Terran Oblivion

Chapter 17

Courtney Bernard

June 1, 2203

Kenscoff, Haiti

1:01 AM

...Yes students...yes...calm down.

This will be on the exam.  I'm serious this time.  Lots of your classmates aren't here for some reason but they'll regret it one day.  And I was once a student like you all.  I've blown off my fair share of classes because I got royally fucked up the night before.

You can delete that from the class recording...

But in all seriousness, Black Hole Cosmology is the understanding that the universe as we know it is actually all held within the confines of a supermassive black hole.

Think about it for a moment.

Even if we were able to go back in time somehow, go back to the Big Bang, could we ever, you know, go back to a time before the start of time itself?   I think not.  

For a very long time, White Holes have been something that exists in mathematics but never in reality.  We have never found proof of a White Hole.  And yet there is one thing that I can think of that fits all the requirements of a White Hole:  The Big Bang

-Recording of a lecture at the University of Maryland, archives dating from the year 2021.

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As a young woman (younger than now, she was very young as it was), she chose to join the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA for short. Courtney remembered what radicalized her: a trip to Los Angeles on a vacation to the beach and enjoying some time at Disney Land after a long year at school. Anaheim was amazing and she enjoyed that a lot, but the trip to Hollywood stunned her. Far from being the land of movies and entertainment, she was greeted by the smell of piss, shit, drugs, and poverty. Homeless people abounded in tents, dying of overdoses mere inches from her while less than a mile away wealthy elites lived in gated homes with a view of the city from the hills. Leftists had ruled California for over a hundred years and no material changes to the conditions of the poor had been made. Courtney saw then more than anything that fundamental changes were needed to fix this and to let the poor improve their station.

As it turned out, however, the DSA was a joke. They spent all their time shilling for liberals and fighting one another over minor inconveniences and petty squabbles over speaking time and access. They had no muscle, no strength, no power, they were pathetic. Courtney left and instead opted to join the Communist Party. Somehow, they were worse. Instead of being active for change, the leadership spent all their time doing 'analysis' and 'critiques,' spending all their time fighting over 'the correct line' instead of doing something, anything. It took her less than a week to burn out of all that nonsense and leave. For a few weeks, she flirted with joining a Maoist party or something but figured that this would be a terrible idea and so she dropped that thought. A few years later she was in ROTC serving the same government she once tried to join a movement ready to overthrow. Amazing how that worked.

But Courtney never quite lost her desire to see change in the world, to see a more equal place come about, a world where everyone could rise to the top. She didn't want some authoritarian communism or something like that, but she just wanted to make a place where people didn't starve and die a mile away from gated communities housing celebrities.

Seeing all these starved bodies shocked her to her core. Courtney almost felt tears leaving her eyes but she blinked them away, not wanting to show weakness. About 700 miles away from Miami, one of the wealthiest and most powerful cities in the world, the capital of Latin America in many ways, people were starving to death in a village. Heck, just a few miles away from the former estates of wealthy oligarchs. Americans throw away so much food daily. Just a small fraction of that food could keep these people alive almost indefinitely on the detritus of just a small town like Annapolis or something. Where did the humanity go? Why did people stop caring about the poor in other places and instead care only about their small slice of paradise in a world that rapidly fell into decay? Courtney didn't understand it, and in a way, she didn't quite want to.