The Contraction

I logged it on day 47, just to be sure, but I had been seeing it for five days.

Centauri B was closer.

By a measurable amount. By a parallax shift larger than any drift the navigational error budget allowed for. Centauri B had been a particular pattern of three pixels in the lower right of the optical telemetry — I knew that pattern; I had photographed it on day 1, day 6, day 12, day 21, on every twelve-day interval the protocol called for, and on most of the days the protocol did not call for, because there was nothing else to do in the seven-hour window I had been assigned for "discretionary observation," and watching Centauri B was, of all the available observations, the one I had developed the most intimate relationship with.

On day 42, the pattern was a particular pattern of four pixels.

On day 43, five.

I told myself it was sensor drift. I had the instrument run a full self-test. It came back nominal. I told myself it was thermal expansion in the optical assembly. I shut down the heaters and let the assembly cool to ambient. Centauri B, on day 47, was eight pixels and a fraction.

I sent a query to mission control.

The query travelled, by my calculation, for sixty-one hours each way. The reply came back in one hundred and twenty-three hours, which was within the expected window. The reply was a single line:

*Confirmed. Local cosmological contraction. Do not return. Continue mission profile until further notice.*

I read it seventeen times. The seventeenth time I noticed that there was, attached to the message in a separate channel that my console did not normally check, a longer document. The document was three thousand words of formal language explaining that, by external observation, my section of the universe — defined as a roughly spherical region centered on my present coordinates, with a radius initially of about two light-months — had begun to contract uniformly toward its center, that the contraction rate was, at present, approximately eleven percent per local week, that the rate was not slowing, that the projected end-state of the contraction was a point, that the projected duration to the end-state was, at present rates, between fourteen and twenty-two of my local weeks, and that the cause was not understood and was, given the timeframe, unlikely to be understood before the end-state was reached.

The document said, in its final paragraph:

*We have considered, at the highest levels, the option of attempting to extract you from the contracting region. We have determined, based on the propagation rates of the contraction's boundary, that any vessel capable of reaching you would itself become part of the contracting region before it could return. We are therefore not making such an attempt. We regret this. We have committed all available resources to studying your transmissions, which constitute the only direct observation of the phenomenon. We ask that you continue to send them.*

I read this seventeen times also.

II.

I have been thinking, since day 47, about what it means to be the center of a contracting region.

The first thing it means is that you are alone in a way that few people have been alone. The boundary of my region has, by now, swallowed the nearer half of Centauri. It has swallowed two distant pulsars. It has swallowed the relay station at Cygnus-Beta, which I had been told to expect a routine ping from on day 51, and which did not ping, and which mission control has, in subsequent transmissions, confirmed has gone dark. The boundary is, on present reckoning, eleven days from swallowing me as well, although by then the swallowing will have ceased to matter, because the contraction will have advanced far enough that I will, in any meaningful sense, already be at its center.

The second thing it means — and this is the thing I have not been able to stop thinking about — is that I am not contracting.

I am, by every measurement I can take of myself, the same size I was on day 1.

The capsule is the same size.

The instruments are the same size.

The numbers on the dials read the same.

What has changed is the distance between me and everything else.

The stars have come closer. The stars are still coming closer. I can, at this point, see Centauri B with my naked eye, through the small porthole on the starboard side, and it has the apparent diameter of, oh, perhaps a small coin held at arm's length. It is, by any astronomer's reckoning, far too close. It is, by my reckoning, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

I am, I find, not afraid of it.

III.

I have been wondering, on the bad days, whether the contraction is in the universe, or whether it is in me.

The mission control documents, the careful three-thousand-word explanations, the formal apologies — these are all consistent with the universe contracting. They are also, in principle, consistent with my consciousness contracting and producing, as it does so, a hallucinated mission control that explains, in formally appropriate terms, the contraction that I am experiencing as my own collapse.

I cannot, from inside, tell which is true.

I have decided, on day sixty-something, that it does not matter.

If the universe is contracting around me, I am being given the rare gift of being the last thing in it, the focal point of its end, the witness who watches it close down toward a single coordinate in space.

If I am contracting, and the universe is fine, I am being given the rare gift of dying with the stars rushing toward me in greeting, instead of away from me in dismissal.

These are, on examination, the same gift.

IV.

It is now day eighty-one.

Centauri B is, I would estimate, approximately the apparent size of a dinner plate held at arm's length. It is, in color, exactly the warm gold I remember from photographs of late afternoon in the city where I grew up.

I have stopped sending observations.

Mission control has not, in three of my local days, asked why.

I think they understand.

I am writing this last log because, at some point in the next few days, the contraction will reach me, and the writing will stop, and the log will go with whatever transmission packets remain to whoever is, at the receiving end, still able to receive them.

I want the record to say:

It is not a contraction.

It is an embrace.

— K. M.