Found in Space

Last week Boing Boing had a contest where they asked for a 100 word flash fiction piece on the topic of Lost in Space. Here’s what I wrote:

The quantum steam that boils off the edge of the event horizon of a black hole holds the potential for everything that ever was or ever will be.

Our ship slides past the infinite monkey that would have written Shakespeare. He is dead, his hands frozen into position above the keyboard of a battered Royal typewriter, eternally prepared to write Hamlet.

We have uncovered strangeness beyond imagination, collected things of impossible value, and run screaming from elder gods born by accident into the endless void. But the only thing we truly wanted was immortality, and today we have found it.