were one of the undead. She supposes that she is. She lays there for hours in the bed of slowly warming water, letting her body absorb the nutrients she will need to make it to the chair at the helm of her ship. She mutters softly, wondering if the computer will respond, but it does not.

She is completely alone.

She remembers, the accident, the subsequent calculations and theoretical assumptions and, it soon dawns on her again. She remembers the whimsical strangeness of her life, all leading to this one waking moment in the vast sea of her sleep. But first she remembers the accident.

Would to God that it had not been a solo mission, she thinks. She still hungers for a glimpse of another human face. Her mission was a simple contract. Her cargo was a series of drill schematics from the engineer colony living on the Mars biosphere. All she had to do was take these few stacks of papers to the Harvesters of Pluto. Piece of cake, she had thought. Pick up the schematics, jet off, take a few years of cryo on the way there and a few on the way back, get paid a kingly sum; she could live the rest of her life out on that type of money. The girls at the bookings office had been in fits. They had made her promise that she would return safely. She joked that she would see them in a decade, and with enough money to make them all rich. It was only supposed to seem like a year.

And then, somewhere near Jupiter’s orbit, everything went wrong at once. Guidance had gone out. In a fit, the engines sent her off course. She was still alive, but, she learned later, she would never see another human again.

Norma had no idea how many years had passed since that day, in total or relative time. Food and water on her ship was a disgusting, recycled, but nutritious affair. She almost wished that it was not; it might have been easier to starve or thirst to death, but she lived on. She had spent the first four years living aboard, trying to fix her ship and studying maps of the galaxy. When that did not work, she spent the next eight years going through the whole body of research of the physics of celestial bodies, which was contained on the ship’s reader drives. The more she learned, the more she considered suicide, the more she knew she would never be accompanied again, the more she felt alone in a cold, dark universe.

She stretches her limbs and climbs out of the cryotube. Her eyes are not used to the bizarre light of this space. She keeps them closed.

She remembers the moment, many years into her long journey, when she fixed the computer, when hope was again taken back into her hands for a moment.

Eventually, she had brought the computer online, and it had spoken to her in a breathtakingly human voice. Deep but soft, strong and yet gentle, she remembers the voice even now. But the voice had told her that she would never return to the Solar System. The computer had told her that it could bring a few minor functions back to the ship, but that the ship had been gradually leaking fuel for years, and, even if she were to expend everything, there was no guarantee she would ever be rescued. And it was unlikely she would ever make it to Earth or any other inhabited zone for that matter. She had gone outside and patched the leaks immediately, but it was still too little too late. The same day hope was found, it was also lost.

She had languished in despair for months. Studying and arguing with her only interlocutor, but in the end the beautiful voice was attached to a computer that could calculate the ship’s course with an accuracy she simply could not match. She could spend her final amounts of fuel in a futile attempt at a futile hope, or she could . . .

The idea had started from something she had learned a long time ago, in a classroom far, far away. It was something she had always yearned to see. According to her teacher, Ms. Cassio if she could remember correctly, there would be a time more than four billion years in the future, when the Milky Way would eventually collide with Andromeda. She would not ask the computer, she had decided. She would leave her fate to the dumb luck of her own calculation. She had set course for the center of the galaxy to the supermassive black hole that she knew lay at its center.

Ms. Cassio had told the class something that had stuck with her, something said in jest: “If you’re going to try to get to the bottom of a black hole, you better make it a big one, ‘cause a big one will swallow you whole and a small one will chew you up and then swallow you.” She set the ship’s orbit to loop through heavy gravity systems and instructed the computer not to allow the ship to get stuck in any orbits that might keep her from the center of the universe. She would cryosleep for eighty years at a time, check the status of her ship, and sleep again. She would outlive everyone she ever knew, their children, grandchildren, their great-great-great-great grandchildren’s grandchildren—or she would die peacefully in her sleep, drifting.

She remembers her plans.

She had decided to wake and correct the trajectory every two decades in her sped up time. There was only so much she could do without fuel, so she decided to be conscious for no less than five minutes every time, unless something was wrong. Her heavy gravity path, she hoped, would slow down spacetime enough that she might age even more in earth years. She did not think it was possible, not to live four billion years, but she had always loved the saying, “Go boldly where no one has gone before.” She should, at least, be able to wake days before she would reach the event horizon of the Milky Way’s black hole. She would seek to measure the earth-time. She would seek to know her own age. And if her harebrained love of beauty was rewarded she would watch the greatest light show in the history of the multiverse.

She begins to slowly open her eyelids. She cannot remember how many times she has slept and woken. She wonders how close she is to the center of the universe. Her computer is offline, after so many years, and it can no longer help her. Her eyes gradually adjust. She turns to the helm, where great wide windows look out onto the cosmic ocean. She is the oldest human in the history of the race, and yet she feels giddy because before her there is an array of solar scenery that inspires joy. It is not the collision she has desired, but she can see the brightness of a billion suns, all being pulled into her. She notices this with a start, and then turns around. She sees streams of light and particles and otherworldly detritus; they are there, then they are not, there is a mass there, but she sees nothing. The black hole is there, drawing her closer into its dark embrace.

She sits crosslegged on the floor. It is, perhaps, a week before she reaches the singularity, and she will spend the time in meditation. This, she realizes, is the moment everything in her life has come down to. She is called back to her previous existence: the one she now characterizes by the loud acceleration of cars and ships, the silence of loneliness, the goodness of others and also the cruelty they visit on each other, the idle chatter, the knowing and not knowing, the good and evil, the screens, the street lamps, and what lies beyond their reach. She remembers when she was young and did not know what to do with her life, and the feeling of smallness and the worry that no one cared, that no one knew her thoughts. She remembers the love she once had, of her family, of her husband, who had passed so young. She remembers the guidance she failed to give to herself and others because of her ignorance. She remembers the wise advice she heard from others. She now feels vast, a collection of memory and feeling, a wellspring of virtue and confidence. She looks at the billion suns to her left. She remembers the ancient, foreboding fear of death that is so characteristic of humanity, but she has been resigned to enter it for God knows how many spacetime intervals. She looks at the complete and significant dark to which she will soon commit herself. She realizes she cannot reconcile time and space, and yet she knows she has lived its unity.

For six days, she rejoices among the stars.

Time slows for her the closer she comes to the center of the black hole. As she nears the event horizon, time passes with incredible speed outside of her immediate proximity. Andromeda rushes toward her in a whirling pirouette. This means that the cosmic show she thought was beyond her grasp is revealed to her. The sight is beautiful. The graceful spiral of Andromeda slides silkily through the veil of the Milky Way. She is witness to a blizzard of heavenly snows. The nearby cosmos is awash with blues, whites, reds, greens, purples, pinks, even colors she can not name. Led by general suns, the hordes of nameless solar objects crash through the void, but most do not hit each other. The wealth of space is too great. Their gravity is altered. The gravity of the cosmos itself is altered. They spin and pirouette and spread and congeal. They separate and coalesce. They dance. She is perceiving new spectrums. Suns hatch and spread fiery wings. It is existence in a nutshell. It is a feeling of apostasy and of being born again. She watches the waterfall of stars. She knows she is ready. She is ready to become one with it all, once again.

And so the being whose body was once forged in the center of the stars, then became known as human, leaves time altogether, and dwells in her abode at the center of the universe—to watch, love, and rest in peace.